Andrew: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of mixergy.com home of the ambitious upstart. Home of in-depth interviews with real entrepreneurs where we talk about the details of how they built their businesses and their struggles and specifics about what they did to grow their companies.
Let me ask you this though, what is the most amount of debt that you’ve ever had? Today’s guest said that he had hundreds of thousands of dollars on his back and he started to get down about it and life was challenging. Then he changed his mindset and he made a list. I’ll tell you more about that list later. Those two things allowed him to turn his life around and to build a successful company that I invited him here to talk about. His name is Scott Oldford.
He is the founder of Infinitus, a company that helps connect people to achieve growth. Basically what he does is, he brings experts in marketing strategy and technology to companies that need them. He recently published a book called Connections that Count, it’s all about the power of connecting with people instead of just sleazy networking with them. I’ll talk to him about that too.
This whole conversation is sponsored by Toptal. If you need a developer, you can go out and start out hunting for them and you know how tough that is. You can go to Toptal and tap into their network of proven developers, people they’ve tested, people who are at the top 3% among their peers, top 3%. Toptal would vet them, Toptal would research them, Toptal would make sure that the developers that they bring to you are in alignment with the way that you work.
With your cultural differences, everyone has a different culture. They will find developers that fit perfectly for you. You can interview one or two people I found that just interviewing one or two from their list is perfect because they screen them so well. You can hire them to work full-time, part-time or even just a few extra hours if that’s what your team needs. If you need a developer go to toptal.com, T-O-P-T-A-L.com.
Hey Scott.
Scott: How are you doing brother?
Andrew: Hey. You’re a sales man, you’re a podcaster, you had me do that spot for Toptal. How did I do?
Scott: I think that was great. You made me interested in it. If I wasn’t doing this podcast right now, I’d be typing in to see what that was all about. I think that was great.
Andrew: All right cool. How much debt did you have?
Scott: At the very top amount $726,000. It was a considerable chunk of money that was split between $450,000 that was actually secured against my parents’ house. It’s not really the thing that you want to be doing. And the other part was of course supplier debts. It was quite interesting…
Andrew: What was the other part?
Scott: It was supplier debts so other people that were not banks that I owed money to.
Andrew: How much of it have you paid so far?
Scott: The bank debt is around $100,000 right now and the supplier debt is down below $15,000.
Andrew: And you can’t just negotiate that supplier debt away?
Scott: That was definitely part of it. That was definitely the last year and a half of my life as well as of course reducing the bank debt. But it was definitely a lot of uncomfortable times and a lot of times of friends that maybe aren’t as good friends during that process. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to get out of that.
Andrew: Wait what do you mean? You discovered people who aren’t really your friends who are around when you’re at the height? Give me an example.
Scott: Well I’ll definitely say that but for example when you are, you know this just as well as me and I’d say a lot of people listening as well. When you’re doing well everybody wants to be around you. When you’re not doing so well and things aren’t looking so bright that doesn’t really happen. They probably think…
Andrew: Give me a specific. Who’s one person, you don’t have to name, in fact I’d rather you not name a name, just what were they like at the height and what were they like afterwards?
Scott: At the height they talk every single day, they allowed money to be… they actually gave me money, secured money for a company. Things that at the time because over past six years…
Andrew: This is one person who gave you money at the height?
Scott: Yeah, totally. I was going into a specific type of business and they secured $150,000 and it was a small investment, this type of thing.
Andrew: And at the low?
Scott: Yeah. And at the low I couldn’t reach them, still owed them the money. I just couldn’t… they literally just kind of cut off communication. What’s really funny is I paid back all of that money but the very interesting thing is now about things are going in the other direction again, during Christmas he gave me a call after not talking to me for I think about two years. That was a very interesting experience.
Andrew: Did you ask him, “Where were you at this whole period when I was going through my tough time?”
Scott: Not yet.
Andrew: Do you want me to do it? I have a phone right now. I’ll call him up.
Scott: I would but I wouldn’t. He’s a pretty private guy. I’m waiting to get in person with him to have that conversation because I feel like it’s an in-person conversation not a phone conversation. But it was…
Andrew: Here’s the thing that gets me. You’re a guy who of course you’re on a high, this must have taken you by surprise because you’re… even as a kid when you were seven years old. Your dad gave you chickens. What did you do with the chickens?
Scott: I ended up going from 50 chickens to 100 chickens to 100 chickens plus. I went to senior homes so I had less clients that bought more eggs. It was…
Andrew: You took the chickens… they didn’t stop selling?
Scott: Yeah, the chickens’ eggs. Then at a certain point you sort of realize that you can’t scale that type of business. I had a little bit of money, a lot of money for eight or nine year old.
Andrew: But before you go beyond that…
Scott: Yeah.
Andrew: Did he give you these chickens with the idea that you would sell them or did you just turn…?
Scott: No, not at all.
Andrew: He just said, “Hey, here’s some chickens as pets. I won’t get you a dog but I’ll get you a couple of cluckers?”
Scott: So we just moved to an acreage from another house. A lot of acres of land and so we just bought these chickens. Honestly I think it was on a whim to be completely honest. I don’t believe it was planned. There were more eggs than we could eat. Just think about it; 36 hens, they lay probably about 24, 28 eggs a day. That’s a lot of eggs to be eaten per day.
Andrew: Yeah.
Scott: I ended up selling them to friends, neighbors, everything else. And then the next year I went back and bought more hens and the year after that I bought more hens. Then I quit.
Andrew: You started going door to door to sell more eggs?
Scott: At first it was friends’ families then it was door to door. And then that was too much work so what I did is I got the three or four senior homes to buy all my eggs. And I would just do two deliveries a week.
Andrew: Where did you learn how to sell like that?
Scott: I have absolutely no idea. There’s no real entrepreneurs in my family. For the most part my family’s had fairly regular jobs in government, corporation, that type of stuff. I think that there’s definitely in every single person, there’s that sale part in them. There is that entrepreneur in them, there is that opportunity. And I always say that I don’t really feel like an entrepreneur, I feel like an opportunist because I see opportunity and I go after it and if it fails, it’s “All right, let’s go to the next thing.” And that’s really essentially what I did.
Andrew: I see. Now I can see too that if you’re a kid, you’re not even 10 years old, I think you were 7 when he first gave you those chickens, you were already turning them into money. You must think, “I’ve got what it takes. Some people have it, some people don’t. I’m clearly a natural and I could see how that makes things harder later on.” But during this period you were also overweight or maybe a little bit afterwards, right? Did I just lose you?
Scott: Yeah.
Andrew: So you are in your teens, you are overweight. How much did you weigh?
Scott: By the time I was 14 I was 360 pounds in and around that area. My entire teenage life was sat behind a computer up until a point of around 16. The other crazy thing is, Andrew, I didn’t know that this was not normal.
Andrew: You weren’t down about it. You just thought, “Hey, that’s the way it is.
Scott: Yeah, exactly. I had no idea. The first day that I realized, I walked into a program in Newfoundland Labrador, called the Youth Ventures, it’s a great program. Its government supported. I essentially told them what I was doing, which at the time that program was all around the world. We’ll talk about that in a minute.
But in doing that they were like… they took me, I was the poster child for Youth Ventures over the next two or three years. I won so many different awards on so many different media channels and all of these different types of things.
It was a very good and bad experience at the same time. It created a very egotistical Scott Oldford, a very unhumble Scott Oldford. Quite honestly, if you give a 16-year-old that much attention, and telling him that you’re great, and that you can’t fail and all these different types of things, its probably going to start…
Andrew: It seems like today everyone tells every kid, “You’re the greatest ever and everything you do is perfect.” What’s an example of how somebody really flattered you and you felt on top of the world as a kid.
Scott: Everything from being on every single poster for entrepreneurship and…
Andrew: I see. So your friends would walk down the streets and see a poster of you.
Scott: Yeah. There was a point, I remember very specifically, there was a point when I was 19 which is a legal age in Newfoundland, actually going to the bar and having to use a fake name because someone would Google me and see all these different articles and all these types of things.
Probably a bit stupid, I was probably a bit into myself at that point. But in saying that, it was so detrimental not just to myself but to the fact that I didn’t think I could fail. Because up to that point I didn’t.
Andrew: I see. Give me an example of your arrogance then.
Scott: All I will say is, all you have to do is look at a video of when I was 18 years old, the way I talked. I just look at it and just the way I looked at the world, the way that I looked at, “You must serve me because I am great.” Instead of, “I’m serving you because this is what my own destiny is and whatever the universe brings back to me that’s fine.”
It took a while for that mindset to develop. And so what ended up happening is, you had this arrogant, egotistical kid that I didn’t like myself. I’d wake up in the morning and was like… I felt like I had to be this person that the media portrayed, that everybody else portrayed and not actually me.
Andrew: You had to be the person who knows everything about business, so that you can speak about business and be the person worthy of being on the posters.
Scott: Yeah. There’s motivational guy, there’s this inspiration guy. At this point, I felt like a fraud because it was just so easy for what I was in. It didn’t feel like it was difficult. There were all these people… and I have a learning disability and so you’d take the weight factor, the learning disability, and add it with the business story and there’s this great story that gets twisted.
Andrew: And you’re feeling on the inside, “I’m not worthy of all of this. They’re pushing me out there to do it. I have to pretend to do it but that’s not really me. I’m the guy who can’t even read, I’m the guy who’s overweight.” I see.
Scott: Yeah, exactly. I was getting top 20 under 20, top innovator in Canada, all these different awards, Small Business of the Year. It was insane and it ended up just twisting me into this, I’ll say monster that hated waking up in the morning and I completely lost my passion for anything that I was doing.
Andrew: And still at that point you were building a business as you said earlier? What was this new post chicken business?
Scott: Prior to that when I was about 10 or 11, a little bit before that I started programming. I just loved it. I was in front of the computer and I feel like most kids 9, 10 years old that have a computer nowadays, have some level of programming or at least they are a lot easier to get into that now.
By the time I was 12, I start getting clients and I start hiring other programmers all over the world to essentially do that work. This was before oDesk and Elance and all these different types of things. This was actual other people that were, for the most part under 25 that programmed for passion instead of for money. I capitalized on that very well by knowing what that person was interested in and pairing projects and clients to what they wanted to do.
Andrew: How would you find these people?
Scott: It would be very much on online forms, on IRC, on different online venues. There wasn’t any job board, there wasn’t any of these types of things…
Andrew: And you just get to know them and then you’d give them work. Where did you get the jobs?
Scott: From the job perspective, I was very lucky in seeing some online jobs at the early days where there were still people posting lucrative online jobs. We landed a couple of big clients, big at the time, big when I was 11 or 12, where the first project was 1,200 bucks. That was pretty cool. But it went from there to making hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly with these different clients and then compare…
Andrew: Hundreds of thousands of dollars before you were 20 years old?
Scott: Definitely, it was insane. I have to say I look back at it and I feel like, I wish it was that easy now. But back then it was a lot easier to be able to capitalize on it because you didn’t have so much competition.
Andrew: Yeah, you know what? I remember those early days. There was a period there I just went through my old paperwork and found a chart from when I was maybe 21, where I did $10,000 a day. I don’t know, I’m sorry it was…
Scott: You had a greeting card company, right? Was that…?
Andrew: Yeah, this is even before that. It was, I think it might have been 1,000 bucks a day. It was so much money to come in at that point and there was no competition.
Scott: I don’t know about you but I didn’t even know the difference. I literally did not know the difference. Money would just keep on coming in PayPal and I just put it into the bank account. My parents were supportive. They had no idea where the money was really coming from but up until the point when I was 16, I myself just thought it was a normal thing to do. And then…
Andrew: How much money did you have? What did you have at the most at the height, excuse me?
Scott: The height was high six, high seven figures.
Andrew: Really? So before you were 20 you had over a million dollars in the bank just sitting there?
Scott: Essentially from an asset perspective it wasn’t… you know how it works. From an asset perspective, it wasn’t a million dollars sitting in the bank, per se. But what it did allow me to do, which goes to my fatal mistake, was leverage the money that I did have in order to be able to take an enormous amount of debt on with that actual money.
Andrew: And where would that money go? What were you investing your money in and then the debt money in?
Scott: Up until the point that I was 18, I was consistently investing in different other companies, probably up until the point where I was about 20. I also was living like a millionaire at this point. My food bills per month were $10, $15,000 by the time I was 19, 20 years old.
Andrew: How were you spending that kind of… keep going and then I want to found out what you did for $10, $15,000 on food. So food was 10, 15. What else?
Scott: I was doing a lot of traveling within North America, not outside of North America, which I’m so stupid. I look back and I really wish that I could have actually went around the world because I could have. Then it was investing it. I had my name on a bunch of different incorporation documents. I completely over extended myself.
Andrew: What are some of these companies?
Scott: These were like start-ups. I’m talking below the seed amount. The low…
Andrew: Some friends would have an idea?
Scott: Some friend had a cool idea or I had a cool idea and I got somebody else to run it. I learned a lot that…
Andrew: What’s the worst of these ideas? Jeff Bezo recently said that one of his worst was Cosmo. He invested in that delivery service back in the ’90s or early 2000s.
Scott: I would say that my… I don’t if it was my worst, but worst that I feel it was. I invested about $50,000 in a supplement company. The problem was I didn’t have the right partner. Second is, I was an idiot, meaning I needed to sell something that wasn’t more than $50 a widget.
I’m not good at that type of sale. I’m good at something that… okay it’s a $50,000 project or quarter million dollar project or whatever it may be. That was literally $50,000 and I’m pretty sure I’m still storing some of that protein supplement in my parents’ house.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: I literally bought $50,000 supply for me and my partner because that’s how much we sold. I have to say that was the worst investment I ever made when it comes to having no return and nothing to show for it.
Andrew: What year was this?
Scott: It would have been 2010.
Andrew: All right. What kind of great food do you get when you’re spending over 10,000 a month?
Scott: It’s really easy to do. I never ate home, ever. From the time I was 19, 20, 21, those 3 years probably even 18, I ate out breakfast, it’s a steak. I’m a big steak fan. Ate out lunch, ate out supper and probably ate at the end of the day. I’m talking $150 steak dinners with drinks and everything else and then paying for friends and then paying for everyone kind of around.
I would do that literally every single day. I remember at one point the place where I was staying for six months because I was living in a hotel for about six months, I didn’t even make food. I didn’t have the ability to make food. I would just eat out every single day and it wasn’t Subway for five bucks. It was lunch is $80, supper $250, whatever it may be. If I have friends with me, I’m paying for them. I was just an idiot and just slowly wasted money away.
Andrew: Was it partially insecurity that you wanted people to like you and you felt that if you’re spending all this money on food…
Scott: Definitely.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: I have a very high need right to this day. I didn’t really come to this conclusion until I was part of a mastermind back in September. I came to the conclusion then of something that I really hid from myself for a long time is that I want to be liked. I’ve always had a problem.
The last six months, eight months, I’d say the biggest thing that’s changed about me is the ability to be transparent and okay, with being vulnerable, and being okay with knowing that I’m not perfect. I’ve always had a want to be liked and to be kind of the cool kid. And it probably comes from partially being the fat kid and not really being liked outside of… at the time where I was the poster kid like when I was 16 I was like the coolest guy in school because I had the company and everything else and that’s…
Andrew: Can you see on Skype? I know you’ve shut down things but tell me if this is this photo that I found online?
Scott: That is me.
Andrew: That is you?
Scott: Yeah, that was me then.
Andrew: I see a heavy kid and surrounded looks like by awards.
Scott: That’s actually probably one of my lower… that’s actually I’ll say that after the show one of my pictures is my biggest part. That was actually, I had a bit of weight going there. But I essentially went through the process of… I went from about 340 to 360 somewhere in that range. And in a year and a half I went down to 169 pounds.
Andrew: This is after the whole mindset shift that we’ll talk about in a moment?
Scott: This is before.
Andrew: Before, okay.
Scott: Before, yeah. Honestly, I’ll be completely honest with you. You can, and I haven’t gone on other podcast to say this, as much as it was about my health, my mother had a heart attack when I was 14, that didn’t change anything for me. I didn’t care, to be completely honest. What really changed was two things.
A, I was 18 years old and the 360 guy isn’t going to be getting many women any time soon unless money was involved and I don’t want to attract myself to those types of people.
Second, I know in business that looks and persuasion and attraction and all these types of things are really what drive business, because emotions drive business. People make emotional decisions, every CEO, every person of a company. How much logic are they using? I don’t really know but there’s a lot more emotion in it.
If I walk into an office and I’m 360 pounds what does that say to that other person how I take care of business, how I take care of myself and all these different types of things. Honestly that’s the two things that motivated me. I had an amazing personal trainer that was ex-military that trained me every single day for about a year and a half.
Andrew: That’s what turned it around. What about the business? How did the business go down? You had the ability to sell companies. In fact, let’s talk about how you got companies. One of the things you did was… is it GolfWRX?
Scott: Golf W-R-X, yeah. That was one of my very first golfwrx.com. They were one of my very first clients. We’ve built pretty much everything that you see there. We transition them out of being kind of… it was essentially… I either could have taken the entire company to just servicing that client, back in 2013, 2012, 2013, and we transitioned to them having an internal team.
But they started in 2003 or 2005 one of those years, not quite certain. That was the very first client we started when they had nine members on their forum and they do about 2 or 3 million unique a month now on their website.
Andrew: And they became your customer? How did you get them as a customer?
Scott: They wanted a buy, sell trade reputation feedback system kind of like buy and sell… Not buy and sell, eBay has.
Andrew: I see. If I had to sell or buy a golf equipment, if I buy it I want to know that the person whom I buying from has a good reputation and you need it to build that for them. How did you find them though?
Scott: They posted on an online forum for the specific type of software that they were using. They were at the time completely clueless in terms of online marketing, online, any of this type of stuff. One guy owned a couple of country clubs and the other guy was an administrator at San Francisco Bay Hospital. Obviously their life has changed drastically since this as it’s really become a money maker for them.
Andrew: Okay. So you built this whole thing out for them. How much money was that worth to you?
Scott: I’ve never tallied up how much money that’s worth, but on a yearly basis it had to be at least a quarter to half a million dollars per year. It was a sizable amount. I’ve learned a lot with that client. That client also allowed me to make a lot of mistakes that probably most clients wouldn’t let me make mistakes.
What I mean, because I know the next question is “what’s a mistake,” is for example being able to leverage teams and deadlines and understanding how to set deadlines, and all these different types of things that a 12, 13-year-old didn’t really understand. They really, really, really allowed me to do that. I don’t think they knew what my age was until probably three or four years later.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: It was like at the early days I gave them a great price because I mean, why not? But then as we both grew it became more and more sustainable from a financial position. But what it did more than anything else, it allowed me to have the finances to be able to solve problems with money if there was one for other clients.
It allowed me to have a portfolio item that was big, that allowed me to get other clients. For example, I’ll just give you an example, like if someone wasn’t happy and they paid $20,000 for a project back when I was 14, 15 years old, I would literally just PayPal the money back to them and see you later type of thing.
Andrew: And your expenses were covered by GolfWRX’s income to you. The revenue you got from them. I see. That also causes problems for the business, spending causes problems. What was the ultimate downfall of the business though?
Scott: I diverted my attention to something else. Outside of the landscape changing a little bit and it’s pretty easy to go on Elance or oDesk and find a program or your sponsor, to find a programmer. The landscape changed a little bit. I still think we could have survived.
But I had this brilliant idea. I’ll just put it out there because I’ll never return to the idea. I promised myself I’ll never return to the idea. So I have the idea of putting advertising on pedestrian cars. Advertising on the sides with the LED display in the back that you could see on one side and then you’d see advertising on the other side equipped with Wi-Fi, 3DP chip, all these different things.
That’s what I poured my money into, that’s what I poured my time into. At one time I had 14 people working full-time in an office working on that. Then I had some partner problems and those partner problems basically ensured that I had to go to the people that were going to invest in the company and say, “Hey, listen this is the situation. I think I’m going to have to shut this down because it’s going to be crippling to what we’re doing.” This was when I was 19, 20, 2010.
Andrew: The connection just stalled out. We’ll give it a moment for Scott to reconnect. There we go. Sorry, we just lost our connection.
Scott: Sorry.
Andrew: I hear the idea and I heard about the partner problems. And then what happened?
Scott: Yes, so I had this partner problems and I had all these employees, had all these costs. We were running a pretty high rate. We were just about to launch, just about to get investment and then, essentially my partner had [inaudible 00:28:32] pulled on him for his main business and he had to come up with millions of dollars [inaudible 00:28:38] in order to buy back his stake in his own business.
And that kind of put him a little bit off the rails, which is understandable. If that happened to me, it was his family business, all these different types of things. If that happened to me I would also go off the rails and probably make decisions that I wouldn’t in a normal circumstance. That kind of closed the book on that business. I still think it’s a great business. And then I was like, “I wonder if I cannot fire all these employees.” Because this is the first time I actually had employees in an actual office and I was…
Andrew: Again the connection, we’ll give it another moment. Let’s see. There we go. So you were saying you didn’t want to fire them, and now that the connection’s back, and you said what else could you do with them?
Scott: Essentially I was like, “Let’s go back to the old concept that I had. Let’s go back to having clients and programming clients and that type of thing, keeping in mind my expenses per month of about $120,000 and my revenue never got above $175,000 a month for the entire year that I tried it. I just bled, bled, led, and bled which ended up putting me into debt.
Andrew: And that’s how you took out a mortgage on your parents’ house to keep this going?
Scott: Yeah, you got it. And then probably the worst part of all this is I merged with another company because I was just trying to save my ass and in trying to save my ass I essentially gave up my freedom and I gave up what I was doing. I gave up my entrepreneurship or my opportunistic self-culture and it was the worst year of my life.
I start gaining weight again, I start going to a world of… a little bit of depression of working 9 to 5, I was just playing video games all day. Honestly I was miserable. I didn’t even understand I was miserable at the time and I did that for a year.
Andrew: When you say depression, I understand escaping from the world by playing video games. But that doesn’t sound like depression. Give me an example that shows how depressed you were.
Scott: Honestly I don’t want… I’ll say maybe depression is a little bit of a high word for it. I don’t want to compare it to some people that I know, that have been going through depression and that type of thing. But I’ll say this, when you wake up every single morning and I think there’s probably a lot of people out there that feels like this.
If you’re looking in the mirror every single morning and if you’re not getting towards your destiny or what you feel your destiny is and rather you’re going away from it. You look in the mirror every single morning and you can honestly say that, “Today I’m not going to do anything meaningful. I’m not going to get any closer to my goals.” And you have a lot of those mornings. This comes with Steve Jobs and you have a lot of those mornings. That slowly…
Andrew: Again with the connection. But we we’ll wait for it to connect again. What’s happening is for some reason your computer, our connection somewhere is pausing. That’s fine. So you’re saying a lot of those mornings then what?
Scott: So if you have a lot of those mornings, you just go into this downward spiral of not having freedom, of not having what you want in life.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: And I know that I’m not employable and I know most entrepreneurs aren’t employed. If you are employed right now and you’re listening to this and at the end of the day you’re like, “There’s no point.” If you feel like, “If I die tomorrow there’ll be no point, there’ll be nothing that I left.” I think you’ve got to find that purpose. I didn’t have a purpose for a year and a half or so.
Andrew: I see. Where are you now by the way.
Scott: I’m in Hawaii.
Andrew: You’re in Hawaii?
Scott: Yeah.
Andrew: What are you doing in Hawaii?
Scott: I’m here for Christmas. Came down for a month and I did some planning for 2015 with my second-in-command and same time I took about two weeks off which was absolutely wonderful.
Andrew: I bet. I see the downward spiral and then you did something that changed your mindset, that changed everything. What did you do?
Scott: Sorry.
Andrew: Pause again, that’s okay. What did you do to change your mindset?
Scott: When I left the company I was at what I just talked about, I went to this three day retreat with a bunch of other young entrepreneurs. They were all my age and they were doing like crazy things. I was just like, I looked back at my past and I had this amazing past. I had this amazing ability to make money and go towards my dreams and my goals and my destiny. And I was just flushing it down the toilet.
That was in Toronto. I came to Newfoundland. Two days later I packed up everything in my office, I left. I was to my partner at the time, “Listen I can’t do this. I don’t care what it is.” At the time I maxed debt. I had $600 in my bank account and a credit card that had $10,000 worth of living on it. And literally that was the extent of how much money. In October 2013 I launched Infinitus.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: We were able to in 2014 do almost a million dollars in revenue. All I can say is the mindset change came a couple months after I left when I was starting to go down the path that I wanted and I had that…
Andrew: Let me understand. It was you leaving because you saw all these other people who were living a life that they wanted. You realized, “I used to be that way. I’m not that way now; I’m not going to put up with it. I don’t care that I have debt anymore. I’m not going to let that stop me. I’m going to get out of here and then I’ll figure out the next step.” So you left the job with debt and no money coming in, living in your parents’ house at the time?
Scott: No, I had sold everything I owned and I got about $12,000.
Andrew: Okay. So you had another 12,000 that you can use and you say, “12,000 plus 600 in the bank before, plus $10,000 in credit cards, that gives me some kind of runway. I might consider this my investment in myself and I’m going to figure out the next step.” You sat down and you started making a list for yourself, correct?
Scott: Yeah. I essentially started at the purpose and the values of what I wanted in life. I started at the values of what I wanted in Infinitus. I started at the business model that I actually had years ago which were bringing experts together across the world to help people.
At the time it was technology but then I saw technology as a commodity. Now where you’re really valuable; strategy. Where you’re really valuable; marketing at a very high level. I found the people, I knew a lot of people. My network was good, I’m not going to lie on that.
It wasn’t like I was starting with no network but I had a great network and I had some really good people around me. I had some people that still believed in me, still no idea of what I…
Andrew: I see. Before we get into the strategy of what you did with it, you made a list of the purpose that you wanted for the business? What was that?
Scott: I started, I remember it was 1:00 in the morning, and I started a circle. In the inside were my core values. On the outside were… so it’s 6 values inside, 12 on the inside and 18 for what I wanted. Essentially I created all the values and the things that I wanted this to be. I was very vague at the time. And then one of the things…
Andrew: What are some of the vague ones if you remember?
Scott: It would have been… I actually have it. I can send it to you after the interview, I actually have it.
Andrew: Good.
Scott: I’ll send it to you after the interview so you can put it in the show notes. One word came to mind when all these words got added together, “limitless.” I was like, “I can’t really name a company Limitless. That’s it. That’s a bit weird.” So I start going to Google translate and that was like… the Latin word for limitless is infinitus.
Then I did the search, no one had it, all good. About 2:30 in the morning, I decided that that would be the company name. This is what it stood for. It changed really quickly. I didn’t intend for it to do as well as it did and what I mean by that is because the years before, like the year I was at the company that I hated, we only did like $220, $250,000 in revenue; barely enough to even really get by.
I set my goal at 320, 380 somewhere around there and I did double that in that time period.
Andrew: In the period that you wrote it down for? You also said to yourself, “I want to be loved.” You added that, you wrote down, “I want to give people a reason to care about me. I want to learn as much as I can. I want to be king,” meaning serve people.
How did making this list help out? That seems like a very self helping, go to a seminar, do it and have nothing changed in your life type of thing to do. I see you’re taking your glasses off as I say I’m saying this. It’s not your experience at all with it.
Scott: Yeah. That list, and I just wrote a new one literally yesterday because I accomplished everything in that list. In that list I had “Do a million in revenue,” I had, “Be a king serve my people,” that’s something I never really did, to serve myself which we all know, kings don’t serve themselves.
The other biggest thing is that when I looked around, some people maybe it really doesn’t matter but when I looked around I said, “How many people would show up to my funeral?” It wasn’t very many. I had a lot of people that I knew, I had a big network but I wasn’t really connected to anyone.
If I said how many people loved me, it was probably my immediate family and my fiance. I wanted more than that. I wanted love and I wanted a connection. Most people settle for connection. I wanted the next thing and I didn’t have both at the time. So I set out on this journey of essentially meeting with people, lunches, dinners, group lunches, group dinners, meeting with people right across North America, having just these experiences and spending a ton of money and just meeting new people.
Andrew: You were spending money to take people to dinner again and to lunch?
Scott: Yes. I spent probably around 40,000, I’ll know in a few weeks how much it actually was.
Andrew: When you tally up your 2014 expenses?
Scott: Yeah.
Andrew: But the idea was this, you said, “If I’m going to get customers. I can’t go out and buy Google Ads for these kinds of customers. They’re too expensive. It’s too much high touch. How do I get them to come to me? Well they’re not going to come to my office. I’m going to organize these lunches where they want to meet each other and through that they’ll get to know me. And through that connection, some businesses might come to me and a lot will come to my other attendees too.
Scott: The crazy thing is the first month I did it; I did a bunch in the first month. First month I didn’t even think about it as a business development thing. I just thought of it as find people that I could like, that people I could surround myself with because I had lots of mentors that I talk to every three months and everything else. But I really didn’t have a lot of friends.
Then I was at a table and a quarter of a million dollar angel investment deal got hand shook. That quarter of a million dollar investment deal ended up in a client of mine from that investment deal because they needed their marketing strategy technology done. Then it was just the light bulb of, “This could probably benefit me in so many ways, and benefit other people in so many ways.”
And it ended up, in the past six or seven months, I’ve done almost 100 of this. I’m actually… I’m in Hawaii. I’m doing one this evening with eight brilliant people. And it’s contributed half of my revenue in 2014 which is about half a million dollars in revenue directly related.
Andrew: What is the other half come from?
Scott: It comes from a pre-existing relationships for the most part. We’re really referral based. We don’t do Google Ads, these different types of things. It’s for the most part a very high level touch business.
Andrew: So Scott what do you say to somebody who hears this, who goes, these lists and circles. It’s not for me. The mindsets change, aren’t enough for me. All he did was he found a really good technique, a really good tactic for getting to find customers.
It’s just as easy as finding Google AdWords, maybe a little more work goes into it but that’s all he found. As long as I take that way from this conversation, life is good. I don’t need to care about his list, I don’t need to care about the circles, I don’t need to care about limit list. You don’t agree with that?
Scott: No.
Andrew: What do you say to them?
Scott: The first thing is that you need to understand that if you can connect with people, not network with people but if you can connect with people and you have a good product, I was having a conversation on this yesterday. If you have a good product, you have a good customer experience and you can connect with people, I guarantee you that you’ll have a multi-million dollar business very quickly because people do business with people that are connected. That they feel like are themselves. All businesses are emotional. It’s not logic.
Andrew: What you are saying is you needed to do work on yourself before you could connect with other people?
Scott: In all honesty before that all I was looking for was the sale or the… I would have a relationship with you because we’re doing business or whatever it would be. I look at myself in the mirror two years ago, I would think that pretty much I’m an asshole. You know what I mean?
Andrew: And that asshole as you say, or the insecure kid as I saw it in the photo that I sent over to you, that kid wasn’t comfortable with themselves and wouldn’t be able to connect with other people?
Scott: The other side of it is that because I wasn’t vulnerable and because I wasn’t authentic and okay with saying that, “You know what, things aren’t always great. Entrepreneurship is a struggle and one month I may be doing great, the other month I may not be doing great.” You connect with people because of vulnerabilities not because of you’re perfect. And that is…
Andrew: What is vulnerability? Why do vulnerabilities help people connect? Aren’t you by saying, “Hey, you know what, I’ve lost a lot of money, I was fat and I was uncomfortable with myself.” Aren’t you just sending a message to the world that you may not fully be ready to work with as opposed to saying, “You know what, I had all this figured out since I was a kid selling chickens. I had a company with tons of employees before I was even able to shave and now I’m the guy who can connect with strategy people. Come to me, I’ve always been the expert, I am the expert. I’m the connector. I’ll take care of you pay up.”
Doesn’t that sound a more confident presentation? Why do vulnerabilities do you think help you make more sales, than that presentation?
Scott: Because people know that people aren’t perfect. For example, I’ll give you a prime example, back in December we just signed, it was about $150,000 deal. It was between myself and another company and I was in the room with the owner. He was asking, “What is the strategy? What is the roll out? Give me the entire plan.”
Straight up I say, “I really don’t know what the plan is. All I know is that I can bring the right people to the table and we can do this together.” I had no idea if social media is the right idea, I didn’t know if email marketing… Yes, I have an idea of what may or may not work. But until I know your business, until we know each other and we know we’re going to get towards that, most people don’t go about that way of selling this. They say, “Okay. We’re going to do this, this, this and it’s going to cost X.” That’s not the way I approach it.
The other side is people know, they know when you’re not vulnerable and when you’re not authentic. You can feel it inside and because of that, they get that icky feeling. Saying that, you know what, I’ll be very honest, every single December including last month, December 2014, that was a horrible month for me. We lost probably $20 or $30,000. Most people would be never comfortable saying that. I know that in saying that it also creates accountability for myself so that next Christmas, it’s not like that and I plan so that Christmas isn’t like that.
Andrew: I see.
Scott: My business is not retail. There’s no money in December. It’s also about saying when you’re wrong, actually admitting when you’re wrong instead of simply trying to skirt around it or trying to exaggerate it. I’ve been the world’s best exaggerator for my entire life.
I will fudge the numbers just automatically and it’s something that the last three or four months I’ve been really trying to be really specific in numbers or if I don’t know the number, be vague because I don’t want that to create dispersity of authenticity. That’s something that I’ve really struggled with and I can… yeah.
Andrew: What’s the value of not fudging the numbers? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say, “We did a million dollars in 2014.” As opposed to “we did almost a million dollars in 2014.”
Scott: It’s just like that little bit of… I never want to create relationships that when you say something one day and then you say it the next day, they may be two different. So one day I may say, “We did $930,000 in 2014.” And the next day I say, “Yeah, we did a million dollars.”
Between the fact of 930 and 1 million, 70,000 at that level is not that much money. I could have come on the show and I could have said $750,000 in debt. That’s the even number and I used to do that. It’s actually 726 but it creates that dispersity, that distrust and I don’t want to start a relationship ever on distrust.
Andrew: It seems like you were an addict and you’re saying, “I’m not going to touch this again.” The way that someone whose an alcoholic wouldn’t even have a single drink. That’s what it is.
Scott: Very, very myself.
Andrew: How did you get to this point? What did you do that allowed you to transition like this?
Scott: It was very funny but I’d say my journey of transparency started with the phone call with Chris Brogan back in March. We’ve become very good friends since that phone call and it’s just been about telling… I remember July 29th, of this year was the first time that I ever told my story to anyone outside of the very close people next to me and the bank, my mother and a few other people of how bad I failed.
No one actually knew I actually failed. They just saw me going from this to that and everything else. I remember sending that out via Facebook and my email list. At that point, at the very point I said, “Unless I subconsciously lie, which I’m sure I will do, I will actively tell the truth. And be who I am regardless of what opportunities actually present themselves because I am done being this Scott Oldford that is polished and perfect and everything else.”
Andrew: What did Chris tell you that allowed you to come to this conclusion?
Scott: He went on a website and he said, it was more for the company at that point, not me, and he was like, “I could insert any company logo right now on your company website and no one would know the difference. What makes you, you? What makes your identity? Who are you? What vulnerabilities? What makes you the person that someone remembers?”
That hit pretty hard, obviously. Then it was this mindset change that continually happened of trying to serve other people instead of just serving myself and that took some time. And then it was about figuring out how to make and give a reason for people to care about me. It’s not about, “I’m going to make people care about me, it’s why do they care about me.”
Andrew: And the reason they care about you is you’re a guy who suffered, who made the kinds of mistakes that they could identify with and by showing that you’ve made mistakes that they could identify with, they root for you. And by showing your hard edges, your website makes more sense and isn’t just another generic site.
Scott: Yeah. It’s the brand of Infinitus. The brand of me is I’m going to own up to my mistakes. I make mistakes all the time but I’m going to talk about them now because I know that in everyone else’s journey, they will make the same mistakes. By me not talking about the things that I screwed up on or the things I did right or not right, I’m simply just sort of leaving all this wisdom, I don’t really call it wisdom but all this experience on the table. And why do ten other people that know me have to go through the exact same thing as me when they can just kind of take that lesson?
Andrew: I see. That’s a really big realization. I’m actually looking at your website, your personal site, ScottOldford.com, from January 2014, it looks like you’re the ultimate expert. “The web has been running through Scott’s veins since an early age.” This is from your about section.
“By his early teens, he was working in technology and online marketing. He was named one of the top 20 under 20 in Canada by some place. He was just recently named one of 21 Incs 50 emerging leaders in Atlantic Canada.” I don’t know what that means. “Scott has successfully identified strategic, technical businesses in marketing solutions for over 250 clients.”
All this is just the puffery, self proclaimed apple fan boy and is slightly obsessed with business cards, doesn’t like strawberries. That was your way of saying here’s some personal side of me. I don’t like strawberries and I love apples.
Scott: What’s really funny is, when this airs it will actually be a completely different website.
Andrew: I can see that actually you’re in the processing of changing it. It will not have that kind of flawless message.
Scott: Definitely not. I’m just trying to find a bio here real quick. Let me see if I’ll be able to do it or not but I personally hate that website, I have to say, because again it does exactly that. It makes me fake in many ways and that is actually almost an identical bio from what I had before.
The new website that I’m doing is a lot more about, A, me being okay with the fact that… since I considered that I was a failure, I’ve always had that self-worth issue of not wanting to put really me out there. Since this has been online I go to the website and I shriek.
By January, by the time that my book launches thankfully my new website will be online. Outside of that, the biggest thing that the new website will do for me at least, is I’ve been able to slowly get over that self-worth issue of, “I have something to actually really offer people and I have experience and I have things that people can really get value from.”
Another thing, I’ve struggled like I said in the last couple of years. I’ve really struggled with self-worth because it’s like, “I failed. No one wants to listen to me. I’m a failure.” Ever since I published that article about me, actually it’s right on the website there, “Fail, Fail, Fail, Win. August 12.”
You can actually go in and take a read on that if you want. If you go in there… outside of me saying that I owed nearly $500,000 in secured debt, that was me rounding up the numbers.
Andrew: What you’re talking about is not the site I was looking at a moment ago which is the version that you had up at the early part of 2014. You’re talking about the newer version.
Scott: No, actually, if you go to ScottOldford.com right now, the old version is still there.
Andrew: I’m even looking at a previous version to that. I’m looking at a cache version from a long time ago that…
Scott: That must have been horrible.
Andrew: That’s what I mean. That’s the part that you’re saying, “I don’t want to be that person anymore.
Scott: No.
Andrew: Let me ask you this. I’m hoping to have this guy, [inaudible 00:54:25] in a few weeks. He’s an entrepreneur who now is a coach to a lot of funded entrepreneurs. And I said, “Why do you want to fix people’s insecurities? What if insecurity is what drives them? What if insecurity is what keeps them up at night working hard and up in the morning working before anyone else?”
And he says, “Yes, that will happen but if the inner vision of the person is that they’re a failure or that they have something to cover up, yes, they might succeed for a while but eventually the outside world reverts to what the inside world visualizes.” He said, “If they don’t stop seeing themselves as needing to fight against this failure or being this inner failure then they’re eventually going to revert to it.”
He started giving me personal examples of people who he’d worked with, who’d gone through it. And I get it. He didn’t give me coaching examples but he gave me life examples.
Scott: I so agree…
Andrew: That’s what happened to you.
Scott: It’s huge in terms of that. I wake up every single morning and I feel like somebody has a short gun to my head. And I’ve never really shared this publicly. But anyway, I feel like the reason I work 16, 18 hours nowadays and the reason why I just literally kill myself, is not because I want to be successful, it’s not because I feel like I have to. It’s because I feel like someone has a gun to my head and then says, “Scott, you’re not allowed to fail this time.”
That level of… if you’re in a car and all you’re focusing on is not go into a pole, you’re going to go into the pole. It’s been really, really a bit of a journey to transfer that gun to your head to thinking, “You know what? I’m going to do this because it’s closer and closer and closer to my destiny.”
I still struggle with it every single morning I wake up and every single night when I go to bed. And I judge myself and guilty if I don’t work for 16 hours on a day, I’m guilty. It’s created so many problems with my relationship, my own health, all of these different problems and it all stems from me being afraid of failing. That’s still a journey that I’m going through.
Andrew: That’s what you’re trying to get past instead of being afraid that you’re going to fail say, “I want to be more excited about this vision that I have for myself that I’ve sketched out and continue to keep improving the sketch of.”
Scott: At the same time I live a great life. I’ve been all over the world this year. I’ll be continuing to be all over the world. But every single morning, it’s like 5.30 a.m, there is a short gun right here, right in the middle of my face saying stop.
Andrew: I know what you mean. For me it’s not so much of a short gun as, “What if you’re homeless? What if this whole thing falls apart and you have to sleep on the street?”
Scott: It’s not for me. Again, this goes back to caring what people think of me, again being liked. To me because I’m so… now because I’m so showing myself and showing my vulnerabilities and showing who I am. I don’t want to be in a place where I got to shut that off or I got to fake who I am again or anything like this.
I want to be a success. I want it so that I have what I feel is this destiny that I’m going towards. I know that… if someone said to you Andrew that you had six months to live or that you knew that you were going to die in 2020, the next five years you would literally not sleep.
You would do everything that you wanted to do before 2020. There is no difference. The only difference is that death seems so far away that we don’t squeeze every single last moment of every single last day.
Andrew: That’s a good place to leave it.
Scott: Yeah.
Andrew: I think I would have to sleep, but you’re right. And it would change…
Scott: It’s kind of that incoherent feeling.
Andrew: I do feel like in five years I could die. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what the number is but I do feel it. And frankly if it was a firmer number maybe I’d feel even more pressure.
Scott: But that’s probably why you’ve also been… you’re on the path to… I don’t know what success means for you but we’re both on our paths of success and we’re pursuing it in a very big way.
Andrew: Yeah.
Scott: I’ve had to get past that failing part. I think everyone gets to that part if they fail and whatever that struggle is just think about the fact that you’re not going to be here forever and that motivates the hell out of me.
Andrew: Me too. The website is GoInfinutus.com?
Scott: Yeah. You can definitely go over. It’s probably easier to spell, ScottOldford.com.
Andrew: Scott Oldford. And you also have the book. The book is TheConnectionBook.com. That’s where you’ve written your process for connecting with people. You talk about the lunches that you’ve put on.
Scott: Yeah, the lunches, dinners. It’s the entire had to guide and I’m super excited to be able to do that. There’s a lot of value in there and it’s awesome to be able to see other people doing these lunches and dinners and seeing what it’s been able to do for them as well.
Andrew: Cool. That is TheConnectionBook.com. Scott thanks for being on here and being so open.
Scott: Thanks brother. I really, really appreciate it and I have to say in all the podcasts that I’ve been on, and all the interviews that I’ve been on, you have an incredible gift to being able to both be comfortable with and also be just vulnerable and be open with. Keep doing what you’re doing.
Andrew: I appreciate it. Yeah, this whole thing means a lot to me. To be able to do interviews that go deep. That they’re probing, that they’re well researched and they get to the real stuff not just the facade.
Thanks for being that open and that deep with me. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye everyone.
