The $100M journey is a testament to the power of persistence and vision in achieving extraordinary success. Join Mark Cox as he sits down with John St. Pierre, author of The $100M Journey. John shares his inspiring journey from college student to successful entrepreneur in this insightful conversation. Discover the secrets behind his success, including valuable lessons on building and scaling businesses, overcoming setbacks, and achieving massive goals. Learn how John turned adversity into opportunity, navigated the challenges of rapid growth, and ultimately realized his $100M dream. Don't miss this inspiring story of entrepreneurial triumph!
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The $100M Journey: Turning Setbacks Into Triumphs With John St. Pierre
John, welcome to the show. It's so great to meet you.
Thanks for having me, Mark.
We got a bit of a shared history, certainly with your College Pro experience. I was so excited to speak to you, John. First of all, I loved the book The $100 Million Journey. I love the transparency of the book in terms of the successes and failures. One of the things I haven't ever seen before was that I loved it when you were referencing another book. It's not just a footnote, but you actually do a blurb on the book and a summary of the book. It is just so interesting.
The Journey Of Building And Growing A Business
I was super excited to talk to you because I’ve always seen that connection between entrepreneurs and selling, it is very important for any entrepreneurial organization, and the behaviors and the approach are very similar to the two groups of people. Maybe just for context to get things properly started, tell us a little bit maybe the short story of your journey to get you here.
Mark, I think we have a lot in common. I'm from Montreal. I played hockey growing up. My kids still play hockey. I started my entrepreneurial roots in the college painting business. There's probably a lot more that we have similar. Excited to jump into this conversation. I think, for me, the journey of an entrepreneur, and you mentioned it very well, a lot of entrepreneurs first start by learning to sell.
If you go really right back to that first job out of college, I had a really interesting twist, Mark, which was, I was a Canadian going to school in the United States Who had a student visa, but I didn't have a work visa, so I couldn't go bartend like my roommates were in the summertime. My first summer, I went back and planted trees in Northern Ontario as my summer job. I vowed I was never going to do that again.
I found this loophole, which was that you can own an LLC, a limited liability company in the United States, without being on a work visa. I was like, “That's interesting. I don't have to go on payroll. I can actually own a company.” With that, I became a franchisee for College Pro Painters as a junior in college and going back to sales. It's like, “Let us teach you how to paint and now go convince homeowners to pay you $3,000 to $5,000 per paint job and you don't even have any painters yet.”
Being thrown into the sales realm was really interesting. I can remember walking away from my first estimate and getting that first deposit check, $500 or so, and I just sold these homeowners on trusting me in painting their home and the responsibility that came with that sale and then going, “I can do this. Let me go get the next one and the next one.”
Here we are 30-some years later and taking all the learnings from those experiences, and they were plentiful, to where I am now, which is now, I'm the chairperson of a holding company. We have five small union-sized businesses the largest being a $100 million national facilities, maintenance and construction company down here in the US. We also provide services in Canada as well. Taking all that learning over that journey has just been quite the ride.
I lived that same world of the student painters. I worked for the main competitor to College Pro, which was called Student Works. I can still remember that first estimate with my general manager, when I was in front of a homeowner and starting the sales process of trying to give them an estimate on painting their home. By the way, I’ve sold a billion-dollar deal. I’ve sold large corporate deals. It is pretty difficult to extract $5,000 from a homeowner, much different than the corporate world because this is money out of their wallet.
John, you'll appreciate this. We painted interiors during my first year in the painting company. Now we're in somebody's house, we're painting their dining room, we're spilling paint on their dining room table or expensive rug. There were some difficult times, but there was some great learning there, for sure. Your journey was just incredible.
How John Helps Entrepreneurs Today
After starting multiple businesses that surpassed the $50 million in revenue point, and then eventually the $100 million in revenue point. The ups and downs of those journeys where you had ownership in some cases, not as much ownership in some cases, and had some hard lessons learned. Given what you do and how do you help entrepreneurs, John? You do a lot of this type of thing and coach a lot of entrepreneurs as well.
I think, Mark, through that story of being an entrepreneur and growing, I learned a lot about what I help entrepreneurs through my failure. Not that I had one failure, I had many failures, but my biggest failure was I cofounded a company. We grew it for over fifteen years to $55 million in global revenues. I was the CEO of the business, and we were a humming. We wanted to take the next step to grow up from $55 million to North of $100 million. We brought on $20 million of private equity funding. Seven months later, I was fired.
I was fired from the very company that I not only founded, but I poured fifteen years of heart and soul into, and everything that I had, and I had the logo tattooed on my forehead. My kids had nothing but that company's apparel. It was in the industry. I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It was devastating. I woke up in the aftermath of that and go, “Where did I go wrong? What were some of the keys introspectively that I contributed to this situation?” It's not what somebody did to me. It was what did I do? Where did I miss? It's in those learnings that I came up with seven principles of entrepreneurial success that I now work with entrepreneurs.
I actually took those principles that I had learned. I applied them to my other business that I had, and we successfully grew that from around $15 million of revenues to North of $100 million the right way. What I really work with entrepreneurs now, Mark, is how do you grow your lifestyle-size business? I call lifestyle a $5 million to $20 million business, not the startup phase.
As someone who's built a nice lifestyle business, how do you grow that to become a high performing business where you, as the owner, can build something of significance that you don't have to run every day and be there managing every day? In that journey from lifestyle to high performance, there are cliffs and pitfalls there. There are tons of opportunities for you to fail just like I did. I help entrepreneurs overcome that growth paradox or that messy middle stage of growth.
By the way, the other reason I was so excited, John, because I'm in that boat. Of course, In The Funnel is my entrepreneurial venture. We're a sales training company, and we are in that stage of lifestyle from the, as you said, the $500,000 to $4 million, $5 million we're in that stage now and so we're this lifestyle business trying to get to the next level. One of the things I found very comforting, at least for me as I was reading the book, whether it's you or Verne from Gazelle's and the Growth Institute talking about, everybody thinks that as you grow, things get easier and easier. You're sitting back and it's quite the opposite. You have to have your true North or this conscious decision that says, “I'm trying to get to the next level and here's why, but I’ve got to embrace the fact that everything's going to get harder.”
There's no doubt. Growth is painful. Growth is costly. Growth takes cash. Growth can be strenuous. I think the biggest problem I’ve found, Mark, is this concept of you want to grow so fast. We all, as entrepreneurs, want to grow so fast. We want to get our business to a certain destination so quickly that we lack the patient ambition to make the right decisions.
To really go at it in a calculated and strategic manner that can preserve your equity that you have in the business that can help your company and the team within your business grow along with you at the right pace. That's a lot of the things that I see with entrepreneurs is just that lack of patient ambition to grow their businesses the right way versus just grow it as quickly as they can. When you do that, you can run it right off the cliff like I did.
John, certainly in the world nowadays, there have been years of SaaS growth models where with the exponential returns that against revenue or multiples against revenue or EBITDA, but mostly it was against revenue and venture capital pound pushing money into those firms. It was really this growth at whatever cost model. There were two groups of people, I think, that were most affected by that.
First, the clients and the prospects. I think as we exploded sales teams in SaaS businesses trying to scale rapidly, we had massive farms of sales development reps and business development reps reaching out to clients and prospects, but they didn't know what they were doing. They hadn't received the same training you'd received with College Pro. Then the second thing that really gets impacted are those salespeople themselves because so many of them fail or they don't stay. There's a third of every professional sales organization turns over every year.
What I think people don't realize is the impact on a young person, if they start a new job, they're so proud to come out of college or university, they got that first sales job, maybe with a known brand in some capacity. Seven months later, if they're no longer working for that firm, or they were fired because it wasn't proper training, there weren't proper patient growth expectations, I think it has this major impact on a young person. That kind of failure stings. I could feel the sting of all of your ups and downs in the book as I was reading it. It's really well written, but it's so authentic and transparent.
It's very true. Back to that growth, what happens when people growth for growth’s sake or growth at all costs, what ends up happening is your business starts taking on customers you don't even want. They don't even fit your port portfolio. They start taking you in different directions. Now you start diversifying in all these different verticals your business wasn't intended to go in, and then you start consuming cash. The problem starts amplifying.
Having that focus on how you're trying to grow exactly, where you're trying to grow and being super targeted, like the riches are in the niches, like go after specifically what you do and do best speaks a little bit to that growth for growth's sake. When you growth for growth's sake, you just take everything that comes on. You say yes to everything. It never works.
The Most Important Sales Skills For Entrepreneurs
It's a quick path to burnout. Your clients aren't as happy. You're not as happy and it's a quick path to burnout. When we look at all of your experience and all of the teams that you had, you had these businesses scaling so rapidly. What are the most important sales skills for these entrepreneurs that you're working with? When you start to think about them and their businesses, what do you think are the most important sales skills for them to cultivate?
This may not be a sales skill, but I want to double down on what I just said, which is the shiny object syndrome. As an entrepreneur, you most likely were the top salesperson in your company before you hired your first salesperson. You knew how to do it. You knew how to sell the paint job, or you knew how to sell the product or the software, and then you built people around it to help you sell it going forward.
What ends up happening is you get bored and you're like, “They're selling that product now or that service, so why don't we start this new line or why don't we do these new things?” You start diversifying yourself all over the place without really getting what you have to its max capability. You start burning a lot of time, energy investment and all these different side things that don't play to the core of what your business is.
I think that focus to double down on what your company does and does well, until which point you've achieved a high performing company. Your company's making $1 million in net operating cashflow a year. That company can go on without you, and you want to start a new venture. Go for it. It gets that real core focus to not deviate from the plan.
Focus on doubling down on what your company does and does well until you’ve achieved a high-performing company.
I think to put it maybe a little bit differently as well, I remember my first sales training and they were talking about the vacuum salesperson who comes in and puts some dirt on the floor, vacuums it up and says, “Do you want to buy a vacuum?” They say, “Sure,” then they buy one. They train somebody that exact same way, and a year later, the person does not make any sales because he's trying to oversell the vacuum cleaner. How do you focus in on your core business and in the sales realm is really most important trait that I think entrepreneurs lack.
Just that ideal client profile and sticking to the knitting. I think it's almost in the nature of an entrepreneur, I think amazing entrepreneurs generally are about adding value into the universe. The challenge is they're always on the lookout for other ways that they can be helping clients and prospects. It seems so obvious. “We're going to do this and we're going to do this.”
One of the things is, it's not always sexy, but it's like exercise. Part of it is just the core discipline of showing up and doing the same thing, just staying with it and just staying focused because we're all curious and we're all intellectually challenged. Sometimes, we're always zipping all over the place. Frankly, we have that problem a lot here at In The Funnel. I think if our team was running this show and I wasn't on it they'd say, “Every once in a while, Mark comes in on a Tuesday and has this vision of something to do. Three weeks from now, it doesn't seem like such a great idea.”
That's the concept of patient ambition as well. It comes back full circle, which is to continue to go down the road. Go more aggressive, maybe down the same road, but not deviate. When I did find myself deviating as an entrepreneur, for example, we were in the sporting industry. We were running sporting events, hockey events, lacrosse events and all these different events. We're like, “We're running these events. These people need to wear jerseys. Let's make some jerseys. Let's open a manufacturing facility to make jerseys.”
The next thing you know, we're trying to sell a new product we knew nothing about and gassing millions of dollars a year to try and provide jerseys to our customers because we thought it was just a natural idea as opposed to just grow your core business, grow your core product or service. That lack of patient ambition plays into the sales component. Mark, that brings it me to other elements, which is what is the strategic plan of the business. The core strategic business plan that you're following, so when John or Mark walk in on a Tuesday and say, “We're going to paint the walls yellow,” everybody's like, “Where's that in the strategic plan?” They can hold you accountable to a plan as well.
Building A Sales Team For Entrepreneurs
In the early days, John, we had an informal advisory group, and it was a little bit helpful for that just forcing me to come up with the plan and then on a quarterly basis, go back to the plan. It just added a little discipline, but still more work to do on our side, for sure. You talked about those early-stage entrepreneurs and some of those really important sales skills and staying focused.
You aptly point out we've had the same experience with our clients. We see entrepreneurs. They are very good at selling the vision and the outcomes from the offering. At what point do you typically try and counsel your clients to actually try and build a sales team where other people can actually sell? It's quite interesting. We're in a lot of mid-size organizations. Let's call it a $25 million to $50 million SaaS organization selling into an enterprise client where the founder or 1 or 2 people are still doing the vast majority of the new client acquisition. How and when do you counsel your clients to start trying to build the sales organization? How do they actually ramp it up so other people outside the visionary can sell?
In the seven principles of entrepreneurial success I talk about in the book, principle seven is how do you move from CEO to chairperson? Your number one job as an entrepreneur CEO is to replace yourself in every single role you fulfill in that business. That is your job. Otherwise, you just bought yourself a job. You are the job. That's the key role. My answer to that question is as soon as possible. That's where I typically lean.
What I’ve learned is that a lot of entrepreneurs that initially start their business because they're the best sales rep are not necessarily the best sales manager because they look at their team go, “I could do that better. I could do this better.” They don't know how to effectively manage their sales team effectively. They have a lack of control in their minds if they give up the sales management.
There's a very interesting transition where I see a lot of entrepreneurs will want to hire their first salesperson and they'll become the sales manager, but then they suck at being a sales manager. They're too distracted. There’s not enough focus. They've never been a sales manager before. They lack in those skillsets that are the next frontier is how do you replace yourself as the sales manager to bring in a professional sales manager can manage your sales team based on KPIs and metrics and focus on the numbers and the growth of the salespeople and leadership of the salespeople and development of the salespeople accordingly?
I think it's that stairstep. How do you replace yourself as soon as possible? From a sales perspective, then you become the sales manager. How do you replace yourself as soon as possible from a sales management perspective so you can be the visionary and not necessarily the integrator of the sales processes in the business? Your vision should still be present and just be trained on, but just because you're the best sales rep doesn't make you the best sales manager. You have to replace yourself for your business to grow.
Just because you're the best sales rep doesn't make you the best sales manager, and you have to replace yourself for your business to grow.
That principle, John, is so true, not just in the entrepreneurial world. It's true in the corporate world. You ran an amateur sports business. It's true in athletics. The best person on our hockey team was not someone who was the best leader on the hockey team. The best players, Gretzky's a good example, he always said he couldn't coach. They often do it. Wayne Rooney, British soccer, we get a lot of British folks reading, your best fantastic player, but can't move into that role. Those are different roles.
I’ll go back to those painting route every once in a while. I was amazed at the amount of personal development that I experienced in a 4 or 6-month period of time going from being a university student who drank way too much for somebody 140 pounds and then suddenly getting focused in on running the business. When I look back, the general manager who worked with me for that business, I still see that person as a major coach or leader in my world. In fact, in my case, that individual still running the painting company, they're called Student Works Painting. His name is Chris Thompson. He's still out there. He was named by Deloitte as one of the top entrepreneurs in Canada.
That's fantastic.
It really is. The essence of what I thought was so interesting about coaching was that it is such a critical challenge in B2B sales. The coaching in those days was very interesting because the franchisee understood they were running their own business. They were in control. They weren't being told what to do, but they had someone coaching them on trying to make them better. Who had a vested interest in trying to make them better? Franchisee was the hero of the story.
Somehow, in B2B sales, it's changed to the point where the sales leader is now the hero of the story. In many cases, seeing the sales team is just tools for them to achieve their goal or objective. Nobody wants to be the tool. Everybody wants to be the hero of their story. Whether it's small, medium enterprise, or even a large enterprise, we're seeing the same thing across the board where this coaching or management is the X factor of B2B sales nowadays. Are you seeing that as well?
I’ll tell you what I'm seeing that brings the parallel as you were saying that and same as you. The pure coaching and mentorship that I had in my first role with College Pro led me to read more. It led me to be a sponge for how do I do this better, evaluating how I did stuff and giving me feedback so I could perform at a higher level. I think as we've gotten away from that period of time, I even look at young entrepreneurs now and they don't have the mentorship and coaching I had in that environment. They just don't. One of the things I like to look at is, are you a manager, a leader, or a mentor? I look at that spectrum.
I think what you're saying a lot too is that what you're finding is a lot of the sales management are becoming managers to try and get these people to execute the kpis that I need to hit for my goal so I can go up to my boss and say, “I'm the hero. Look what I just did,” as opposed to mentoring their team. I think that's a little bit of a Corporate America issue where when you get to the boardroom, you want to show all your wins and what you did so you can get the promotion. There's a lack of that. In the small, medium-sized business world, Mark, I don't see that as much. I don't play a lot in the corporate boardrooms, but I do know that there's a lot of problems there regarding backstabbing and, “I did this and I did this,” because they want to be seen on that front line.
Whereas in the small, medium-sized business, if you don't develop a team of intrapreneurs, I call them a team, of people that act like entrepreneurs within your business, from the salespeople to the sales management, to the ops people, to find everybody. If you don't build this culture of entrepreneurship where you're mentoring and developing them, still holding them accountable to the goals and responsibilities, and providing them leadership so they can grow, you will never get out of your business. You'll never be able to enjoy the fruits of your business because you'll just turn and churn through people as they come in and out of your business seeking mentorship and seeking a place they love to get, be developed and grow. To me, that plays to the sales group as much as any other group. As a leader, if you are not mentoring your people, you're on a dangerous path.
If you don't develop a team of entrepreneurs within your business, you will never get out of your business.
Managing Ups And Downs In The Entrepreneurial Journey
John, I’ve always seen this alignment between entrepreneurs and salespeople. At the highest level, I guess, it's just the simplicity of any day, week, or month, you've actually got to go out into the universe and make something happen to create attention and interest and then demand and close a deal to bring revenue into the business. As salespeople, they're feeling that ongoing cadence because they're worried about success and hitting their goals and keeping a job.
With entrepreneurs, they're worried about keeping the lights on. The same thing happens, but it's a very unique world where the outside world is going to define our success in some ways because we've got to get that money coming in. A lot of the other roles, frankly, are backstage for companies, whether it's finance or HR and some of these other things.
One of the topics that come up a lot on this show in professional sales is just mental health and being in the right mindset as you're traveling this journey and maybe managing those ups and downs where we're not going euphoric happy, we're not going into the valleys too much. We try and maintain an even keel. Tell me a little bit about what you see in the entrepreneurial world where that same cadence to perform is so vital. Are you noticing some challenges or opportunities there as well? How do you coach entrepreneurs on managing those ups and downs?
I believe that's my mission and probably yours as well.
In many ways it is.
Mental health is a big problem. It's a big problem. It's been amplified by COVID. It's been amplified by different things going on in the world. As an entrepreneur, and sometimes much like a sales rep, you're in business sometimes by yourself, trying to run your business. You can't necessarily bring your problems home every night to the family because that doesn't help that situation. You don't really want to bring it to your team when you're scared and something's going on.
The same thing happens to a sales rep. You may not be having a good quarter, and your sales manager's expecting this from you, so you have to try to present that face there, and you want to look good in front of your colleagues. You don't want to go home and say, “I'm going to miss my big bonuses,” or whatever the situation may be.
That pressure that just keeps accumulating, where is the valve? Where is the release valve to be able to have a conversation with a mentor, with a coach to help guide you along the right path and reinforce some of your maybe beliefs or do away with your limiting beliefs of, “I can't do this,” or whatever you're saying to yourself as you go through this path. I look at it as a transition curve as well of life. From uninformed optimism to crisis of meaning to back to informed optimism, that is the life of ups and downs. When you have the right mentorship, whether that be the leader in your organization or the entrepreneur running your business, or a coach on the side, it doesn't really matter. That coach can minimize ups and downs.
Yes, you do have successes, and yes, you don't win deal once in a while, but you know how to manage it. You know how to manage your emotions, you know how to manage your subconscious mindset and how you're talking to yourself and how you're performing each and every day. That is a major component of sales, entrepreneurship and everything. It's basically a life code in general for everybody now. Are you seeking the right guidance, whether it be books you're reading, the videos you're watching, the people you're talking to? Are you surrounding yourself with the right information to guide you in the right way?
On the side, one of my hobbies is I'm in a bar band that I jumped back into after twenty years of not doing it. I jumped back in a few years ago, and we play in Toronto with a bunch of executives and core who are on boards, and we do charity gigs for different associations. One year, we donated all the money to CAMH, which is the Center for Addiction and Mental Health. It was a real wake-up call for me. This was post-COVID, but in advance of the gigs, our lead singer who is on the board of CAMH, which share stats on mental health and issues, and it was flabbergasting. One of the things that's interesting, the way they look at it is there's this spectrum.
In the past, you might have looked at it and said, if you cross this aspect, you've got a mental health issue. There are a lot of steps along the path to that where you're just not yourself or you're just not feeling good. One of the things we've constantly coached on this program is trying to focus on those things that you can control. There are a lot of things that are outside of our control. If I am short on revenue as an entrepreneur, if I'm short on qualified deals as a salesperson, that's not going to change overnight. Over the next 2 or 3 days, I can certainly trigger some live conversations that are eventually going to lead me in the right direction. Zoning in on those things that we can control most.
Just as a reminder for our readers, just while we're on this topic, one book I picked up, which I thought was very interesting in the professional sales realm was Anthony Iannarino’s The Negativity Fast. This would be somebody who's one of the top ten thought leaders in B2B sales globally. After everything he's published and everything he is done, his second most recent book came back and said, “I'm going to talk about mindset and The Negativity Fast.”
One of the things that struck me so much was he's got research in there on the power of gratitude and the idea of actually being grateful for what you have, your family, your loved ones, your health, the wealth. Many of us look at ourselves and say, “I'm not as rich as the Joneses. My business is not as big as so and so's.” Anthony reminds us that 96% of the entire global population lives on less than $35,000 a year. I think in the past, we could take these things for granted. Now, I think you have to have an intentional plan, almost like a strategic plan, to keep yourself in the right mental and physical framework so that you can be successful.
I love that, Mark. I'm going to look up that book. I love negativity fast. I’ll tell you this failure that I had, which was a few years ago. It wasn't that long ago. It was in 2018. This is pre-COVID and pre-everything. Fifteen years of building this business, going all out. Long weeks, long years, you name it. To lose it all in a second, not a second, but a few months felt like a second. I remember sitting down after that feeling sorry for myself. The biggest thing that helped me was the power of gratitude. I looked at it a little bit differently at first. I wouldn't have called it the power of gratitude. What I called it was perspective.
I said, “I got a great wife, a great family. We're healthy. Two great boys. I have a home. I have a car. Yes, this sucks. Yes, this is going to hurt a lot of people. Yes, I could have done better, but in the grand scheme of things, there's a lot of people in life that don't have what I have right now, and I'm feeling sorry for myself. Slap yourself across the head, pick yourself back up. Figure out what you did wrong, figure out what you could have done better and get to work.” It's that perspective view of things that led me to this power of gratitude area which was, “This is really bad but not insurmountable.”
You get to the other side of it and you're like, “In the grand scheme of things, that was a blip on the radar.” I needed that to help me get to this area. You have a whole different positivity perspective on this big failure. I would've never celebrated failure before. Now I'm like, “Yeah, this is great.” I learned a lot from that opportunity experience. I don't want to fail again, don't get me wrong, but I know how to overcome that with the power of gratitude. I appreciate you sharing that. That's great.
Moving On After A Business Setback
John, how long did that take for you? I apologize. I'm sure you talked about it in the book, but how long did it take for you to let it sink in and maybe give a little bit of a mourning period to this business that you'd given your whole life to and all your energy and then say, “Okay, now I’ve got to pull up my socks here. Let's get going?”
I took a year's sabbatical from operating any business. I did have another business venture that I was partnered in and to focused a little bit on that. I took a year and said, “I'm not going to take any other role or operating job or do anything. I just really need this time to figure this out.” I was thankfully able to do that. I'd say it probably took me a good six months to be like, “Even though I'm still on this thing, I'm antsy. I'm ready to get going again.” I did take that time, like just a lot of self-reflection. What that self-reflection was like, I think it's relevant, and this applies again to salespeople and entrepreneurs, the same.
I was running so fast in building this business, and the business was growing so fast that at the end of it, when I lost it all, I asked myself, “What was I doing that for?” I’ve always been a very goal-oriented person. I had goals as an individual and goals as a business person, but they weren't aligned. My goals were short-term goals. One of the biggest things I came in that moment of perspective and gratitude is I said, “I'm going to design a 30-year life plan. What's the one thing I want to achieve in my life? What is the one thing? Thirty years from now, where do I want to be? How old am I going to be? What do I want my life to look like? That's a long time from now. Let me back backtrack. Where do I want to be in fifteen years? Where do I want to be in five years? Where do I want to be next year?” Got it. Now, I got a life plan. Now let me go do in business that will align to my life plan.
Why did I want to grow a company so fast and bring on equity and then lose my equity and then lose control of business? It was because I was chasing something. What was I chasing? It had nothing to do with my life plan. Now everything I do aligns to what I'm trying to achieve in my life, and I find a lot more symmetry. I find myself in the zone of doing things I'm passionate about, I know I can be the best in the world at, and it drives my economic engine. That is that hedgehog concept from Jim Collins, which is like, that's where you need to be. That intersection of the area. To me, if you're a salesperson, it's the same thing. Make sure you know what you're trying to achieve, and it's not just the commission check at the end of the month. What are ultimately trying to achieve in life, and then align your sales objectives to match that.
Tying back to the why, so helpful. Nice for you to bring out, by the way, the Venn diagrams I haven't seen since the finite math days at university, so it was nice to get scared by those again. Pulling those back out and saying, “Let's connect why we're doing this,” because now when I'm jumping outside my comfort zone on a regular basis, I actually understand why. By definition, it's never going to feel great jumping outside a comfort zone because you're outside your comfort zone. It's almost like the gang from Peloton are so good at coaching you on, you start to get slightly more comfortable being uncomfortable.
“I know this is not going to kill me. My heart rate's up, I'm breathing heavy, but I'm going to be okay.” I think it's such an important thing, and you talk about the true North concept in the book, but just aligning. The other thing I just love is that I forgot who you referenced in the quote in the book, but it said, “People overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” That quote stuck with me from your book, and I think it's just such a good thing to see sometimes that big picture is very helpful to get us through some of those challenges along the way, like having that big picture.
I love the comment on that one. That was Bill Gates that made that quote. I found it to be so true. We live in this microcosm of, “What is my goal this year? How much am I trying to earn this year? What am I trying to do this year in my building?” Whatever it may be. Mark, I started thinking about it, and with the advances in AI and technology and everything else, you're either going to have a hardware or software problem in your body, and both of them are probably going to be able to be fixed.
You start looking out on the horizon and you're like, “In 30 years from now? That seems like forever from now.” When you have a long-term view horizon, you can actually start being a little more strategic on what you're doing, how you're doing it, and you can view some of these, “I didn't get the sale yesterday,” as not that big of a deal. You're still heading in the same direction.
That real long-term perspective and view on things meant a lot. I like to ask entrepreneurs all the time, “Do you have a life plan?” End of story. The answer is, 9 out of 10 times, no. Most people do not have a life plan, and when they start thinking about it, they start thinking about the next couple of years. I go, “No. Let's start with the end in mind. What are you ultimately trying to do long-term?” It's such a visionary thing for an individual to do to look long-term what they're trying to do, and then start marching towards there in their careers.
All of these things, by the way, team, this is why John's book is so valuable, The $100 Million Journey. I should have picked this book up years ago when we started In The Funnel. That would've been very helpful at that point in time. It's been a super helpful read now. We're at that stage of trying to get out of the lifestyle business, but frankly, John and team, we've got to do more thinking about that life plan and why because it is a pretty good lifestyle business and we enjoy this.
The $100M Journey: Your Guide to Growing the Business of Your Dreams without Going off the Cliff
You start to think about, “Am I trying to get to that next level just because I want a better answer when somebody says, ‘How many employees do you have and I want an impressive answer of 75 or am I trying to get to that next stage because it does something for me, Donna, our family, everybody we love and the sales community?’”
Maintaining Focus On Helping Clients And Achieving Success
One of the things that's a joy for us now is the contribution back into professional salespeople. That's why we run this show. We're actually trying to improve the lives of professional salespeople, and if they know what to do, things get a lot easier and their lives improve. John, I'm going to be very cautious of your time, but one more question before we wrap up here a little bit. Our topic, the customer, the client, we've talked a lot about what we do for us and our businesses, and whether it's salespeople or entrepreneurs, but everything starts with that focus on helping somebody else achieve this better outcome in the future, whatever that might be. Share with us a few thoughts about, whether we're entrepreneurs or salespeople, what we do to just maintain and clarify that intense focus on helping someone else and how that plays into our success model.
I think as an entrepreneur, and it plays as we've talking about this whole conversation as sales as well, is what does success look like for you? If you're hiring somebody, what does success look like for you in coming to work here for our business? If you're talking to a customer, what does success look like for you? If you're talking to a vendor, what does success look like for you, being a supplier, and working with us? To me, that one question never gets asked. For example, if a sales manager's talking to a sales representative, “What is the one thing I can do to be a better leader or mentor to you? They never ask that question. They just say, “Where are your numbers? What's going on?”
What does success look like? To me, it is not just something you ask and you never revisit. It's you ask, you document, and you celebrate the achievement of it. To me, that builds customers for life, that builds team members for life, that builds relationships for life because at the end of the day, the core to relationships are experiences over time. The more positive those relationships are over time, the delivery of what the success looks like over and over again. That's how you build long-term sustainable customers, employees, team members of the likes. To me, that one question isn't asked enough, it's not brought up enough, it's not celebrated enough, I think that is the key to long-term customer relationships.
It's so important. A friend of ours, Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach, has something called R Factor question he Loves, which is, and I’ll paraphrase it, but if we're going to have this conversation a year from now on November 8th, 2025, what needs to happen, John, for you to be blissfully happy, personally and professionally with where you're at? It is just such a well-thought-out question. It's all about them. Back to Dale Carnegie. You can make more friends in 2 months by being interested in somebody else than you can in 2 years by trying to get them interested in you. People haven't changed in this period of time. By the way, it's more fun, the whole, “Who wants to pitch and talk about me?” I want to learn about you. That's why something like this show is so much fun.
John, this has been amazing. Team, by the way, the book we've been discussing is The $100 Million Journey: Your Guide to Growing the Business of Your Dreams Without Going Off A Cliff. By the way, it's a gorgeous book. One of the things that I picked up a couple of books, including The ONE Thing, there's many books in here you reference I haven't read. I’ve already ordered The ONE Thing on Amazon, so thank you for that. How do people learn more about you, John? After reading this, they're going to want to engage with you. What's the best way to do that?
Yeah, I think LinkedIn. John St. Pierre on LinkedIn. You connect me there. My website is 100mjourney.com. You connect me there as well. Certainly, I would love to talk to anybody and give free consultation calls to any business owner, entrepreneur, or sales rep for that matter to help them on their journey.
Thank you, John. Thank you so much for joining. What a pleasure meeting you. Team, thank you so much for joining the show. If you like this discussion, please like and subscribe to the show because that's actually how we get great guests like John, when you like and subscribe. One other favor, we know we're not perfect at running a show, and your feedback really matters to us. Please share your constructive criticism and great ideas for the show with me, MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That's my personal email, team, and I check and respond to every piece of feedback we get. Let us know what to do, and we love constructive criticism. Don't pull your punches, and thank you for doing so. John, thanks again. Team, we're going to see you next time.
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About John St. Pierre
John St. Pierre is an entrepreneurial strategist, business growth advisor, and co-host of the Entrepreneurs United Podcast with over 25 years of experience in co-founding and growing successful businesses across various industries.
He’s also the author of "The $100M Journey: Your Guide To Growing The Business Of Your Dreams Without Going Off The Cliff!", a book that shares his proven strategies and insights on how to scale a business while avoiding costly pitfalls.
John’s passion is to help ambitious entrepreneurs achieve their dreams and create lasting value. By providing guidance on protecting and growing their equity, reinvesting strategically, fostering a culture of intrapreneurship, or moving from CEO to Chairperson.
John is currently the majority owner and chairperson of Rhombus Group, a private holding company formed in 2003 comprising several small businesses.
