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Welcome to the Entrepreneur Sound Off. This is Randy Wimmer, and today I'm going to start a seven-part series that answers a question that I'm frequently asked. And I'm asked this in about a dozen or more different ways, but ultimately it's the same question. And that is, is Randy, how do I actually launch a successful business? And uh there really is nothing available out there in the world of literature that that truly addresses this question. I faced that question in uh 2003 when I launched my very first company, or attempted to launch my very first company. And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to do it. Um I didn't have an MBA, and I thought an MBA would save uh it would be my savior. It would be the the the be all the end all um level of knowledge that you need to launch a business. And then I later realized that that's not the case either. So what do I do? Well, I'm gonna date myself a little bit. I went to Barnes and Noble. I went to the bookstore, and um there were no books on how to do it. None. Now, don't get me wrong, you go to a bookstore and they've there's row after row after row of books on um on leadership, on management, on motivation, um, on the traits that you need, uh, how to influence people. Yeah, it's just a ton of books, and they're all good books, they're all worthwhile. But none of them are really truly actionable when it comes to saying this is what you have to do first, and then this is what you have to do second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, all the way down to the nth um number of action items required to launch your specific business. It just doesn't exist. And there's a reason it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because every founder situation is completely and perfectly unique. I I explain this phenomena this way to people. Uh again, I'm asked this a lot. They say, Well, Randy, why don't you just tell me what you did? And I and I tell people that I can take you down to the same fishing hole, give you my same fishing pole, tell you to use the same exact fishing bait that I used, and I can tell you exactly where to cast your your line because that's where I caught my big fish. But you know what? That fish is no longer there. That that fish is mounted on my wall. It is gone. You can't catch the same fish I caught because I already caught it. And that's the same thing with business. Even today, if I wanted to launch the same exact kind of company, doing the same exact kind of services for the same exact kind of customers, I couldn't do it the same way. I couldn't. Things have changed. I have changed, uh the markets changed, the economy's changed, the industry's changed, the customers' needs have changed, everything has changed. My relationships have changed, everything has changed. So I can't even replicate the same process that I used in the past. I can't do it. You can't do it. Nobody can do it. So that, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle that everybody faces when they launch a business is I don't know how to do it. I do not know how to launch a business, and there's no resource out there to really walk me through the process of doing it. So that's what keeps most people out of entrepreneurship. It's not the desire, it's not the capabilities, it's not the intellect, it's not the passion, it's that they don't have a step-by-step guide to execute. That's why franchises are so popular, because that's what people are buying. They're buying uh a small instance of a much larger community of companies. For example, it's like a restaurant. You know, the um there there is a checklist that you can follow if you're launching a McDonald's restaurant, for example. And McDonald's, what they do is they, you know, they have McDonald's University or Hamburger University, I forget what it's called, but um it's it's somewhat renowned. And all their new entrepreneurs, they they send them through the program, they give them, they give them the how-to manual, and they provide them exactly everything that they need. Um because they control it. But here's the reality. These people, and I'm and I gosh, I I hope I don't offend people when I say this, but there, in my opinion, there there is a non-trivial difference between being a franchise owner and a startup founder. Completely different. I would put the um I would I would put the franchise owner, and I'm not belittling this at all. You know, congratulations if you're a franchise owner. Um it's a noble path forward, and it's all good. You know, I'm not this is not a criticism at all. But what I am saying is that there's a difference between creating something from nothing, and then providing another instance of something that's a carbon copy of something that exists in a thousand other locations, being run by a thousand other people. It's almost like you're a branch manager, and this is just an expansion of that that restaurant, that store, that service provider, and they're just expanding it to a different location. Completely different. Um and but that is why that is why uh franchises are so popular. Um even though it's not nearly as financially rewarding as launching your own business, it's still better than being an employee. Um, but it's very attractive because you have a step-by-step guide to follow. And that's all on you and effort. Now, the downside is uh being an entrepreneur being a franchise owner is that um it's it's the financial piece and it's the creativity piece. It's you know, financially like uh there's a reason why why most franchise owners, you know, that the people who launch the company, um the franchising it, you know, and selling franchises, is because they make more money that way than they than they do if they were to actually own and operate their own businesses. Uh and that's in my opinion, that is a that is a strong indicator that perhaps that's not a good franchise to own, is when the the company who originally launched that business has got out of actually operating his own stores. And they make more money by having you do it. So that's that should tell you where the business is and the financial opportunities are. It's not in actually running the actual single instance of the franchise, it's owning the entire business where you're selling the franchises to other people. That's where the money is. So uh the other thing is is you you like your own creativity. You know, they they tell you where you can launch that company, what you can sell, who you can partner with, how much you can sell it for, how you're gonna market it, if at all. You know, you usually marketing is handled at the corporate level. And the basic basically what you're doing is you're you're you're almost like a regional manager. You're managing that instance of that of that of that store. But again, the trade-off is you got a step-by-step guide. And you know, then it's something that that you can to to some level or to some extent call your own business. Um, so so that's why people do that. That's why people accept all the negatives of franchises, um, of franchise ownership. Because again, you know, you're paying royalties every single year, uh, you pay a just a tremendous upfront cost for licensing. Um and then what most people realize uh don't realize is that you've never really owned the franchise. It's basically they lease it to you. And at any particular point, you know, um, and especially at the end of that lease, they can they can not renew it. And then you've literally got nothing. So um, but again, the trade-off is you get a step-by-step guide. Now, what if you could have a step-by-step guide to help you launch your own business that is truly yours? That it is 100% your creativity, your idea, uh, your decision of where to launch the company, uh, what to sell, how to sell it, how to market it, who to employ, how to employ these people, how you want to truly run your business and not act like a you know a regional manager of somebody else's. And where you are fully rewarded for for your initiative and uh your leadership with 100% of the profits, not a tiny cut. So, but how do you do that? Well, I tried to answer this question on paper in 2023. I launched a book called Good Enough to Launch Your Company. And it's a step-by-step startup guide for real people using real examples. That's that's the tagline. Um, I wrote this book and uh to to answer that that the the ultimate entrepreneurial sticking point. How do I create my own step-by-step guide? Because none exists for my specific situation. A lot of people think they they do. A lot of people think like, hey, I just go go to Google and um Google business plans and uh for a startup, and uh you'll get a thousand different hits, probably a lot more, and you can start downloading templates left and right. And I got I gotta tell you, a business plan um that you find online, you download it, and you start typing it in, your complete and total focus has not changed from launching a business to completing a template. And those are completely two different things. And I do mean completely two different things. And what happens is is these people they they download this business plan and they compute the template and they they they fill it out. And uh, you know, they're all the same, especially. And at the very last chapter, you you've got your your hockey stick, you know, revenue growth curve. You know, wow, you you've just you've just sold you know uh your product to one percent of the Chinese public, you know, which is you know kind of a joke. If I if I can only sell well, you know, to the 1% of the you know, the uh the citizens of China, I'll become a gazillion area. But there's there's inherent flaws into that. And and like I said, your your focus shifts on filling out a form uh rather than launching a business. Um because that I guarantee you that business plan is going to sit on your shelf and collect dust. It's shelfware, and it will add you add you know really zero value to what you're trying to do. So what I I tried to do again in 2023 um is is is write a book that that discusses the process of how to launch your company. And it's 99% about the process of creating your own step-by-step guide because nobody else will provide that to you. You've gotta you have to create that to-do list yourself. That's again, that's the majority of the challenges you're gonna face as a startup. You don't know what you need to do, so you gotta figure that out. So this book um discusses a framework that I created back when I was in the Navy. It's called the Daddy Framework. It's um dream, analyze, uh, define, develop, execute, and evaluate. And this framework is it's a business model, it's um it's a process. And that process is designed to walk you through the the necessities of executing a really challenging project. I first started exploring this um you know frameworks when I was a chief engineer aboard uh a ship that was that had just been accepted into the Smartship Initiative. The Smartship Initiative was a program that the Navy created to have a ship um try out brand new ideas or create, think of, you know, brand new ideas and and try them out. And if they work, they were going to implement them across the entire ship class. And I was on one of two frigates that that was participating in this program, and basically they gave us a blank sheet of paper and say, this is that this is this is your boundaries. That's do whatever you want. But you have to document what you're trying, and you you also have to document how well it worked. And if if it didn't work well, we need to know that too. So that's what we did. Now, I had just graduated from the Naval Postgraduate School with a master's degree in operations research, and that was kind of uh what operations research uh graduates do. They they try to think of innovative, uh optimal ways of doing things. So that's why I got I got this you know set of orders um because I was expected to to kind of you know be a leader in in this initiative for our for our ship. And I didn't know where to start. First of all, there was no charter. Basically, we were asked to improve performance and crew morale. Now, to me, you you could drive a truck through that. Like, what doesn't that include? You know, better food. Hey, that improves morale. You know, it's just like it could be anything. Um and there there was nothing to keep us on track. There was nothing to really initiate this effort and say, okay, let's try something new. You know, new to do what? What do we want to improve? So we really we we we really had to get up uh you know some guardrails on this thing to keep us focused. And we needed a process uh that would walk us through how to do that. And that's kind of when I started exploring uh different business models and frameworks, and none of them really worked exactly the way I thought that they should. So I kind of incorporated about three or four different things from uh from from from each framework I looked at. And you know, over years, and I've modified this thing, you know, at least a dozen times, it's it is what it is now. It's it's the Daddy framework. So uh that's what we used. And the uh this framework, again, kept us on track. And uh when I was launching a small business, uh, my very first one, I I struggled at first because I was doing it the same way everybody else. I thought, I'll just get a business plan. I'll I'll I'll find a template somewhere and just start typing over it, you know, kind of uh what I thought it should be. I'd I complete the form, you know, for my particular case, and and I would do that, and I created the you know the business plan just like everybody else does. And uh it ended up being, you know, really long and really useless. And again, I'm not joking when I said that I don't I don't even have it today. And I you know I've kept a lot of stuff from from the early days just for some little reasons, but that was just garbage. It didn't help me. So I I finally got serious and I decided, like, hey, I gotta think about this in a logical way. If I'm really gonna do this thing, I gotta stop dreaming about it. You know, and and uh daydreaming about it when I was mowing the lawn uh it and actually get around to start making progress on it. And that's when I I pulled out my old daddy framework, you know, stuff and started walking through it. And I I kind of want to walk you through exactly what um uh what it is. So here let's let's start with with the first D. Uh the D is you know, the first D stands for dream. At the end of the day, that's truly what you want to accomplish. And um, for example, for that smart ship initiative, what did we really want to improve? Well, one of the biggest things that impacted crew morale was how many watch stations um or or or watch sections we had. Um, I'll tell you my first ship, what I reported on my very first ship, um, one-third of the crew had to stay on board ship every single night. Whether we were in home port, foreign port, it didn't matter. At least one-third of the crew. So that means even if your ship was in port, um, you were either gonna have to spend a Friday night, a Saturday night, or a Sunday night every single weekend um on board your ship. It was horrible. You didn't you never got a full weekend off. Even when you were in port every third day. Now, this is on top of your regular normal duty day. So you you'd go there, let's say you had duty on a on, you know, on um on a Wednesday. So it was your that's your duty day. So you'd work your full normal Wednesday duty day, I'm at work day, and then when everybody else is leaving, with two-thirds of the ship is leaving, one-third stayed behind just to stay on board the ship in case uh an emergency happened and there's certain things that you have to manage and monitor, you know, around the clock on a ship. And uh so you would do that all night long. Um you had watches that you had to stay in there. That doesn't mean that you you couldn't sleep, you know, you had watch stations, uh, which means that uh you you took turns, you know, usually they're four hours in port, four or six hour watch stations, and so you would rotate you know throughout the day and and night doing those, and then the following morning you're still on board ship because you were you you had duty that night, and so Thursday morning you just worked a regular Thursday day. So it's um miserable. Everybody hates duty section. And then so you you know, you work a full day on Thursday, so you get to go home Thursday night, and you come back to work on Friday, you work a full day on Friday, and then you get to go home Friday night, and then it's your duty day again. So at 6 30 in the morning, you're showing up for a full duty day on Saturday. And you know, you gotta stay there all Saturday, but you know, and then you know, at 7 o'clock, you know, on Sunday, you get to turn over and you get to go home. So basically you got Sunday off. Um, but you're probably tired because maybe you hadn't watched in the middle, you had the mid watch that Saturday night. So it's not even like you had a really good Sunday day off. And so that was a horrible thing. So one of the things that that we focused on was how do we increase our duty section rotation from three, which is what you know ships traditionally have, which is you know the pretty bad, you know, for a lot of ships you can get to four-duty section rotation pretty easily, but but three is what you know uh when a ship is coming out of the shipyards and they have uh they have a lot of untrained sailors, they're they're stuck in a three-duty section rotation. So uh we got ours up to a 10-duty section rotation. 10. Now, how did we do that? Well, you know, we had to figure out how to do that. So if that was our goal, it was to increase uh the number of duty sections that we had. So instead of every third day, um, you know, that we'd have to stick on board ship, it would be every sixth or seventh or eighth or ninth or tenth or eleventh or twelfth. You know, that's a quality of life impact. Now, how could we do that without impacting ship performance and risk to the ship? So, ah, you know, now we're starting to now we're starting to kind of peel this onion a little bit. So our dream is to increase it. So now the question is as well, what's our goal? So now you gotta take your dream, you gotta translate that into a measurable goal. Well, uh our dream is to have less duty nights, and our goal is to say we want to expand our three-duty section rotation into a 10-duty section rotation. That is our goal. So um so your dream phase results ultimately in a goal, your business goal. Now, um the next phase is the analysis phase. Ah, you gotta do you gotta do an analysis. So what does that mean? Well, um, in this particular example, because somehow another I started out on this you know, this sports chip example completely uh unintentionally, but let's let's continue to go with it. Well, the analysis phase would be like, what are our current watch stations that we have to um that that that we have to fill every duty day? And then the other thing is is like what is the minimum or you know what what are the the damage control requirements for for being in port? How big does our damage control team have to be while we're in port? So um what are the functions that we have to perform while we're in port? And so you start to analyze those things, and that is that's your as is, and then you have to start to think about well, what's the 2B? You know, well, the 2B would be 10 D sections rotation. Well, uh is there any redundancies? Are Are there any watch stations that we could safely combine? So we you know we we start to come up with those types of things, you know, the types of thinkings. Um what are what are the minimum requirements of of a duty section? Well, you have to have somebody who's who's in charge. That's your command duty officer. You have to have uh you have to have somebody standing watch on the on the on the quarter deck um every single minute. So, you know, let's say you know, we say you have to have a watch station rotation, uh, you have to have a guard there, so there's another person there. Uh you have to um you know you have to have a radioman to send out messages in case there's an emergency and to receive messages in case you need there's a message sent to the ship. So there's all these different types of requirements. You have to have an electrician in case there's an electrical problem, an auxiliary man in case there's an auxiliary problem, uh, you have to have a mesh crew on board just in, you know, to feed the crew. So there's all these requirements. So that's in your analysis phase. You got you gotta kind of do the, you gotta, you gotta assess the landscape. And um, so then what you do is you um once you kind of understand what's going on in your analysis phase and you start to look at your your green that you've translated that into a business goal, then it's it's a lot easier to define what you actually need. Well, if you want to go to a 10-duty section rotation, that means that instead of having a hundred people on a ship, now you have 30. Wow. So now we have to define uh a strategy to where 30 people can do this meet the same requirements, address the same obligations as what was previously being done by a hundred people. So that's your defined phase. And then after you defined how that's going to be, well, we'll eliminate this watch station because we can we can communicate through walkie-talkies. Um we can come we can lengthen the the watch duration um from four hours to six hours, and by doing that, instead of having um um eight different watch standard at that duty station for a 24-hour period, um you can do it in four. Um so we can save two people that way. And so that you know, you kind of you define that strategy. Now what you have to do is you gotta develop a plan to execute it. Well, what does that mean? Well, the person who's filling this watch station is now required to basically perform the duties of two watch stations, maybe even two additional ones. So maybe it's a total of three. So now they got to get qualified, not only in what they were presently qualified in, but also two other different watch stations. Because now they, you know, we just we just bundle up a couple watch station requirements, um, and have instead of having three people do it, we're having one person do it. So how you know what is the plan to get these people qualified to do those those type of activities? So instead of having a you know a 35-person uh damage control team, uh duty section damage control team, now we're only gonna have 12. Oh my gosh, how are we gonna do that and put out you know the worst case scenario of fires? Well, maybe what we have to do is we have to install a different type of firefighting system in our in our engineering plants. Maybe one that's autonomous, maybe that one that's remote controlled, where we don't actually have to send people down in there to to do it. We can we can do it remotely. So um there you so now you're you're developing a a strategy to to to to meet the requirements to to meet those defined requirements that you determine from your analysis phase in order to meet your dream and your goals. And then finally, you're getting down to execute. You have to execute that plan. Well, how do we execute that plan? Well, we we know what we need to do. Now, what we have to do is we have to put it on a project plan. We we have to do schedule, uh schedule management, resource leveling, resource management. Uh we have to sequence it, we have to we have to identify the fit dependencies, you know, what needs to happen before for other things, and and we have to have a communication plan associated with that to make sure that everybody knows what's going on. Um, and then that's that's that's how you start to execute it. And then ultimately you have to evaluate is this really working the way we wanted it to? Are we really as effective with having a third fewer people on board ship as you know as before? Are are we safely addressing those challenges? Um, and then you have to evaluate yourself and you have to be honest. And then once you evaluate yourself, you you know, part of the evaluation is you have to have key performance indicators. What what's important to us? What are we measuring? Well, here's the deal. If you're not measuring something, you know, you you can't improve it. Uh worse yet, you can't even identify deficiencies in it. So um there's a whole there's a whole spill on that right there where you've got to know what's important to you and you've got to have mechanisms in place to to evaluate it and measure it. I I used to have a boss that says, you know, don't expect what you don't inspect. And um again, getting back to the Navy, this I had an exo, the executive officer. He just for for you non-Navy types out there, uh, the executive officer is the number two person on the ship. He's the hard ass. You know, he's uh part of my French, but he's the guy who gets things done and he runs the ship. Now the captain sets the vision and he's kind of like the face of the command, you know, outward. Um and he's the one who's interacting with the fleet commander and and other captains, and and he expects the executive officer to run the day-to-day operations of the ship and maintain his standards. And so the XO, he's the hard guy. And uh and he was harder than most, and he's a really good guy. Uh, I doubt he's you he'll listen to this, but his name is Frank Scarangello. Uh I think I'm pronouncing his his last name right, but uh, and he probably won't remember my my butt chewing that that he he gave me, but he gave it to me pretty solidly. He um as a division officer, I'm responsible for my division. And that also includes my sailors in their living space. Now, the sailors are responsible for cleaning their own space every single day. Um, and my job is to make sure that they do that because we want our sailors living in safe, clean um, you know, spaces, you know, so they have a better quality of life and uh to improve morale. And and by doing that, by having making sure that that they have these safe spaces and clean spaces to live in, it really does add to morale. It's kind of backwards, but it's true. If um you know, if you you walk into the to the head or the bathroom and it's covered with green slime, well, you know, that doesn't really help morale that much. But if it's cleaned every single day and it's cleaned very well, you know, then it's good to go. And if everybody's uh puts away their stuff and it's clean and neat, well, then you have a nicer space to live in uh when you're at sea. Well, I didn't do that one time. I uh, you know, I I was supposed to make sure that my that my division's living spaces were clean. I was supposed to verify that it was clean and because the the exo goes around and he really makes sure it's clean. And I didn't do that, and the exo was very, very, very unhappy with the cleanliness of my division's face one day. And um, in about 30 minutes of a butt chewing, you know, I got the point, you know, it's summarized to don't expect what you don't inspect. So, but I needed the other 29 minutes and 50 seconds of butt chewing for me to still remember this at my current age. And I, you know, then believe me, I still remember it. But it's true. So that's what the evaluate phase is is you know, inspecting what you expect it to be to ensure that it is performing the way you want it to. So that's it. Uh that's uh that's the DADI framework in a nutshell. And the good thing about the Daddy framework is that it's iterative. So as you learn something, um, you know, while you're developing your plan and something is not exactly right, well, then you kind of go back to the analysis phase and figure out why it's not working right, or why something you don't think is going to be fully addressed, and and then you you you redefine what needs to be to be done in order to accomplish that. And then again, now you can develop another plan to execute. So uh it's iterative because if you can't accept a mistake and learn from it, you know, uh adjust, pivot, redirect, you're gonna fail. Nobody gets it right on their very first try. Nobody. Nobody. And that's what a business plan assumes. That I've got a plan, a business plan, a singular plan, and when it starts to to to to deviate, you know, the reality from what you expected, then it the the the wheels come off the cart. Because it is that iterative process is not baked into a business plan. And this is what everybody does. They start putting a lipstick on a pig, they start to dress up a bad situation. Mistakes are good because you learn from them. But the only way you're gonna identify a mistake is if you're evaluating, is if you're inspecting. And again, that's part of the the evaluate phase that kind of kicks things back into that iterative process in order for things to improve. So this is a cycle. Nobody gets it right the first time. Nobody, nobody. So if you are using a singular business plan, you are almost all but certainly going to fail. If you have an iterative business model that you're using, a business framework, and it doesn't have to be the daddy framework. You know, any well-established business model essentially does the same stuff. I just prefer the terminology that I use. Um, I I like the the idea of having six steps versus four steps or eight steps. It's just it's personal preference. You know, this one worked for me after a few modifications, and every single thing that I've used this for has ultimately succeeded. Because not the first time, but again, it's it it's it's iterative. I just keep on, if I stay with it, it's it's I'm gonna be successful with it because I just keep on iterating until I find something that does work and that is successful. So if you use an iterative business model or framework, you will be successful. So what I'm gonna be doing in the next few um six, to be honest with you, um podcast is I'm gonna be discussing each one of these phases in detail. And I also encourage you to um go to Amazon and and buy good enough to launch your company. And this isn't a plug for me to get book royalties because I'm I'm selling it at cost. I'm selling it as low, as cheaply as as Amazon will allow me to do it. I I make no money off of this thing. And it's not like you make money off of a book anyway. Um my wife is a tremendously more successful art um author than I am. She she wrote a book that you know sold a lot of books. Uh it was extraordinarily well respected in her genre. And we couldn't make just as much money, you know, um combing the beach with a metal detaptor. You don't make that much money, you know, in a book. Um so I'm selling this thing at cost. I think you can even buy the Kindle version, I think, for 99 cents, which is, you know, like I said, the cheapest that Amazon will allow me to sell it because they have expenses too. Um and then um the the paperback, I think, is$6.99, which is again the cheapest that they'll allow me to sell it. If you uh I have a PDF version of it, um if you if you want a copy of that, just shoot me an email. And you know, my I got a ton of emails out there. Uh you you can find me on the internet. Just just google randall.wilmer and you'll you'll go to you'll get to one of my companies in a heartbeat, and then just shoot me an email from that. So that's it. Um again, I I hope you stick this, you know, stick through this um this this sequence of uh podcasts that are coming up, even if you're not in the middle of launching a business. Because this framework is continuous. It doesn't stop once you get traction. It it keeps on going. That's how your company continuously improves, gets better, grows, pivots to better markets, um, adjusts pricing, adjusts, adjusts employee benefits packages. You know, this is how you do it. You have to have that iterative process that is just is continuously ongoing. So I will see you during the next podcast.