Persevere or Pivot: The Founder's Hardest Call

Transcript Summary

• 08:20 — Episode Introduction and Guest Framing
• 10:25 — Learning More From Failure
• 12:18 — Reality Testing and Obstacles
• 16:18 — Breakthrough Moments and Low Points
• 17:25 — Food Century Business Model
• 20:40 — Loss of Control and Ousting
• 23:24 — Team Conflict and Leadership Tension
• 30:25 — Solopreneur Shift and Automation
• 39:14 — Origins of MBA ASAP
• 46:37 — Applying Prior Experience to New Venture
• 50:12 — Decision-Making and Mental Models
• 56:36 — Persevere or Pivot Judgment
• 59:55 — Luck, Timing, and Increasing Surface Area
• 01:01:08 — Closing Reflections and Farewell

Full Transcript (AI generated and might include errors)

Jeff Holman (08:20.462)
Welcome back to the breakout CEO everybody. I'm your host, Jeff Holman. So glad to have you here joining us again, learning about how successful and smart people think how CEOs make pivotal decisions. And today to help us with that, I've got John Cousins with me. John, welcome to the show.

John Cousins (08:44.012)
it's a pleasure, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

Jeff Holman (08:46.04)
I'm so glad to have you. You've got quite the background. It spans quite a few different things from, and we're not going to get into everything right this minute, but I'm sure some of it will come up as we're talking, but you've done IPO stuff, you've done hedge fund stuff, you've done bigger stuff, you've done smaller stuff. I think you've had some wins and maybe seen a few non-wins, we'll call them. And, you know, all of that is, as we talked in our quick segment, our quick Q &A segment before this, you know, those are part of life's journey, right?

John Cousins (09:15.854)
Oh, absolutely. You know, I've heard that nowadays, you know, it used to be that you could basically come out of high school, get a job maybe at the manufacturing plant, get your lunch pail, work for 40 years and, you know, retire. And there was this sort of a patriarchy type of idea about industry and companies that they would actually take care of their employees for the whole time. It's not that way anymore. so I, you know, they say on average everybody has about nine

Jeff Holman (09:26.514)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (09:38.906)
yeah.

John Cousins (09:45.358)
careers, you have nine different careers these days because you have to like a cat keep landing on your feet, it sinks change, know, Kodak goes away as a business. Oh my gosh, what do you do up in Rochester, New York? You have to figure it out or move. And so, yeah, I've done a lot and it's only in retrospect, I mean, obviously that I can sort of see, can connect the little dots, you know, that's sort of a thread because otherwise it seems like I'm just bouncing around like a ping pong ball, you know, doing this, doing that. But they all seem to have a...

Jeff Holman (09:50.706)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (10:09.918)
You

John Cousins (10:13.042)
of a piece, you know, and come together on some sort of a path, is really, and gotten to be a place that I really, really feel happy and satisfied, which I feel blessed for that, you know, it's like, so.

Jeff Holman (10:25.144)
good. Yeah, not everybody reaches that moment very quickly sometimes and or maybe ever at all. So it's good you've you've gotten to that point. So you've seen, you know, IPOs, you've seen legendary investments, you've seen, I think what you called an epic failure at one point. But which of these experience and now you're doing your solopreneur stuff, which of these experiences would you say has changed how you think as a CEO the most?

John Cousins (10:55.886)
Well, and that's a great question, Jeff. think they all, in some way, everything adds to, if we're attuned to sort of try to look for the lessons in whatever we do, the lessons are there. But I would say, I think I've learned more from failures than I have from successes. And I've heard a lot of people say that. It's like, when you have successes, especially early on in life, you can see people in their 20s and all of a sudden,

they melt down because they think that they're a genius all of a I start believing the hype around them, the sycophantry that sort of gets around them. And I'm grateful that I wasn't successful early on in a way. And so I had to keep questioning, what am I doing wrong? What do I want to do? What do I want to be? And when you start to ask those kind of deeper questions and look for the answers, that's when you really start to grow. So I think there's a lot of, when you have an idea,

Jeff Holman (11:30.792)
Yeah.

John Cousins (11:51.56)
and it's a vision and now you're gonna turn that vision into some sort of reality. If it goes perfectly or better than you experienced, and I've had lots of those, know, number of those, then it's like, my gosh, I've got the golden touch, you I'm a genius, I can do anything wrong. And that is a recipe for epic fail, you know, really, really fail, or not even knowing yourself. But if things don't go the way that you think, you know, like they say, know, no.

Jeff Holman (12:04.455)
Yeah.

John Cousins (12:18.274)
Helmuth von Multke, who was a Prussian general, said, know, no battle plan survives the first confrontation with the enemy. You you have your plan, and as soon as it goes against reality, things don't just go the way that you think they're going to go. And you have to think on your feet. Like, the obstacle is the way. You know, that great book and idea, you know, that it's the obstacles. Those are the ways that we learn. And those lessons are the ones that, if you can figure out a way to make them repeatable.

Jeff Holman (12:25.79)
yes.

Jeff Holman (12:37.054)
Yeah.

John Cousins (12:46.946)
can really help you on the path, I think. That's been for me.

Jeff Holman (12:49.992)
Yeah, that makes sense. And I love, I think it's a Mike Tyson quote. It's said to be a Mike Tyson quote, right? Everyone's got a plan to get punched in the face.

John Cousins (12:55.96)
Punch in the face.

Yeah, exactly. That's his take on the von Moca. Yeah. I've always and it is a Mike Tyson quote. And, know, and he's absolutely right. You know, you get in the ring and it's always the you it's once once you're testing your ideas. And I think that's where it gets you gets courageous and brave as an entrepreneur or a leader. You know, is when you're actually going to be willing to test your ideas against reality and realize that reality does not conform to your will. You're going to have to figure out ways to make it work.

Jeff Holman (13:17.288)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (13:28.662)
Yeah. Yeah, I know I was, I was actually talking to my cousin, not my cousin, talking to my, my nephew, my brother's son. He's, uh, you know, early twenties chance, great kid, um, studying engineering, doing this stuff, but he teaches at a boxing gym right now. And, uh, and he was just telling me last night, last night he's, he's like a coach at the gym, but he's actually started sparring and being in the gym. He hasn't boxed. He hasn't grown up boxing. So he's

He's teaching people kind of the mechanics, but he's, had never done it until more recently. And he said, man, I go in there. They put me with this guy named Danny. He's been boxing since he was eight. And I just keep getting punched in the face over and over and over and over. But now I go back and I'm coaching my class and I'm like, no, like I actually know what it's like to be punched in the face. Like, so I'm, you I'm up there. You want to get ready for, for, for fighting. I'm going to

you know, get my pool noodle or whatever, whatever. And while you're punching the bag, I'm gonna whack you in the face as hard as I can. You're gonna be ready for when you start sparring. It's totally different once you've been in the ring, so to speak.

John Cousins (14:34.634)
Absolutely, there's that great and I can't quote it now, but that Teddy Roosevelt thing about the person that's in the critic and the man in the arena. Yeah, and I always love that. You know, that is like the kind of thing, you know, the critics just sit there and do their thing. But it's the person that's actually down there, you know, bleeding and sweating and working and toiling. That's where it's at. And and and so, yeah, you know, that's just a great way to think about it. And the other thing about, let's say, boxing or anything is it's all about also

Jeff Holman (14:41.116)
The man in the arena, right?

John Cousins (15:04.534)
If you get knocked down eight times, you get up nine times. know, that's really, you know, keep going. know, persistence is absolutely key. And I found for me persistence. I'm I'm I don't have to worry about persistence if I'm doing something that for some reason has a pull to me. And I love it for whatever reason. They say to follow your passion. And that can be erroneous because maybe there's not a market for your passion. But, you know, figuring out where that where those Venn diagrams overlap.

Jeff Holman (15:07.784)
Yep. Yeah. Persistence is key.

Jeff Holman (15:29.501)
Right, right.

John Cousins (15:33.176)
But if you're doing something that you really love or enjoy and love the process of and the progress, whatever it is, then it's easy to just keep going. Even if all you get for a while are crickets and no one's paying attention, you just keep going and going. And over time, there's a good possibility that, especially in this day and age when you can build up audiences of a long tail all over the world, if there's just a couple of people in every market, you don't have to worry about your geography being popular in one place.

Jeff Holman (15:55.741)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (16:02.717)
Yeah.

John Cousins (16:03.042)
that can really be super helpful. so persistence by itself, think, just like discipline, habits are better than discipline, love of doing something in the process is better than persistence, think. Persistence is just an artifact of that.

Jeff Holman (16:18.47)
Yeah, well, I'd love to explore a little bit more depth about, know, where you were in your, which arena you were in, right? I don't know if that's a specific business or time of life, but where were you when you think back and you say to yourself, you know what, that might've been one of the hardest times, but I was in the arena, I showed up and I actually learned to break through.

the barriers that were in front of me at that point. Where was one of your biggest breakthroughs in your career?

John Cousins (16:49.646)
Well, let's see, I've had a lot of low points. And I think after a while, if you have some success or if you have some sort of experience of if you do it long enough, something happens like I've heard. I don't have faith. I have experience. You know that things happen, and then you just keep with it. I think that's a really important thing. let's see.

Jeff Holman (17:03.964)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (17:07.56)
Yeah.

John Cousins (17:19.106)
You know, I had a couple of, one was, you know, saying epic fail. I had a company, I had, you know, heard these guys talk about what they were doing and they were doing something really, really neat. But they had one customer. They had one customer who was a government agency. so I contacted these guys and said, hey, you know what, why don't you take that knowledge base and stuff and we make it into an app and sell it to the general public.

Jeff Holman (17:25.938)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (17:38.514)
Yeah.

John Cousins (17:47.988)
And it seemed like a great idea. And so I started this.

Jeff Holman (17:50.982)
What was the context to what kind of business was this?

John Cousins (17:54.722)
Well, it was a food safety company. And what they were doing was they did open source intelligence. They were looking at OSINT all around the world. They had this one brilliant guy who was ex-military and NSA and just a genius at looking and reviewing information all over the world. Open source means that it's totally available. So newspapers, radio shows, whatever.

And he had his whole team in all different languages that were looking at where food was coming into the United States. And we have a lot of food that gets imported in the United States. Obviously, if you go and you get grapes in the middle of winter or something, you know they're not grown down the block. They're from Uruguay or Thailand or all these kind of places. And the only thing that they tell us about the food on the shelves if you go is country of origin. They don't tell us anything about

safety standards, anything like that. And so there's all kinds of things that are in your food that we don't really know about. Like if you get shrimp that are aquafarm, say from some country that doesn't have the same type of things that we safety standards that we do, they can't put all kinds of antibiotics, hormones, all kinds of, and it's relatively not good for you to eat those kind of things or tilapia or something like that or.

you know, apples from China where the ground is polluted with heavy metals, things like that. And they would look at all these kinds of things. And we'd had this rating system. their customer was the FDA. And the FDA has to examine a bunch of stuff coming into the different ports. And it only gets to examine about 5 % of what comes in. know, it's just such a flood of stuff. They made it so that they had 10 times better

results at catching bad, you know, imported food than before because they could use this information to target what, you what's coming into what ports and stuff like that. So turn from the information that these guys were developing. And so what we were going to do is take that same database, that same kind of stuff and make it an app, a subscription app. You'd buy this thing, it's called Food Century. And you go in and you use a barcode thing to read it. And it would tell you about what is the...

Jeff Holman (19:54.952)
from your information that you guys had developed.

Jeff Holman (20:07.581)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (20:13.88)
tomatoes from Mexico better than the tomatoes from Uruguay or whatever, know, and you could make those kinds of decisions. And so we were doing that, you know, we had a team. just saw, had an incredible marketing guy that came on because he was really inspired by what we were doing and he wanted to join. So he joined, I split up the equity five ways basically to make it like, you know, three musketeers, five musketeers, all equal, da, da, da, da, and.

Jeff Holman (20:17.405)
Yeah.

John Cousins (20:40.27)
I had all the equity. did this as a generous kind of thing, I thought, at that time. And they ended up ousting me. And the thing tanked.

Jeff Holman (20:44.671)
Mm-hmm. gave up enough that you didn't have control and so...

John Cousins (20:52.364)
I didn't have control. And what happened was we were having a difficult time. It turned out that I thought, everybody's going to love having safe food and stuff like that. Turned out people don't really give that much of a hoot, not that many. People eat at McDonald's. They eat at whatever. They don't really care if their food has a bunch of sodium or where their beef comes from or what. And so we realized. So then we started moving into having

Jeff Holman (21:06.023)
Yeah.

John Cousins (21:17.342)
supply chain management for different companies that didn't know where their supplies were really coming from. And we could vet those. But then it became instead of becoming a downloadable digital first company that could really scale, it became more like a consulting firm where every client, again, big clients, you know, it would be a different, different kind of set of criteria. And so it wouldn't really scale. And I kind of lost interest. And but but then I got booted out. And it was just a miserable experience for me.

to just sort of, I remember my wife said when I came home, I was just like white, know, I just like, you know, and I couldn't believe it. I put all this time and effort into it, made this thing and then, you know, I did, I relinquished control thinking that that would be a good venture and it turned out not to be. And, you know, so lessons learned, but that was when I, you know, really, and that's when I basically started to think about, you know what, having partners, having big customers, those kinds of things, or having investors.

Jeff Holman (22:07.568)
What would you?

John Cousins (22:16.318)
I had that before where they just want to bleed you dry sometimes and stuff and not really have your best interests in mind. Basically, a lot of times, VCs and stuff, all they want to do is give you milestones that you commit to that you can't perform on so that then they can grab more equity as part of the, once you get to that milestone and don't actually have the deliverables at that time until they have control of your company.

Jeff Holman (22:39.634)
Yeah, yeah, there may be some of that, maybe less optimistic or more nefarious activity going on. Well, when you were at Food Century, I mean, how did you guys make the decision to pivot from the app to the consulting country of origin type of work? mean, clearly the market was giving you signals and saying, we're not buying, we're not getting traction or whatever. But that doesn't mean

know, signals are one thing, but making the decision and the process of talking it through with the team and getting everybody on board or getting enough people on board, like what was that process like for you guys to work through that decision together as a team of five musketeers?

John Cousins (23:24.596)
That's the great question. Basically, I had two guys that were really, really pivotal and their expertise was outstanding. One was the open source intelligent guy, absolutely brilliant, military. He had a certain kind of mindset though, you know, that was very regimented and then the marketing guy, a genius marketing guy who had done all kinds of great campaigns before.

And he was more of a liberal artsy kind of guy, right? So these two guys didn't really mesh as far as their personalities. And I was kind of the guy in between, talking about a leadership thing, trying to hold this thing together long enough for a big payday. I mean, basically, trying to. There was, there was. They just didn't like each other's way of looking at the world and approaching the world. Not the business. And so the...

Jeff Holman (24:05.747)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (24:09.31)
Oh, was there contention or? mean, okay.

Jeff Holman (24:18.213)
I see.

John Cousins (24:22.7)
the marketing guy would say, here's what the market wants, you know, and the operations guy would say, here's what we can deliver. And they were just butt heads. And finally, the marketing guy said, life's too short. I'm out of here. And he left. And when he left, then we had to figure out, what are we going to do? We had had been approached by a couple of large international companies to do, you know, the other way. you know, we tried that and that's when it

Jeff Holman (24:36.798)
John Cousins (24:51.01)
you know, it basically the business model changed enough that it didn't really make sense to me. But then a decision was made for me as far as my involvement. But I basically followed the marketing guy out the door and then the thing never really, really took off. So that was a, that was just a challenging time. but it really made me have to go back and say, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? you know, obviously I couldn't

Jeff Holman (24:59.848)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (25:06.727)
Yeah.

John Cousins (25:19.038)
sort of be the marriage counselor, whatever, between these two guys to keep them, you know, in their own spheres. so that was really, that's how it really, it basically was just that precipitated looking in another direction and the direction presented itself from some inquiries from some big companies.

Jeff Holman (25:25.725)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (25:40.54)
Okay, well I'd love to hear, I'd love to get into some of what came next, but first, I mean, I just want to touch on the point that you're making that, you know, a lot of leaders get themselves into that situation or find themselves in that situation, right? Where you know that there's going to be tension among the different roles in the leadership team and company. have different tasks they're trying to complete, maybe all aligned to a similar.

strategic objective, but their tasks and their way of thinking are different. So, you know, at what point did you realize this, we might not be able to solve this communication issue between these two. Cause as a leader, you're like, like, like I can see both sides. I'm sure you're, I'm sure you're sitting there saying we're, we're saying the same thing in different languages. Let me translate. Let me, let's just get on the same page and, and then we can get past this.

squabbling that's keeping us from doing the real work, right? At what point did you realize, I don't know if I can save this communication issue?

John Cousins (26:45.538)
When when the marketing guy said, I'm out of here. mean, basically, you know, up until then, I thought, you know, I'm going to like I said, I'm going to do everything I can to hold this together. I mean, it was basically make a stand up, spin up a startup and then try to sell it to some bigger company and make an exit relatively fast couple of years. And if I could just keep it together long enough, keep these guys, you know, from killing each other, then then we can make this happen.

Jeff Holman (26:48.52)
he.

Jeff Holman (27:03.24)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (27:14.124)
Another thing like that too that's really tough is when you have a bunch of different, and every company has a bunch of different aspects, and especially when you're in a growth stage, each part doesn't have the identical or equitable amount of work. At some point, one group's gonna have to really be doing a bunch of heavy lifting while the other group looks a little bit passive. And then if you get to the right spot in the curve or whatever of growth, then the other group's gonna come in and do their part.

Jeff Holman (27:41.245)
Yeah.

John Cousins (27:41.484)
And you have to be comfortable with that kind of fluidity. that's another tough thing to do. People say, we're working 18 times as hard as those guys over there. They don't do crap. They don't know what they're doing. And also, I think a lot of sides don't appreciate the other side. A lot of people think marketing, marketing is, what do they do? It's just so soft and stuff like that. do a couple of things. And I'm the one that's really doing the big lifting and all. I'm making the product.

Jeff Holman (27:57.938)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (28:04.304)
Right, right.

John Cousins (28:10.466)
You know, I make the product and people are going to come in and buy it. Right. But I found out through my, especially now as a solopreneur, you know, as a making the products is, is tough, no question. And really trying to find product market fit, you know, and finding customers and all. But then I think marketing is actually much more difficult. It's really, really hard. And especially, I mean, it's better now in this day and age when we have all these incredible tools so we can actually get feedback on our marketing.

John Wanamaker, was one of the famous first department store guys said, you know, half of my budget, my advertising budget is misspent. The problem is I don't know which half, you know, and that's the thing, you now you can actually get feedback on what ads are working, how they're, know, how, kind of engagement you can re-engage people, you know, you can do all kinds of stuff to, to, to get metrics and feedback and see what's working and double down on that. And what's not working either jettison or

Jeff Holman (28:49.118)
Yeah, I love that quote.

John Cousins (29:08.59)
refined it until it is working. So marketing has gotten a lot, think, more engineering-like and more feedback. I mean, in the old days, how did you do it? You ran an ad in a magazine, It would take you, you'd go do the whole ad, it'd be the nice glossy ad. The magazine would come out 60 days later. It would be on the newsstands. then, you know, and how did you measure the efficacy of that advertising campaign? Very difficult, where now you can just like,

Jeff Holman (29:20.871)
Yeah.

John Cousins (29:37.378)
You put something up, you get the Google results, and you just go from there. And so it's much more quantitative. But even with that, it's incredible. I find it to be incredibly difficult to get the messaging right and to get the conversions up to a place that makes sense and all those kind of good things that we can do now.

Jeff Holman (29:57.03)
Yeah, and now you're now you're now you're filling multiple hats, wearing multiple hats here at this at this new place. What did you find that shifted in your in your, you know, the way you thought about things, in addition to saying, I don't know that I want all this controversy or have all this drama around me, I'm going to work, work with, you know, do something a little bit more, you know, solarpreneur ish. You know, how did how how else did your thinking change?

John Cousins (30:25.346)
Well, one of the things to I couldn't be a solopreneur 20 years ago or 15 years ago, you it's all with these new platforms and a lot of automation and things that allow us to now do a lot of the things that used to take people, you know, we can do it with automation. You can make, you know, say an advertising campaign that grabs emails and then you make an email funnel and then that goes to your, you know, paywall and then you measure conversions and

Nobody has to do anything. That's just all automated. And then if it's digital downloads, as many people as want them can download it. so you don't have working capital tied up in accounts receivable or inventory, you know? And so all those kinds of things really help. And there was something I was going to... and yeah, as a leader and, you know, as a, you know, one of the big things you're supposed to do is delegate.

and really be comfortable and delegate. And I agree with that to a point. But what I've found is whenever I delegate and whenever I've delegated, my understanding of that part of the business starts to atrophied because I'm not directly involved in it. So all of a sudden I would get to places where it's like, wait a minute, I don't really know what's going on over here in this part or that part. now, and plus I just love doing every part of it. I really...

Jeff Holman (31:42.085)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (31:48.94)
I love to geek out on marketing and operations and, know, accounting and finance and everything in between. So, you know, it's not, it's not a problem. I actually feel better. And I actually, if I'm more engaged with every part, then I know actually what's happening. And I find that to be absolutely crucial. and so it's a balance to, you know, people don't delegate, they hold things because they can do it faster than handing it off to someone else until that person really gets up to speed.

Jeff Holman (31:54.29)
Yeah.

John Cousins (32:17.024)
And if you do that too much, then you're you know, diluting your efforts because you can't do everything that well. But but I do delegate, but I delegate to automation. You know, it's like The 4-Hour Workweek book. I think that was a revelatory thing for me, quite frankly, that Tim Ferriss, Tim Ferriss's book, The Four Hour Work Week, when that came out. mean, the name's kind of, you know, wild, but but it was all about, know, how can you what do you need to have done?

Jeff Holman (32:28.723)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (32:33.522)
Hmm. Yeah.

John Cousins (32:45.102)
The other things just get rid of them or automate them away. And I was like, wow, we're at a place now where we can actually do that. And so that was back when I really started to think about delegating, but delegating to automation where I could see a dashboard of what's going on and know that the automation doesn't have any ulterior motives. It's tough with employees too. And I don't mean to be so cynical about partners and

Jeff Holman (33:11.08)
Ha ha ha.

John Cousins (33:14.858)
employees and investors and all that kind of stuff because they can be wonderful too and they can be empowering but you know,

Jeff Holman (33:22.024)
But this is the real part of the business though, right? Anytime you're building a business at scale that requires people and let's face it, automation is awesome, but most businesses require some people still, right? Maybe many people and you have to manage the team of people and the team of emotions and the drama or like it's part of the business and it's a very real part that can.

John Cousins (33:26.243)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (33:48.316)
I think maybe from your food century example, it can really have an impact on the viability of the business outside of the business model itself, right?

John Cousins (33:56.558)
Well, absolutely. And there's been the whole thing like quiet quitting, that whole thing. mean, and basically, whole idea, nobody hires anybody unless they are.

Jeff Holman (34:01.971)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (34:09.326)
creating surplus value, more value than they're getting paid for. There's no reason to have an employee if they're not creating more value than they're getting paid for. And then that excess value, that surplus value, accrues up to the owners of the company. So every employee, to a degree, is being exploited. so people also, as they're working, sometimes get tired of it and stuff. And it gets to the point, I'm going to pay you just enough that you don't quit.

and you're going to do just enough work that you don't fire me. And that's a real dysfunctional place to be in a company. And I've seen that happen a lot too, where companies just don't, it's like molasses, you this bureaucracy gets built up because people are just doing enough and not doing what they want. And what you're saying, Jeff, too, about businesses need people now, well, we're right on the cusp of, you know, dare I say the A word, know, AI, know, artificial intelligence.

You know, where a lot of, especially the first ones are coming for all the white collar jobs. mean, anything that has to be done that can be done by, you know, moving around, you know, documents and information is just prime for AI to take over and do that job. mean, automation is just to that point. When I say automation, mean, a lot of times, know, artificial automation with AI sprinkled on it and stuff.

Jeff Holman (35:23.046)
Yep.

John Cousins (35:33.806)
and actually moving atoms, actually making things on a manufacturing floor, that's going to take some more time maybe. we're getting, know, Tesla just announced that they are dropping their Model S and their Model Y cars, and they're going to use that factory space to start manufacturing their optimist robots, their humanoid robots. Those are coming pretty quick. And when that happens, you know, a lot of jobs that are actually, you know,

Jeff Holman (35:33.928)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (35:54.846)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (36:03.93)
plumbers and carpenters and everything else, know, we're actually moving things around. Warehouse jobs and stuff are going to be done by by robots. And I think that those days are coming a lot faster than we think. You know, I keep hearing these pundits talk about, you know, by 2027, you know, things like that, that these are, you know, couple of years these things are going to be happening. So I think position for me, positioning myself as a solopreneur.

is just a way that I can maybe leverage some of these. The tools are just coming on fast and furious too. They're always changing and getting smarter and being more capable. So that's been a real plus, I think. And I don't know if businesses are gonna survive in our 20th century kind of model where we have a whole bunch of layers of management and a whole bunch of people doing different tasks and...

I mean, when all those tasks can be automated, I think those jobs are going to evaporate.

Jeff Holman (37:08.572)
Yeah, no. Well, I want to get into what you're working on now, but I first of all, validating what you're saying. I mean, I'm in the legal field and there's no other field. I don't think that AI is more anxious to replace than attorneys that you don't want to hire or talk to anyways. Right. So we're seeing a ton of that and it'll be interesting. You know, there's a lot of ways that we, think we're being marketed AI as if it works better than it does, but it's going to get there.

And it may be a short timeframe or a long timeframe, but it's gonna get there and it's gonna absolutely shift the way that the lawyers and other, as you mentioned, white collar and blue collar, eventually people are doing their jobs. So it's an exciting time for sure. So.

John Cousins (37:53.55)
Yeah. And I think also with, with lawyers, it's going to be more like solopreneur kind of things. Right now they say, you know, that the, the people coming out of law school right now are going to have a tough time finding jobs because those entry level jobs are the ones that are being automated away where it's all the document research and all that kind of stuff that you feed up the chain. And you can be one attorney and have, you know, AI's scouring Lexis nexus in these databases for you and creating all the documents.

Jeff Holman (38:12.253)
Yep.

John Cousins (38:21.676)
and then you're just sitting on top of writing all of that and you don't need, I mean, we've already gotten rid of the law library, right? And the secretarial pool and all those other parts of a big law firm that used to be. I think that the next step is gonna be these entry level jobs and it'll be the attorneys that have the experience that'll be just using all these tools and not having to have a bunch of associates and lower level attorneys working for them.

Jeff Holman (38:50.482)
Yeah. Yep, it's all shifting into legal ops these days. it's an exciting time. Well, tell us, you know, so you've had this experience with Food Century and other businesses and you've kind of modified your approach. You said, hey, I'm going to do something on my own. Was that first thing you did MBA ASAP or was there another step to get to this point?

John Cousins (38:50.486)
and eating into their profits.

John Cousins (38:55.543)
Legal apps.

John Cousins (39:14.894)
Well, would say it basically, MBA ASAP has evolved over time and that's really, where it started was writing, well, basically where it started was I was starting companies. I took two public, I ran them as a public CEO and CFO for 15 years. And then I also started teaching and started teaching finance basically. My sister was teaching.

Jeff Holman (39:35.71)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (39:43.35)
in New Jersey at a university in the evenings. She was working as a financial person for a big company there. And I thought, that's so cool, teaching. I never thought about that. And so when I got back home, I started poking around and got myself a couple of teaching assignments. realized that, and when I got my MBA too, I realized these poor students, the textbooks are this thick. 800 pages on accounting and 800 pages on finance. Right? Yeah.

Jeff Holman (40:07.814)
I've been there. totally understand.

John Cousins (40:11.5)
It's like, they're not going to learn all this stuff. And they had no context for it and prioritization, like valence of what's really important and what's not. From an academic standpoint, it's all intellectually fascinating. But on a day-to-day basis, I was thinking from my experience, what did I use? What were the fundamentals? What was the blocking and tackling of this subject? And started looking into that and started really distilling this information down from these big textbooks into little

PowerPoints, know, slide decks and then into little white papers and then from there into like book length things and around that time again, it was this conversion of technology, know Kindle direct publishing came along Amazon and you could upload a Word document and they had a cover maker and suddenly you had a book that you could sell worldwide and and they make a you know, electric cop electric e-copy, you the Kindle and they also make a paperback that they do is called pod print on demand so

Jeff Holman (41:04.968)
Yeah.

John Cousins (41:09.73)
You didn't have to anymore print a thousand copies because somebody had to set up a printing press and that would be where the break even point was. They print one anytime anybody orders it. So it was a really wonderful way to start making the books. And from the books, then I started just recording my classrooms, things on my whiteboard lectures on my little smartphone and editing them on iMovie.

Jeff Holman (41:19.431)
Right.

Jeff Holman (41:35.478)
It almost sounds like though this wasn't intended to be a company. Was the idea to have it a company from the beginning or was it just more like a passion project you were doing and then is that what it...

John Cousins (41:41.432)
No.

John Cousins (41:47.118)
It was like, you're right, it was like a passion project. And that's why I say, you know, like doing something that I love doing, then it doesn't matter about being consistent and disciplined because I do it anyway. I just keep doing it. but pretty, pretty early on, I thought I can make a company out of that, because that's basically the way I think, you know, it's like, I can make a company out of this, you know, so. I've been doing it for years, I've been doing it way back since I was a kid, and then, you know, definitely in my 20s and, you know, and always.

Jeff Holman (41:59.87)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (42:07.036)
Right. You've been doing that. You've been doing that for years and years and years. It's going to creep in.

John Cousins (42:16.942)
And so it's like, you know, I can, let's see. And then the tools were there to do it that way. And then a platform called Udemy came along and I could just upload these videos and a couple of PDFs and stuff and have courses up there. and again, one of the lucky things was one of the first courses I put up, I was putting up, you know, I was thinking people would be more interested in sexy subjects like strategy and marketing and, negotiations. And I put up a corporate finance and that became a hit for me. And I was like,

people want to know about corporate finance, seems like the driest, boringest subject, but it really filled a, filled a niche and surprisingly enough was one of the first ones I put up. So I had this early win. like, well I can do more of those, that kind of stuff. And so I kept putting up more and more stuff and some of them, you know, didn't do as well, certainly, but I just kept doing it. And because I knew that I could, because I had this sort of proof of concept. And from there I went to, you know, I wanted to not be,

to beholden to anybody's platform. I did other ones too. There's a bunch of other platforms for, for do a teachable and the other things, but I wanted to have my own. So I hired some developers and things and made a MBA dash ASAP.com a website and put a course on there and know, housing my own videos and also if somebody changes the rules on me, I'm not, you know, the rug pull isn't, you know, they can't take away my intellectual property, you know, like a lot of people I was hearing these cautionary tales about

It was like having, you you'd be on a platform and then the platform would change the rules and suddenly you had no business. And it was like, somebody said it was like having the most lucrative McDonald's built on top of a volcano. You know, it's like, it wouldn't really work. So I wanted to have something that was more stable that I could build intellectual property around and have it as an actual asset and property. So I did that. And that has been really fruitful. And just recently, you one of the things that people wanted was accreditation. So

Jeff Holman (43:56.413)
Yeah.

John Cousins (44:13.646)
through Florida Global University, I've got accreditation for my course. So at the end of the course, they take it, if they get 80 % on the final exam, they get a certificate, you know, with credits from Florida Global University. And, and then from there, instead of just having a, you know, a sort of one way street where I'm talking and they're listening on, I want to, I started a community. So there's all that peer to peer.

Jeff Holman (44:27.611)
Awesome.

John Cousins (44:42.848)
interaction and I develop them over time to each month we have a different subject that we take on and we have you know mastermind each week and things like that and and that's been really fun too and having not just where they're interacting with just me but they can interact with each other and ask me a lot of questions and I can respond and so that's been a really a really great thing too so those are the different aspects of it as it's grown it's grown organically like you say it started out as just

sort of the artifact of my deciding to do some teaching and then using my classroom as sort of a laboratory as far as what works, what sticks, and I could see when the light bulbs went off, you know, and they say, now I understand what, you know, a balance sheet is, you know, or they would just sort of start to glaze over and look at their watches and when's this course going to be over, you know, so that helped me to make, try to make the material compelling and also, you know,

interesting enough that they could actually, you know, get it because that's really the key. want people to know this stuff, know it like they know anything, you know, anything else and, and, then be able to use it and be able to use it right away. And that's the ASAP part, you know, just like not to, we're to take two years to go to college and, spend a whole bunch of money, but maybe six weeks and all of a sudden you have this, you know, information and you can start using it to make your bakery or your auto mechanic shop on a little bit better.

Jeff Holman (45:44.328)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (46:07.314)
Yeah, that's very cool. So many small business owners need that, but they need the light version of it. My wife went through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program and loved that. She called it her mini MBA and it's been just something she's referred back to and think drawn a lot of stuff from. So a lot of people need this, whether it's one format or another, they need access to this to help run their business better. I'm really curious, John, what did you take from

John Cousins (46:17.134)
Well.

Jeff Holman (46:37.118)
your prior experience with larger businesses, bigger bets, you know, and pull into MBA, SAP as you were building it. What kind of decision making were you thinking about or leveraging from that earlier experience?

John Cousins (46:53.474)
Well, and decision making, mean, that's such a key part of things. Every experience kind of cultivated me for the next thing. But one of the things that I was always interested in, like you say, with decision making and sort of how do you approach the world and sort of make a model out of what you're experiencing so that you can make good decisions and fast decisions.

And Charlie Munger, was Warren Buffett's partner, always talked about having this lattice work of mental models that you could, so the right tool for the right sort of job that you're encountering. And so I started to put together a bunch of my thoughts on that. And that became another book, too. I have a book on mental models and what are the looking for things like the power principles. Like, what's the 20 % that's going to

bring 80 % of the results and things like that and try to really exploit as many different models as I could to make better decisions and to make clear decisions. So yeah, that's been a I think a big takeaway. But everything, mean, another thing that I've, a lot of what I've done with MBA SAP is sort of,

had my ideas on something and then want to codify them in some way for my own mind. And then from there, make it into a product that I can share with everybody else. Negotiations. I mean, at the end of the day, everything is negotiations, right? Whether what movie we're going to see, where we're going to go to dinner, you know, in your personal life, whatever those kinds of things to how you're going to assemble people to do things. And a lot, a lot of what I do now too, is, I will, you know, it's not just me. I will hire some consultants from time to time.

and assemble a mosaic of talent that fits whatever job needs to be done. And then that goes apart. And so you have to, there's no more of this hierarchy where you say, you know, do this, do that. Why? Because I told you to, because I'm your boss, you know? And if you don't, fire you and then you won't be able to pay your mortgage. So you're really beholden to me, you that kind of stuff. It's like you have to have leadership skills and negotiating skills to make people understand why it's a good idea to be part of this team and to do these kinds of things.

Jeff Holman (48:51.55)
Yeah.

John Cousins (49:13.666)
and to do it in an effective manner. And so I put together all my stuff on negotiating and then put that as a course and a book and all those kinds of things too. They say, and I really like this is, if you're not thinking enough, if you get stuck, if you're not thinking enough, read and just read like crazy. You should read like crazy anyway. mean, that's a superpower, especially in this day and age where not too many people read. You can really get ahead that way. And if you're thinking too much, write.

Jeff Holman (49:16.253)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (49:31.614)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Holman (49:38.386)
Yeah.

John Cousins (49:42.718)
You know, put those ideas down, get them out of your head and get them on paper so you can clarify them up and make them into something meaningful for yourself and then hopefully for others. So that's really my approach to these different kind of subjects. But I would say, yeah, decision making skills through having a good set of mental models and then also cultivating negotiation skills. And negotiation is a learned thing. You can learn to be a better negotiator.

And I think it's really valuable.

Jeff Holman (50:12.764)
Yeah. I, well, I feel like as you're, as you're mentioning all of this, and maybe I'm wrong. You can tell me if I'm wrong, but it really feels like you've gone from, you know, bigger businesses to, Hey, I need, I need to, you know, alleviate some of the, maybe pressures or the

drama, I keep going back to drama, that's a word I use a lot, that, you know, of dealing with other people, you start to write, you start to teach, you start to share your expertise, and then you're like, wait a second, maybe I can monetize this. But it really does seem like all of this is kind of leading up towards maybe a legacy moment. Are you doing part of this as leaving a legacy for those that, you know, you're connected to, those that...

show up at your classes. What's driving you at this point for MBA ASAP?

John Cousins (51:11.32)
You know, and that's a great question, Jeff. And it has been that way. That's what I wanted to do as I've gone through life is I wanted to alleviate frictions and stresses and drama and all those kind of things that were not productive parts of trying to be productive. that's really what I've really tried to think about and to strip back until I got to this place. Now, sometimes people ask me, are you retired and stuff? said, well,

Jeff Holman (51:30.909)
Yeah.

John Cousins (51:41.326)
I'm kind of retired, but I just do this. And one of the reasons I love it too is because I get all this data feedback, it's like kind of gamified. There's this gamification element. It's like, oh, I sold that many books today, or oh, I sold that amount of courses, or oh, this happened or that happened. There's these metrics that then excite me and give me those little shots of dopamine, I guess, that keep me going in that way. But yeah, you know, I...

Like I say, I write, I think it's all part of a legacy. And I like that idea. You all these things are artifacts that I'm going to leave behind. And, and I like that idea. I've written a lot of a lot I just published today, actually, my 71st book, 71 books, you know, it's a lot of books. And, and this last book that I published was the third book of a trilogy on Benedict Arnold, the famous

Jeff Holman (52:25.266)
Hmm. Wow.

Jeff Holman (52:38.674)
Hmm. Yeah, yeah.

John Cousins (52:39.106)
American trader, you know, and people don't realize that he was a real hero of the revolution before he became a trader. And and so I take that through that in a trilogy form. And and so that's more of a literary historical fiction. And it brings up philosophical points and points about government and and ethics and morality, all kinds of things that I wanted to wrestle with, you know, and do it in this dramatic thing. And I started doing that, you know,

15 years ago, when I read Ron Chernow's book, Alexander Hamilton, when I read that, I started to write a play about this stuff. And interestingly enough, like a year later, that Hamilton play came out. was like, I think he had the same idea, but he did a much better job, and he put it together. And it's taken me this long of a rattle around to say, you know what? I'm going to sit down. I'm going to write this in a novelistic form with a larger overarching narrative and stuff.

Jeff Holman (53:14.44)
Mm.

Jeff Holman (53:21.139)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (53:30.92)
Cool.

John Cousins (53:35.458)
So I write a lot of things like that too. I write some histories. write, you know, histories of technology, histories of all kinds of things, biographies, books on music. I'm a musician. So yeah, I think in a way, and I do think about that sometimes, like, you know, it'd be neat if these things somehow survive me and maybe like a great, great grand kid of mine or something will one day say, what did that guy have to think about?

And there's my ideas that somebody could access. That would be just really, really cool to me, you know? So yeah, I am doing it as a legacy. And it's almost like a snowstorm, know, where it's just flake on flake, these things kind of build up to some sort of a mass. And in each instance, I try to do something that I'm just really compelled and interested in at that moment, because I can't force myself to do it. It has to be something that, like I say, the pull has to be enough.

Jeff Holman (54:06.909)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John Cousins (54:32.61)
to pull me through the process. and a lot of times it'll be just a little idea that I have that I start to follow and all of a sudden, little by little, it builds up. Sometimes I, you know, I abandoned it for a while like that Benedict Arnold idea for 15 years, but then I come back around to it, you know, and say, wait a minute, this is kind of interesting. So, yeah, so it's all a piece with creating a legacy and thinking of it in those terms and bringing that type of responsibility, I think, to the future or whatever.

Jeff Holman (54:48.595)
Yeah.

John Cousins (55:01.592)
to my work to sort of not make it too haphazard and not to sort of, you know, knock it out fast or something. But at the same time, you know, professionals ship, you know, they deliver. So at some point, perfectionism can be procrastination. So I don't wait too long to polish stuff, you know, so, and that's that balance between, you know, how does an abstract artist know when the painting's done?

Jeff Holman (55:14.451)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (55:26.726)
Yeah, exactly. Well, you've you've certainly shipped your fair amount, maybe more than your fair amount. Seventy one books. That's got to be it's got to be up there in the, you know, top percentile of how many books anybody's publishing. That's pretty amazing and probably a subject for a whole whole other podcast episode, maybe. So but I'm curious, you know, of all these things you've done, you know, big companies, solopreneur writing books.

John Cousins (55:34.126)
you

Jeff Holman (55:56.638)
thinking about legacy, teaching, what is it that you would leave with somebody, a CEO, who's maybe at a point that you saw or were at in your earlier career? they're like, man, I'm trying to build this business, whether it's with a team or not. And they're struggling with some of these strategic high-level decisions, trying to break through their own obstacles in their path. What's that?

nugget of advice that you would say, listen, this this might or might not work, but this is what I would do. This is where I would turn in that type of situation.

John Cousins (56:36.428)
That's a great, great question, Jeff. I think, you know, we talked about perseverance, you know, and persistence and don't give up. Just don't give up. You know, when you're doing something, you know, and don't question it too much, you know, have a bias towards action. You know, I like instead of a ready aim fire, ready fire aim, you know, where you actually plan a little bit, do something and then see what type of, you know, feedback you get measure that feedback and then

Jeff Holman (56:53.022)
Mm-hmm.

John Cousins (57:05.998)
course correct accordingly or what you have to do. So you have some real, you're actually interacting with the real world and not just getting lost in, you know, your own mind and not letting that battle plan confront the enemy or, you know, taking that punch in the face when you have your plan kind of thing, you know, really have a bias towards action in that way. And then really the thing comes down to sure obstacles and perseverance and trying to break through

That's absolutely a thing. But there's also, you know, this thing in entrepreneurship they talk about a lot in all businesses, pivot or persevere. You know, sometimes the wall is really a brick wall and you can't go through the wall. So you have to figure out how to pivot, how to do something a little bit different that and that's where the art that's where the art really lies and the judgment really lies. And you have to trust your judgment is I persevere. know, I've persevered. I've tried to, you know, make this obstacle.

Jeff Holman (57:51.143)
Right.

John Cousins (58:04.802)
you know, whittle it down and figure out how I can get through it, but I'm just not making it. Is it time to pivot and, and go around it or to try something, you know, that, what else has come out of this as a, as a little artifact? There's so many businesses where they say that, we were on this path and we did this and we made this little tool for the team to communicate. And this business didn't work, but the little tool that we've been for the, you know, that became Slack or something, you know, it's like, you know, so there's lots of things that you can learn.

Jeff Holman (58:28.178)
Yes, yeah. Yep.

John Cousins (58:34.272)
If you're just willing to not just focus on the thing you want it to be, but what are the other things to and listen to customers. It's not what you build and then they're going to come. It's like, what do people want? What kind of either pain point can you alleviate or what kind of delight can you create? Those are really the two things you can ask and find out what people really, really want and then do that.

Jeff Holman (59:03.164)
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think we might have to extract a few different nuggets out of that last statement there. But you're right, persistence, perseverance, and pivot are all, they're just foundational issues in entrepreneurship, right? And maybe knowing, and that's maybe what this podcast is really meant to be, it's knowing to make the decisions to try to do those different things.

And I don't know that there's an absolute right answer one way or the other for any situation, but knowing that the options are there to do those and how to smartly try to attempt them and test them out and see if you can do it. I think that's the best we can do. And sometimes you're going to find success. Many times, maybe not, but some of these things are going to lead to success. So you've clearly experienced some of that. Oh, go ahead.

John Cousins (59:55.329)
no, I'm sorry, but I was just going to say, know, like the longer you're in the arena, the more chances for success you have. You've increased your luck surface, basically, you know, because I heard a quote recently, time is luck. And if you're in it long enough, because let's face it, it's never our own efforts totally that make a successful or failure. It has to be timing. It has to be an aspect of luck. And that's what Napoleon

Jeff Holman (01:00:17.886)
Yeah.

John Cousins (01:00:25.196)
always asked of when people were recommending a new, elevate somebody to one of his generals. He didn't ask if they, how good were they strategically in their military? Are they lucky? And that was the thing he wanted to know, that they have a pension for luck. And the way that we can increase our luck is just by being in the game relentlessly.

Jeff Holman (01:00:45.852)
Yeah, you called it luck surface area, I think is what I heard. I like that.

John Cousins (01:00:51.49)
Yeah, increase your surface. right. If you increase the luck surface area, where opportunities can fall, that if you can recognize them, boom, that might be the thing to do. so time is one of those things that increases that luck surface area, for sure.

Jeff Holman (01:01:08.614)
I love it. Well, John, you've left us with a bunch of insights and I know it's just a small slice of all of your expertise and experience. So I appreciate you sharing that with the audience today. It's been great having you on the show.

John Cousins (01:01:22.926)
Thanks so much, Jeff, and thanks for doing this because you're you're bringing this to a big audience that can then be inspired by all your different guests and your own great insights. And I started out in the television business and back then it was three networks in the United States and it was all just transmission. And now through a podcast, you can have an international audience. It's just amazing.

We're living in some wonderful times and kudos to you for doing it.

Jeff Holman (01:01:53.342)
Lots of opportunities. I'm glad to be a small part of it myself. And also thanks to our audience for joining us again on the breakout CEO. It's great to have you. guys help us make the show what it is and you guys are help us to get John's insights out there even further, help to build his legacy and build your own businesses. So, and we will see you all again next time.

John Cousins (01:01:57.56)
Great.

John Cousins (01:02:17.666)
Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Holman (01:02:18.728)
Thanks, John.