Trim The Fat, Elevate Your Network And Eliminate Startup Risk

The Fail On Podcast with Rob Nunnery - Fail Your Way To An Inspired Life

Andy Drish is an entrepreneur, a speaker and co-founder of The Foundation. He helps people create the mindset and skills needed to create software businesses without upfront risk and absolutely no business idea. His company, The Foundation, has been absolutely crushing it over the last five years. They have success stories from students that have gone on to create eight figure businesses.

In today’s episode we will be discussing the three different ways to elevate your network. Andy shares how to completely eliminate risk when starting a new business. He also walks us through how he first made money in entrepreneurship and why the only thing that matters when you start is simply getting sales.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Andy tells us where his passion for business came from and how he started out.
• Find out how Andy started his business in Etsy and how it became successful.
• Learn how helping an influential person who has experience in business can help you.
• Hear about Andy’s biggest struggle in terms of his journey of getting to where he is now.
• Understand why it is important to know exactly what you want and not deviating from it.
• Learn why you have to reach out to people that have done what you want to do.
• Understand what is meant by elevating your network.
• Find out how to surround yourself by people that are doing better than you.
• Hear how Andy defines failure.
• Learn more about The Foundation, what it is, how it makes money, and its future plans.
• Understand why emotions play such a big role in entrepreneurship and how to deal with it.
• Discover ways to assess risk in terms of whether to pursue ventures or projects.
• Andy tells us about the last time he got outside of his comfort zone and what he was doing.
• Find out about one directive or step to helping you with a business idea.
• Hear who has had a profound impact on Andy’s life.
• Andy shares on some exciting new ventures.
• Find out about the different two realms for entrepreneurs when diving into a business.
• And much more!

Tweetables:

“Knowing exactly what you want and not deviating from that as an entrepreneur, I think, is so important.” — @andydrish

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“I think failure happens when you stop, when you give it up.” — @andydrish

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[0:23:22].1]

“There is no failure, there’s only progress.” — @andydrish

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[0:23:16].4]

“It’s actually those negative emotions that will propel you forward into the next experience.” — @andydrish

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[0:27:10].1]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Andy Drish — https://andydrish.com/

Andy on Twitter — https://twitter.com/andydrish

Andy Drish Email — [e-mail]

The Foundation — https://thefoundation.com/welcome?

Chiat Day — http://tbwachiatday.com/

Etsy — https://www.etsy.com/

Clay Collins — https://www.leadpages.net/

Tim Ferris — http://tim.blog/

Jason Fried — https://basecamp.com/

David Hauser — http://davidhauser.com/

Phil McKernan — http://philipmckernan.com/

Jayson Gaignard — http://www.jaysongaignard.com/

Adam Caroll — http://www.adamspeaks.com/

Chandler Bolt — https://self-publishingschool.com/

Tesla — https://www.tesla.com/

Cathryn and Allen, The Self Journal — https://uk.bestself.co/

Carl Mattiola — http://www.carlmattiola.com/

Nicholas Kusmich — http://nicholaskusmich.com/

The book, Nature in the Human Soul — https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Human-Soul-Cultivating-Fragmented/dp/1577315510

Transcription Below:

Read Full Transcript

EPISODE 013

“AD: Here’s the first thing I would do is I would make a list of everybody you know who has had some sort of success in business or who is running a business or like who is an entrepreneur at some level. I would make a list of all of them and I would shoot them an email and I would have the email say something like this:

“Hey, I really want to get into business, I know you’ve been doing it for a while, I want to get into business by helping people who have painful problems. I want to solve something for you so I’m wondering, can we talk for 30 minutes and I can just ask you questions about your business, about what’s working for you and what isn’t and see if there’s anything that I can help with?”

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:35.1] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Fail on Podcast where we explore the hardships and obstacles today’s industry leaders face on their journey to the top of their fields, through careful insight and thoughtful conversation. By embracing failure, we’ll show you how to build momentum without being consumed by the result.

Now please welcome your host, Rob Nunnery.

[INTRO]

[0:01:02.1] RN: Hey there and welcome to the show that believes you are destined for more and that failing your way to an inspired life is the only way to get there. Today, we are sitting down with Andy Drish, he is an entrepreneur, a speaker and cofounder of The Foundation and he helps people create the mindset and skills needed to equip new entrepreneurs with the tools to create software businesses without upfront risk and absolutely no business idea.

His company The Foundation has been absolutely crushing it over the last five years, creating success stories and testimonials from students that have gone on to create eight figure businesses, that’s a big business.

We’ll be discussing the three different ways to elevate your network, how to completely eliminate risk when starting a new business and Andy walks us through how he first made money in entrepreneurship and why the only thing that matters when you start is simply getting sales.

But first, if you’d like to stay up to date on all fail on podcast interviews and key takeaways from each guest, simply go to failon.com and sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the page. That’s failon.com.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:04.3] RN: today I’m joined by Andy Drish, cofounder of The Foundation, Andy, welcome to the Fail on Podcast.

[0:02:09.4] AD: Dude, thanks man, stoked to be here, we’re sitting in a hotel lobby right now.

[0:02:14.9] RN: It’s not even a lobby, on the second floor of like, I wouldn't even consider this a lobby.

[0:02:18.5] AD: Yeah, totally.

[0:02:19.4] RN: A hallway in a hotel, yeah. Anyways, thanks, this is actually as I was telling you earlier it’s my wife and I’s first time in Boulder and I’m a mountain guy so I’m in heaven right now, I’m loving it.

[0:02:30.0] AD: It’s beautiful here.

[0:02:31.7] RN: Just to jump into it man, obviously I want to dig in to your current ventures and The Foundation in a bit but I always like to start with is going back to the first time that you remember that somebody actually gave you money in exchange for something that you created.

Whether it be a proctor service?

[0:02:46.5] AD: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of moments that really matter in an entrepreneur’s life and there’s a handful of things from when I was a kid you know? I started mowing lawns, I mowed my grandma’s lawn a lot you know? $10 a week or something.

[0:02:57.4] RN: Iowa kid.

[0:02:58.4] AD: Iowa kid yeah. Grew up in a farm.

[0:02:59.3] RN: I can imagine, it’s probably a big yard.

[0:03:01.5] AD: Yeah, you know it and we used to — my friend had a mowing business, we used to get up before school and trim cemeteries like with weed eaters, it was terrible, I hated it. I hated every aspect of it except hanging out with my friends like doing work with your friends is okay but — that was one of the first times I started — we de tasseled corn in Iowa which is where you get up at 4:30 in the morning and then drag through the cornfields in these machines and you have to pull tassels off of corn but all of that was like, you know, it’s pretty much like job, it’s not work. I just started working young. When I went to college, I started a bar in my dorm room and I sold fake ID’s for a little bit. I was smart enough to not make them good so that if we got in trouble, the cops would be like, “Are you kidding, what is this?”

That didn’t last very long. In college, I had a handful of these experiences but the moment that really mattered for me was when I was 22 years old. Graduated, I was working in Corporate America and one of the things I’d always want to do was get paid to speak, that was something that was really fascinating to me and when I was 22, I started doing all these presentations in Corporate America around what’s happening with social media, how it’s shifting landscape for corporations and companies.

The Iowa Association of something, really weird thing, heard about the presentations and they asked me to do it and they asked me how much I charge and I was like, $500 and they’re like okay, I got paid $500 to go talk for three hours and that was the moment where I was like holy shit.

[0:04:24.0] RN: It’s a pretty long talk, that three hours.

[0:04:25.0] AD: Yeah, it was a whole workshop.

[0:04:25.7] RN: You consistently through…

[0:04:27.4] AD: Workshop style, there’s talk and then we had exercises and stuff but at 22 years old, to get paid 500 bucks for three hours of my time doing something that I absolutely loved doing, that was the key. Because all of the stuff in the past was like, I enjoyed it from time to time but that was something that was really dialed with what I wanted.

[0:04:42.9] RN: That kind of changed our thought process? Okay, I can actually do this and make money and this could actually be something.

[0:04:48.5] AD: It was just like wow, you can — growing up in southeast Iowa, work was always hard, it was always construction, it was always manual labor, it was like pain in the ass and I was making like 10 bucks an hour to make $500 bucks for three hours doing something I loved was a complete game changer for me in terms of what’s possible in reality.

[0:05:08.8] RN: So what did that lead you to? Once you did that, were you like, man, I want to do these workshops every day.

[0:05:12.6] AD: Yeah. I was like holy shit, I can actually do this and I ended up starting a company where I did training for college students so I partnered with professional business fraternities and I would speak at their regional and national conferences teaching college kids how to land a job after college, how to do personal branding and how to start businesses and I would speak at their regional and national conferences and then the students would invite me back to their campuses and so I did a stint of that for a year, year and a half or something like that.

And then it became not so enjoyable, like every weekend, having to go, fly out, go somewhere and you know, I was making better money then, it was one to two grand for a talk, something like that.

[0:05:52.6] RN: What kind of drove you to always want to speak?

[0:05:55.8] AD: I don’t know.

[0:05:56.7] RN: So is this always a thing since you were like a child?

[0:05:59.3] AD: Yeah, it was fun.

[0:05:59.5] RN: Always wanted to be in front of people, that’s just kind of your personality, just want to be in front of people talking, explaining stuff?

[0:06:04.4] AD: Yeah, I really enjoyed it and there was something that in college, we taught a course on helping people with presentations because it was just something I think if you want to influence people, it’s a skill you have to have. Whether it’s one on one like just sitting here like this or whether it’s one on a thousand people in front of an audience like the more ability that you have to be to communicate in front of people, the more influence and impact you can have with people.

[0:06:28.7] RN: 100%. After you did that and going around the colleges and stuff, what was your next play after that?

[0:06:35.6] AD: Well, it’s so funny because I was doing multiple things at a time so I was still working full time in Corporate America doing this and so this was just like on weekends and stuff. Yeah, I would fly out from Wednesday afternoon, come back Sunday night.

[0:06:45.9] RN: What were you doing in corporate America? What was your nine to five job?

[0:06:48.6] AD: I was in a leadership rotation program. Fortune 500 company, big financial services and doing marketing, I was working in new media marketing technology pretty much similar to what I’m doing now.

[0:06:59.8] RN: Sure, did you actually enjoy that work or did you — or were you just a guy that hated the nine to five, hated having to report to somebody?

[0:07:05.9] AD: You know, I go back and forth, I had my up days but down days, I hated not having control of my life, I hated being surrounded by people who felt like they were dying inside but some of the work was really interesting, we got to work with Chiat Day who’s into ad agency who does all the campaigns for Pepsi, Apple, Visa, Gatorade and they flew out the top 30 marketing executives and company and me. Because I was like this young guy that understood social media.

I got some really amazing opportunities and got to learn some really cool stuff from the program that we’re in but overall, so not sure. Not what I wanted.

[0:07:41.6] RN: Yeah, just...