From Waiting Tables to Owning a Major League Team - The Epic Journey of Marcus Whitney
In this episode we share how a college dropout went from waiting tables to becoming the owner of a Major League Soccer Team and the most powerful VC in the healthcare industry. We uncover the incredible strategy that can be used to break into ANY industry and become a dominant player sharing the stage with top CEOs, even without any connections or relationships. We share why you don’t have to be an expert to leverage the credibility of others, the power of public speaking, what it means to orchestrate a deal and much more with our guest Marcus Whitney.
Marcus Whitney is an entrepreneur, an author, and a founder or co-founding partner in many businesses include Health:Further, Jumpstart, and the Nashville FC professional soccer team. Marcus is the author of Create and Orchestrate, a book for entrepreneurs about living a creative, purposeful life. He also runs the podcast Marcus Whitney’s Audio Universe. Marcus has been recognized by several business publications including Techcrunch, Fast Company, The Atlantic and many more.
How Macrus went from a college dropout with 2 young kids waiting tables to becoming a powerful entrepreneur and owner of a professional sports team
Importance of being self taught - most successful people are self motivated and self driven learners.
How did Marcus pivot his company Jumpstart from one of the 5000 incubators in the country to the top Healthcare VC in the country?
The powerful strategy that can be used to break into ANY industry and become a dominant industry leader, sharing the stage with top CEOs, from nothing.
“We didn’t get on stage and profess to know anything, we just threw the party.”
How to build a network, develop relationships, and get access to your customers - without knowing about the industry you want to break into.
How Marcus got on stage with the #1 CEO on the Healthcare Industry
Power of convening and bringing people together and CURATING other people’s content and credibility
Public speaking is an incredible arbitrage of time and leverage. You get on stage, you often get paid to do it, and you get PAID to market yourself.
How do you build your personal brand? What should you do if you don’t have a platform and credibility yet but you want to bring your brand?
Simplify your story into THREE key points, max. The law of threes.
Believe, Partner Up, Orchestrate.
The power of co-creation and partnering up. Things don’t seem to happen when you do them by yourself.
To do anything BIG you have to get a lot of people on the same page, moving in the same direction.
The conductor doesn’t actually play the instruments. He keeps everyone aligned so that the collective result is harmonious.
What’s it like to have your back against the wall? What should you do if you’re stuck but you want to take your life and career to the next level?
Dare to believe a little bit bigger every time. But have achievable goals. Every time you achieve a goal, build momentum and set a new bigger goal.
What’s it like to own a major league sports team?
The conductor’s job is to make everybody else look like a rock star.
There’s incredible value in highlighting and celebrating other people.
What is the difference between management and leadership?
Leadership is about vision, values, communication, principles, goals, accountability, integrity, and inspiration.
Management is an operational function. It’s about delivering things predictably to your stakeholders. Including employees, investors, customers, etc.
The 8 core concepts of business (in order of importance)
Leadership
Finance
Operations (including management)
Growth
Product
Service
Sales
Marketing
The Japanese concept of Ikigai. The intersection between what you love to do, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for.
Entrepreneurship is a creative palette. The most important business skill is self awareness.
“I’ve had so many failures that have allowed me to have the short list of successes that I have."
You’re not good at everything, and you often don’t know until you try. You have to be OK with failure if you’re a creative entrepreneur.
Homework: Think about your own story - figure out what themes emerge from that process, dig into self-awareness and figure out WHO you really are.
Thank you so much for listening!
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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research
General
Marcus’s Website
[Podcast] Marcus Whitney’s Audio Universe
Media
Nashville Business Journal - “Marcus Whitney, Health:Further ending annual conference” By Joel Stinnett
Health Leaders - “Who’s Marcus Whitney? An Emerging Force Behind Healthcare” by Mandy Roth
Medium - “MARCUS WHITNEY JOINS NASHVILLE VOICE CONFERENCE LINE-UP AS KEYNOTE SPEAKER” by Paul Hickey
Dome Headwear Co. - Marcus Whitney
HFMA - “Marcus Whitney says it’s time healthcare leaders embrace disruption” by Laura Ramos Hegwer
Venture Nashville Connections - Articles related to Marcus Whitney
[Fast Company] “An Entrepreneur Learned The Importance Of Making Time To Manage Time” by David Zax
[Podcast] Navigate - Navigate 010: Learning from Pain - Marcus Whitney's Steps on Turning Pain Into Success
[Podcast] Master the Start - 20 – Marcus Whitney Talks True Hustle as a Serial Entrepreneur & VC Investor
[Podcast] 360 Entrepreneur - TSE 153: The Game of Entrepreneurship with Marcus Whitney
Videos
Marcus’s YouTube Channel
TEDxTalks - Nashville hustle -- to change your world, you gotta lie a little: Marcus Whitney at TEDxNashville
Health: Further YouTube Channel
Montgomery Bell Academy - Marcus Whitney at MBA Assembly
Talkapolis - The Entrepreneurial Mind: Marcus Whitney
TechCrunch - Marcus Whitney | Keen On…
William Griggs - My Entrepreneurial Journey: Marcus Whitney of Moontoast
Books
Create and Orchestrate by Marcus Whitney
Misc
[SoS Episode] Limiting Beliefs
[SoS Epidode] Use These Powerful Thinking Tools To Solve Your Hardest Problems with David Epstein
TEDxTalk - Simon Sinek|TEDxPuget Sound - How great leaders inspire action
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.
In this episode, we share how a college dropout went from waiting tables to becoming the owner of a major league soccer team and the most powerful venture capitalist in the healthcare industry. We uncovered the incredible strategy that can be used to break into any industry and become a dominant player, sharing the stage with top CEOs without any connections or relationships and starting completely from scratch. We share why you don't have to be an expert to leverage the credibility of others, the power of public speaking, what it means to orchestrate and much more with our guest, Marcus Whitney.
Welcome back to another business-focused episode of the Science of Success. Everything we teach on the show can be applied to achieving success in your business life. Now we're going to show you how to do that, along with some interviews from the world's top business experts. These episodes air every other Tuesday, along with regularly scheduled Science of Success content. I hope you enjoy this interview.
Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.
In our previous episode, we asked the big question, how do you find meaning in your life and work? When you're staring death in the face, life's purpose becomes clear. We learned how to harness those lessons to find meaning in your own life and discover a few simple things that you can do every day starting right now, to increase your odds of living a longer, healthier, happier life with our previous guest, Tom Rath. If you want to truly find meaning in your life, listen to our previous episode.
Now for our interview with Marcus.
[0:02:43.8] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Marcus Whitney. Marcus is an entrepreneur, author, a founder and co-founding partner in many businesses, including Health:Further, Jumpstart and the Nashville FC professional soccer team. Marcus is the author of Create and Orchestrate, a book for entrepreneurs about living a creative, purposeful life. He also runs the podcast Marcus Whitney's Audio Universe, of which I'm a previous guest. Marcus has been recognized by several business publications, including TechCrunch, Fast Company, The Atlantic and many more. Marcus, welcome to the Science of Success.
[0:03:15.3] MW: Matt, thank you so much for having me.
[0:03:17.4] MB: Well, I'm super excited to have you on the show today. I love so many of the things you're working on and there's so many fascinating strategies that we can dig into and share. Before we get into any of that, I want to start with the beginning of your career. How did you get started? Because you have a really interesting background and it's truly impressive what you've been able to build and create. I want to hear about how it all began.
[0:03:40.4] MW: Yes. My career is almost 20-years-old. My oldest son is a little over 20-years-old. Those two things are connected for a reason. Prior to my oldest son being born, I was out in the wilderness exploring, being a creative person. I was creating music. I was doing a bunch of different odd jobs. Becoming a father was really the catalyst for me taking the development of a career and a skill that would benefit my family economically seriously.
I dropped out of college as part of my creative pursuits. When I did seek to get my career going, I needed to figure out what I could do that would not require a bachelor's degree. This was the year 2000. The one thing that stuck out to me was software development. I spent time teaching myself how to code. This was before software boot camps, or code academy online, or many of the things that are going on today, trying to help people to move into that career.
This was just something that I recognized on my own and I went got books and studied and did all the different practice exercises in the books. Over the course of eight months, taught myself enough to be able to get a job as a junior developer at a company called HealthStream here in Nashville, Tennessee. That really started my career into technology, software and everywhere else I went from there.
[0:05:06.0] MB: It's so interesting. Many of the most successful people that I know are self-motivated learners. Oftentimes, the things that they end up being really successful at are not things that they studied in school, or were taught, but they taught themselves. How did that factor into your career and your journey?
[0:05:26.9] MW: I think it was huge. I think that very first time that I got hired from HealthStream from a – let's call it seven to eight-month process of teaching myself how to code, that was a huge confidence boost for me. It really showed me that I could put my mind to something and that I could make myself seen in the eyes of the public of the business world as being worth investing in. From there, I think I've done many other things that have been self-taught with the same effect.
I just think that when you are teaching yourself something, it requires drive. You have to be motivated yourself. You're coming from a place where you don't know much at all. You have to have a beginner's mind. You have to be humble. At the same time, it's something that you want to do. No one's making you do it. For me, doing things that I want to do, self-direction, autonomy is incredibly important for the way that I spend my time and my life. I definitely think learning how to teach yourself something is an incredible hack for how to be successful long-term.
[0:06:27.6] MB: Today you're a successful venture investor, you're a co-owner in a professional sports team, which we're definitely going to dig into a little bit. How did you go from being a junior developer at a healthcare company to where you are today?
[0:06:42.8] MW: Yeah, so it was a long journey, 19 plus years. The first seven years were all spent in software development. I went from being a junior developer at a large-ish company, to a head of technology at an early stage e-mail marketing company called Emma, based here in Nashville, Tennessee as well. That was really the experience. I spent four years there. I was there from 2003 to 2007. That experience is really where I learned about the startup space and where I learned about managing people and building teams and going from burning cash to making a profit. I learned many of my lessons through that experience.
After the end of four years, the company had gone from five people to about 50 people and it was time for me to go out on my own and explore entrepreneurial opportunities. From 2007 till today, I've been on my entrepreneurial journey. My very first company was completely based in the software development space. It was an agency that offered an exchange of software development services for equity in companies that we worked with. I really liked working with early-stage companies. A real drought of technical capabilities in terms of the ratio of founders to tech co-founders, and so various opportunities to pick up equity stakes. Did that. We had about four or five clients through that process. Ended up really leaning into one of the companies that had raised more money than the rest of them, called Moontoast; went on a four-year journey with them.
We opened offices in Boston, San Francisco. This is at the rise of social media marketing, social commerce. Working with Facebook and Twitter in the early days of their ads ecosystem in that whole transition from desktop to mobile and really, really learned a lot about what it means to build a business on someone else's platform. In parallel to doing that, I was also working nights and weekends with my current business partner, Vic Gatto on Jumpstart Foundry. We launched it in 2009 as a tech accelerator. That was around the two years after Techstars had launched, maybe three or four years after YCombinator.
We were one of the first 100 accelerators in the country. By the time 2014 came around, we were one of 5,000 accelerators in the country. The market got very saturated very quickly. At the end of 2014, Vic and I decided that this was the business we wanted to run. We both quit our positions in our respective companies and went all-in into Jumpstart Foundry and turned it into a seed stage fund in healthcare.
That leads up to today. We've been doing that now five plus years. We've got over 80 companies in our portfolio and we're the most active venture capital fund in the healthcare space in the country.
[0:09:13.9] MB: That's incredible. The story of how you broke into healthcare, I find so fascinating. I want you to tell that, because you went from this incubator to correct me if I'm wrong, but with no healthcare focus, or very few, or if any healthcare companies, and to the leading healthcare VC in the country. What enabled you to break into that industry?
[0:09:39.9] MW: Yes. The reason why we were able to break in so successfully is because of geography. 2014, when we had to accept that the market has saturated to the point where we were no longer going to be able to get great deals, we had to think about what did we have as an advantage. Now if you're in Nashville, Tennessee you have to acknowledge if you're in the venture capital business, you're in the flyover country. You are not in New York, you're not in Boston, you're not in San Francisco and you're not in LA. If you take those four cities, you basically have something like 75% to 80% of all the capital in the venture capital business. The rest of the country splits up the other 20%. Nashville is just in that bucket.
We were never going to be the most attractive early stage fund for just any old tech company, because any old tech company should be on the coast. Nashville has a very strong, robust healthcare ecosystem here. Nashville is the home to Healthcare Corporation of America. Most people think about Nashville as music city and country music obviously is a huge part of this economy, but the number one segment in the economy in Nashville is healthcare.
HCA, Healthcare Corporation of America basically invented for-profit hospitals in the United States. Just HCA alone is responsible for 5% of all healthcare provision in the country. A way to think about that is one in every 20 babies in America is born in an HCA facility. That doesn't even touch Life Point, Community Health Systems, AMSURG, many of our other very, very large healthcare companies here.
There was a very robust ecosystem here, great leaders, and Nashville is a uniquely collaborative city where you can make friends and you can learn about an industry. That intersection of Nashville's community focus and the strength of the healthcare industry was a great place for us to focus. We decided in 2014 as we left the tech accelerator world and went into being a seed stage fund, we could talk a little bit about the difference between those things, but that we would focus exclusively on healthcare.
Spending five years focusing just on healthcare in one of the healthcare capitals of the United States, you can learn a lot. You can learn a lot about how the market actually works. You can learn a lot about which headlines to pay attention to and which are completely irrelevant. You can learn a lot about how the government is going to impact healthcare going forward, because it is a very interesting market compared to most markets in terms of the amount of influence and power that the government has on it. We've been very lucky, because of where we live and where our business is set up that we could accelerate so quickly in the healthcare space.
[0:12:15.8] MB: You had a particular strategy that you shared with me prior to this interview that I thought was an incredible method for breaking into any industry and going from having virtually zero credibility, very few connections and not being a presence, to being a dominant industry presence, starting to shape trends, be on stage with some of the most predominant and preeminent leaders in that industry. You use this to break into healthcare. Tell me a little bit about that methodology and how it works.
[0:12:44.4] MW: Yeah. We backed into this by accident. Now I'll tell you, yes, it is a very good strategy, but it wasn't exactly what we were thinking at first. When we made the shift from a tech accelerator into a seed stage fund, we had one piece of collateral that was left over, which was our demo day. We knew we wanted to get rid of the demo day, but we also knew the power of convening, of bringing people together to build your brand, to build your network and to strengthen the chances of your investments being successful.
We didn't want to get out of the convening business, but we did want to get out of the demo day business, which is where every year, you have the companies you have invested to get on stage and pitch. We just weren't interested in doing that anymore. We had the idea to throw a conference about healthcare innovation. It just so happened that Nashville, even for its very, very strong position in the healthcare industry overall, it did not have a healthcare innovation conference. In 2015, innovation really started to become a topic that all of the leaders in healthcare needed to have an answer for.
We created a brand Health:Further and we threw the first ever Health:Further Summit in August of 2015. To our surprise, the event sold out very, very quickly and it was a smash success. We had leaders and tons of attendees from all the big companies in town there. It was great. We didn't get on stage and profess to know anything, we just threw the party and we invited everybody. They helped us to understand what were going to be the important topics and who needed to speak on those things.
As we did that, A, we built credibility within the industry. B, we learned a lot. C, we started to build relationships with leaders in the industry that we would have never had otherwise, had we gone to these people simply as a venture capital fund saying, “Hey, we've got these companies. We want you to hire them as vendors, or we want you to consider buying them,” we would have been laughed at. By throwing a party and creating value for them, we got to be friends with them and we got to learn a lot and we got to develop our network.
Over the course of four years, we threw that event. Last year, we threw our last one, at least for a while. We put the event on hiatus, because our networks pretty well-developed now. Last year we had about 1,800 attendees. Half of them were coming from outside of the state of Tennessee. We had a 100 people coming from outside of the country. All of this has built our network, has enabled us to better understand what our investment thesis should be and has helped us to even create a path to globalize our business.
[0:15:12.3] MB: I love it. The power of convening as you put it, this idea of bringing people together and even the notion of curating other people and the content the value that they can bring, as you said, especially early on you weren't the keynote speaker, you didn't get on stage and talk about how amazing you are, though you obviously have started to do that now and we'll get into public speaking a little bit more. The power of that event was that you brought these people together and you were the catalyst, though you didn't have to be on the front of the stage and in front of everybody.
[0:15:44.5] MW: That's exactly right. I mean, I can tell you 2015, I didn't know anything about healthcare. It was definitely not my place to get on stage. By last year's summit, I interviewed Milton Johnson who was the former CEO and chairman. At the time he was the CEO and chairman of HCA. You're talking about the number one CEO in all of the hospital business in America and I interviewed him for 20 minutes and I knew what I was talking about. It was a big step from where I was in 2015 and the event was a huge part of that. Going to the event, programming it, curating it.
Every time there was another session that was planned, I needed to understand what that session was about. I really got a crash course that I don't know, maybe it wasn't a crash course. Maybe it was more like a college degree, because it took four years in the way that the healthcare business works. Now as you hinted to, I'm now doing public speaking about where the healthcare industry is and where it's going.
In major healthcare events last year, I keynoted the HFMA annual meeting. HFMA is a 75-year-old organization. It's the leading organization for finance professionals in the healthcare industry and I did a one-hour keynote at that event five years after not knowing anything about the business.
[0:17:04.2] MB: It's an incredible achievement. Tell me more about how you've been able to leverage things like public speaking. Actually, even before we dig into that, you mentioned in a previous interview that I thought was really interesting is that a while ago, you used to think that public speaking wasn't real business, or wasn't real work and you've changed your perspective on that now, see how powerful it can be. Tell me about that shift that you made and then how you’ve started to integrate that into building your business.
[0:17:32.4] MW: Yeah. That shift happened for me when I did my TEDx Talk at TEDx Nashville in 2014. I had done a couple of public speaking things before that. Really in retrospect, mostly panels or technical talks, I hadn't really done the big 18 minute type of TED talk format before. I just did not have enough respect for what went into it. I really didn't. As any TEDx speaker will tell you, when you are selected to do a TED talk, you have to go through a coaching process.
I went in and I showed my deck to the coach at the time and said, “This is what I'm thinking about.” Quite frankly, I was pretty arrogant about it. I was like, “Ah, I'm going to kill it.” I had this talk that had seven different points in it, no good narrative to it. I didn't really internalize that. I needed to have this down, like I wasn't going to be able to read from slides. And they just killed me. They just said, “Hey, this is way too complicated. You need to break it down to three simple points. B, this sounds like something everyone else has said. How are you going to make this unique? C, you have a lot of work to do in a short period of time. You got four weeks before your talk.”
I spend 24 hours being really mad and saying they didn't know what they were talking about. Then I came to reality and said they're right and I have a lot of work to do. I went and looked at a bunch of TED Talks online and thought about where I was versus where those speakers were and I said, “Man, I've got a lot of work to do.” Because once you do a TED Talk, it's immortal, right? It lives online forever.
I spent 40 plus hours committed to working on this talk, writing out an entire script, simplifying it significantly and making sure that I had surprise elements in there, bringing in some pop-culture references, recording it and then listening to it over and over, like you would listen to your favorite song. I listened to myself do this 18-minute talk over and over and over again, practicing it in front of multiple people, then the actual performance, which scared me out of my skin. It was definitely – now I'm much better now. That was the first time I ever had done anything like that, standing in front of a room of 2,000 plus people with the bright lights on you and you can't make a mistake.
It went great and it really set up the stage for so much of what I'm doing today. It set up the stage for my newsletter, for the book that I've been working on for a video series that I've done. Just for me even knowing that me telling my story and the philosophies that I've derived from my experiences could inspire and help other people. I didn't know that. I now have come to really respect public speaking. It's probably one of the most important things that I do. From a strategy tactic perspective, if it's something you're good at and not everybody is good at it, but if it's something you're good at, it's an incredible arbitrage of time and leverage.
You get on stage, people will pay you often to do it and it's marketing and it's brand building and it is a very, very unique thing where you can get paid to market yourself. Most things are not like that. Public speaking has become a very, very valuable skill for me and I have developed a great amount of respect for it.
[0:20:43.6] MB: That's a great frame and a way to think about it that you're basically being paid to market yourself in front of a roomful of people. As soon as you get off stage, you now have this instant credibility of everyone in the room knows who you are and just listened to you for 15 minutes, or however long you're speaking.
[0:20:59.1] MW: Exactly. It's a pretty big hack but it's work, right? The bar is high. There are people out there being paid six figures to do it. If you're going to do it, you're going to have to work at it. TED has really changed the game and has created an art form around public speaking, I would say, as TED on YouTube has just exploded and the number of views that a lot of those videos get. You can think about people whose entire careers have been made by TED. Simon Sinek comes to mind, right? By the way, his talk was a TEDx Talk. It wasn't even a proper TED Talk.
[0:21:28.2] MB: I didn’t know that.
[0:21:29.5] MW: It's a TEDx talk that got elevated to the TED level. Yeah. I mean, I think people don't necessarily take the TEDx stuff as seriously as they should, because you're in the TED network once you do it. If they find a talk to really blow up, then yeah, you could get elevated to a TED level. Go take a look at that talk again and you'll see he's not on the big stage, it's pretty low-budget actually, but the millions of views don't feel low-budget at all.
[0:21:53.6] MB: That's incredible. What advice or strategies would you have for someone who wants to up their personal brand, up their public speaking game, those might be different things, but you've done an incredible job of branding yourself, of building the Marcus Whitney brand, along with building your companies and your businesses. What advice would you have for somebody who is just starting out and doesn't have all of the credibility and the cachet that you do?
[0:22:20.4] MW: I think the place to start is to work on telling your story. That starts by thinking about your story. The TEDx Talk for me was the first time that I actually thought about my story. At that time was 2014, so there were certain elements of my story over the last five years that weren't there. I still had enough to talk about specifically going from waiting tables, to being a software developer, to being an entrepreneur, so that journey that I was on.
Now I can add soccer to it and a couple of other cool things that I've done over the last five years. When I started to think about my story, I started to think about okay, what were the principles that I knowingly, or unknowingly lived by that helped me to achieve the things that I did achieve? That's where I came up with the things I talked about it in the TEDx Talk, which even today are still key pillars that I live by, but also that I create a lot of my content around, this idea of believing, partnering up and orchestrating, which have become the framework for the Create and Orchestrate book and so many other things that I've talked about that.
That framework of knowing your story and being able to simplify what you've learned through your story down to three key points is really money and anybody can do it. I don't think there's any way that that framework can be saturated, because everyone's story is unique. As long as you stay authentic and unique to your own story, you can bring your own unique angle to that framework. There's just truth to the law of threes. People understand things in threes. It's just the way that we're wired. I think just knowing your story, working on writing your story down is where to start.
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[0:25:08.7] MB: I want to dig in to the three-part framework that you just shared; believe, partner-up and orchestrate. I think it's such a fascinating idea. Tell me about each of those components and how they put together.
[0:25:19.8] MW: Yeah. I had to think about how I grew into the person that I was. It definitely started with belief. When I was waiting tables, I was working six and a half days a week. During the six of the six-and-a-half, I was working double shifts. Anyone who's ever waited tables and those were double shifts knows those are hard days. Not just physically hard. They're hard mentally, because some days are good when you're waiting tables, some days are absolutely terrible. Sometimes you get stiffed.
You've got that break in the day and what are you doing during the break? Because you got to go back and work later on. It's really just hard. When I also had a one child and my wife at the time was pregnant with another child, it was just difficult to see our way out of it. We were living in a week-to-week efficiency hotel. There was nothing in my environment that I could see that should have given me any belief that I was going to be able to get out of it, especially by way of software engineering.
I had to believe in myself that I could. I spent so much time seeing myself as a programmer, putting myself in environments that would reinforce that belief. I just find belief to be the fundamental human capability that allows us to become things that otherwise we would never be able to become. That was the first part for me. Then there's been a recurring theme throughout my life of co-creation, where things don't tend to happen very well when I'm doing them by myself. I have to learn this lesson over and over again. I'm learning it again right now and I'm about to engage in another partnership with a new venture that I'm working on. I'm so excited, because all of a sudden, things are moving quickly again.
It is really, really hard to do things by yourself, right? When you have a partner, you just can get that flow of energy and you get to focus on the things that you're good at and that you love to do and that other person can focus on the things that they're good at and that they love to do. There's magic that happens there. I saw over and over in my career the importance of partnering with somebody else in order to make something great happen.
Then the third stage, orchestrate, is just this idea that ultimately to do anything big, to do anything major, to do anything grand, you have to get a lot of people on the same page, moving in the same direction. This has often been something I've had to do through big events, but I think the biggest example I've ever had in my life of this was bringing professional soccer to Nashville. That was something that required more orchestration than I've ever done before. This was getting people on the same page in politics, in the community, investors. Just so many different people had to be marching in the same direction in order to make it possible for a professional soccer to come to the city of Nashville.
Just whenever you're trying to do something big, this mindset of orchestration is key. When you think about orchestration often, you think about an orchestra and a conductor. If you look at the conductor, they look weird because they're up there and they're waving this stick and they're not actually playing any of the instruments and that's the point, right? Is the work of orchestration is not actually playing the instruments, it's keeping everybody aligned and feeding into everybody else, so that the collective result is harmonious and successful. That is a key skill that whenever you want to take anything you're doing to a grand level, I think is very, very important to be able to do.
Those are the three things that I saw in my story come up over and over and over again. They were just a theme. Yeah, it resonated with people when I did the talk, so I decided to name my book after it.
[0:28:58.0] MB: There's so many things I want to break down from that. Let's start with the story about belief. It's such a powerful narrative going from a college dropout, a waiter, to becoming one of the most powerful, prominent, the biggest healthcare venture capitalist in the country, maybe the world even potentially. What advice would you have for someone who is in a similar situation that you were in 20 years ago? Their back is against the wall, they're struggling, they don't necessarily see the path forward. What would you say to them and what would you tell them to do?
[0:29:33.3] MW: The thing that I think was so important about that time and you said backs against the wall, I think backs against the wall is helpful. I think the pressure that's created from having your back against the wall can really push you to do great things. The goal I set while it did not have a lot to do with the life I was living, it was ultimately achievable. It wasn't so outlandish crazy that it couldn't possibly happen. That's something that I've learned is very important, which is belief is very, very powerful. It is a critical ingredient in doing anything really, really meaningful in the world, especially in terms of tapping into your true talents and your true purpose for being here.
You have to believe in something that is attainable and achievable. It needs to be a stretch, but it also needs to be achievable. For me, the stretch of going from waiting tables to being a junior software developer at a company, making $45,000 a year and getting a benefits package, it’s a pretty big jump, but it was attainable, right? You know what I mean? It wasn't completely inconceivable that it could happen.
I then leveraged that to dare to believe the next thing and to dare to believe the next thing. I think over the course of the last 19 and a half years that I've been developing this career, I've probably believed 19 to 20 different things. Probably every year, I've dared to believe a little bit more and a little bit more and the success that I've gotten from each belief that worked out was rolled into the next one and it provided a little bit of momentum. It certainly helped any debate I might have in my mind about whether or not it was possible for me to achieve that thing.
I could always look back at the last thing and say, “Dude, you did that. You can definitely do this next thing.” I think where people get out of alignment with that energy is when they set a goal that is just too far from where they currently are. It doesn't mean they can never do it, right? Because if you take my whole story and you put it together and you say, this guy was a college dropout who waiting tables and didn't know anybody in town and now he is one of the owners of a major league soccer team, right?
Okay, so if you take everything out of the middle, that is completely impossible, right? There's no way I can jump from that first thing that I said to the last thing. If you take all the hops in between, then it starts to make sense and it starts to become more and more plausible. I would have never believed in the year 2000 when I was just trying to figure out how to be able to get into a regular apartment that I could potentially be a co-owner of a professional sports team. That would have never been a realistic thing for me to think about.
I was just trying to take care of my kids. I was just trying to get healthcare benefits, right? I just didn't stop there. Once I got that, I was like, “Okay, great. This is awesome. I've achieved that. Now what's the next thing I can believe that's attainable? How do I build that momentum from the last thing that I did?” I think that's the angle that I see some people get a little bit tripped up on is from where they are and what they want to be, they're skipping steps.
[0:32:54.3] MB: Such a great story. It's time to dig into this. I'm so curious. I think many people's life goal is to own a professional sports team. What is that like and how did you achieve that?
[0:33:09.1] MW: It's like so many other things, right? A, five years ago when the journey started, I never thought this would be the way that it would play out, but I did know there was something there worth spending my time and energy on. The background to the story is Nashville has been growing at an incredible rate for the last, let's just call seven years. We had a pro-am soccer team called the Nashville Metros that had been around for several decades. Unfortunately, just from timing perspective, the ownership group had to close its doors, and so Nashville was left with no competitive soccer team to cheer for.
A young man named Chris Jones saw that and said, “Well, that sucks. I would like to start a community-based soccer team called Nashville Football Club. It's a non-profit and everybody can pay $75 in order to be a part of it and let's see what we can do.” He put it out on Twitter. This whole thing actually started as a tweet.
I saw that and I ended up being the 86th person to pay $75 to be a member of this non-profit. To be completely honest, I was really busy with my own work at the time. I stayed tuned in via social. I would e-mail Chris from time to time, but I didn't have a lot of time to go to the games. I was on planes going to Boston and San Francisco working a lot at that time.
By the end of the very first season that they played, they were having between 1,000 to 2,000 people going to the games. They ended up making the playoffs. Now this was fourth division soccer, right? There's no TV or anything like that. It’s not a lot of money in it, but they'd clearly shown that Nashville had an appetite for soccer and there was the opportunity to develop something really, really great there.
At the end of that season, I reached out to Chris and said, “Hey, let's get together.” We had lunch and he said to me, “Look, we had a great first season, but I think this thing needs some real leadership in terms of tightening up the business. Would you join the board?” I agreed. Pretty quickly after joining the board, I became the chairman of the board. Then pretty quickly after that, there was an article in our local newspaper that said that a professional team, they were in the third division from Pennsylvania had spoken to our mayor's office and was looking at moving to Nashville.
That was an opportunity for us to leverage that story and say to the public hey, if anyone's going to bring professional soccer here, they need to talk to us first. That got the local paper involved and they interviewed us for a story about that. That really started the ball rolling on a conversation about how we would take this non-profit fourth division entity and make it into a professional team.
I knew just from my work in business that there was no way that a non-profit could ultimately run a professional team in America. Just none of the leagues would really support that long-term. I also had experience, because I've been working in the tech accelerator on how to package something up to raise money around it. I shifted my energy to building a pitch and to hosting investor events. In our very first investor event, we found our lead investor, a gentleman named David Dill who then was the president of LifePoint Health and now is the CEO.
David brought along a good friend of his, who's also a healthcare entrepreneur, a gentleman named Chris [inaudible 0:36:39.3]. Then David recruited me to be part of the ownership group. Within 18 months of me joining the board of Nashville Football Club, I ended up becoming part of the ownership group of the group that went and got a pro franchise in the third division, which quickly became a second division for soccer in the United States, a group called the United Soccer League.
Then news came out that major league soccer was looking to do an expansion and was going to add four teams to the league. A group led by John Ingram, who is one of the – let’s just call most successful business families, the Ingram family in Nashville, started that process. We entered into negotiations with John just to unify the bid for Major League Soccer. John then purchased a majority of our franchise, in exchange for us getting a percentage of the major league team should we be awarded it. Then a year later, we were awarded the major league team. We were the first city to receive an expansion team. We will play our first game February 29th of 2020 in Major League Soccer. That's the story. That's how it happened.
[0:37:54.1] MB: The thing I love about that and this comes back to the concept of orchestration, which I want to dig into a little bit more, is that very similar to the lesson you shared about how your career trajectory, it's all about these individual steps, right? You can't necessarily see what the end is going to be and yet, each step and each process and coordinating all these different people and all these different relationships opens a new door and a new opportunity. If you don't take the first step, then you never see the winding path that can unfold before you.
[0:38:27.8] MW: That’s exactly right. I mean, I would call the first step when I joined the board of Nashville Football Club, right? What earned me the right to do that was when I get to pay $75 to be a member. The first real step was when I joined the board. You could not have told me that from the day that I joined the board three years later, we were going to be receiving a Major League Soccer expansion team. That was not even in the cards. In fact, when I first accepted the role of chairman, I put a message in front of – you have to go to the board and state your vision, right? I said, we will reach Major League Soccer in 10 years, right?
[0:39:07.0] MB: You beat that goal.
[0:39:08.3] MW: Yeah. We cut that goal in half. Did I see this ultimately happening because of the momentum of the city and all this other stuff? Yes. Did I know it was going to happen as quickly as it did and then I was going to be playing the role that I played in it? No.
Getting my hands dirty at the non-profit level gave me incredible insight that was valuable all the way through to the Major League Soccer expansion bid. I understood the supporters very, very well. I understood the community. I understood a lot of things that earned me an opportunity to continue to be considered valuable as a member of the ownership group. Yes. I had to do a lot of orchestration along the way.
Yes. I mean, I think that is a skill. I think I might have even heard it on one of your shows, just the importance of the skill of synthesizing things and not necessarily being a specialist in a particular thing, but being able to learn from a variety of experiences and then bring all those experiences together to create more value than you would if you only understood things in one realm. That's been something I've just continued to do throughout my life. Orchestrating really helps that, because you have to communicate with lots of different people coming from lots of different perspectives.
While I've never been in politics, I've had to work with politicians in order to get things done. I have a better understanding of politics than I ever would before having had to work with politicians, right? If that makes sense.
[0:40:37.1] MB: That totally makes sense. The analogy of the orchestra is great, because as you said earlier and this is a really powerful image, the conductor is not playing an instrument. To me that's a really important lesson that many people miss when they think about achieving a big goal, they think about executing and hustling in the day-to-day of it, but the orchestration piece is such a powerful component as well.
[0:41:03.7] MW: Absolutely. The conductor's job is to make everybody else look like a rock star. That's the job. To even in real-time highlight and signal to the audience – Some of the stuff that the conductor does, I'm not even sure it's really for the orchestra, as much as it is to cue the audience, pay attention to this section right now, right? Because they're about to go off. You know what I mean? I think that's part of the deal too. I think there's incredible value in highlighting other people and celebrating other people and making sure that two different groups that will be much better together than it will be apart, understand how much better they'll be together and navigating, getting them to believe that.
Those were things that we had to do through this process, because everyone had their own interests, right? I mean, we all shared a vision. The clear vision was we want to have Major League Soccer here in Nashville. People are coming at it from different perspectives, right? The politicians owe something to their constituents. Different groups of investors want different things. That's just reality. There's nothing good or bad about that. That's just the way that the world works. You have to be able to show people that none of us are going to get what we individually want out of this if we can't make this happen together. There will be lots of compromises and sacrifices that will happen, but ultimately, we'll all get to enjoying this greater vision and ultimately, you'll also really get what you're after.
[0:42:34.1] MB: That makes me think of another comment that I've heard you make in the past that I thought was really insightful, which was the difference between management and leadership. I think you and I share a similar perspective. Correct me if I misstating this, but I think you once said you don't love managing people. I'm very similar. I don't like managing people. I love coaching and inspiring and that thing. The distinction between management leadership, I think is really interesting and I'd love to get your insight on that.
[0:43:00.9] MW: Yes. Leadership I believe is the highest order in any organization. It is about things like vision, values, communication, principles, goals, accountability, ethics, integrity, those are the things that leadership is about. Inspiration, inspiring people. Those are the things that make up a culture. Management is an operational function. I have a framework for the way that I have reverse-engineered business, because I dropped out so I didn't go to business school. I don't have a traditional way of interpreting businesses, but I basically have reverse-engineered it into eight concepts that I've never seen any business not have to adhere to. They actually go in order of importance, but they are all critical and necessary.
At the very top of the – I call them the eight core concepts. At the top is leadership, then finance, then operations, then growth. I'd be happy to talk about what I mean by that. Then product, then service, then sales and then marketing. Those are to me the eight core concepts that every single business has to address. Leadership is the highest order concept. Management falls inside of operations, which to me is the third highest order concept.
Management is about delivering things predictably, ultimately. That is to all your different stakeholders. You have employees that are stakeholders, you have customers that are stakeholders, you have investors that are stakeholders. You put forth a brand promise, you put forth a promise of what value you're going to deliver to all of those stakeholders. Management is about seeing to that actually happening.
Some management is project management, some management is people management. In the case of people management, that's a skill set. That's a very specific skill set. Not the same skill set to me as leadership. I think both are necessary, but I think they often get conflated. They're not the same thing. If you've done management as much as I have and have had the mixed bag of results that I have had, you know what I mean? You've also done leadership and you've had a different set of results for that, you start to distinguish between the two and get clear on what you're passionate about, what you're good at and whether or not leadership and management are the same thing. For me, they're not. For me, I am very, very passionate about leadership and I see management as a skill set that I value highly, but that I am not that interested in personally.
[0:45:48.6] MB: I love that framework and I personally agree with that breakdown and the distinction between management and leadership. I through my own business experience also have a very similar perspective about my own strengths around management, but that's a whole aside, that we don't have time to get into because I know we're running out of time.
For listeners who want to concretely implement something that we've talked about today, we've talked about a bunch of different strategies and ideas, what would be one piece of homework or initial action stuff that you would give them to start taking action towards something we've discussed?
[0:46:25.8] MW: Yeah. Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the Japanese concept of ikigai, just the Japanese concept of life purpose. It's falling at this intersection of what you love to do, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can get paid for. I find that to be such a helpful directive framework around how you can really maximize your time on earth.
I think about entrepreneurship as a creative palette. Sometimes, your partner will be the entrepreneur and you will be the creative, right? You can still have lots of entrepreneurial endeavors, but you're not necessarily great at finance, right? Look, in order to be a really great entrepreneur, you got to know finance stuff. It's pretty important.
I think thinking about where you fall at that intersection, what do you love to do and what are you good at and what will the world pay you for and what does the world need? I think that process of self-awareness is so helpful for then figuring out all these other steps. I'll repeat, thinking about your own story, just really going back and jotting down what's happened to you in your life and the way that you remember it and what themes emerge from that process, I think is incredibly helpful.
There are so many different frameworks out there for how you'll put together a business. There's the business model canvas. There's the attraction VTO. There's the lean canvas. There's just so many different ways to get the thoughts out of your head around how you want to launch a business. I think the most important things really are centered around self-awareness, because it's how you position yourself relative to this thing you want to do and who you need to partner with in order to make it happen, and what is going to be your challenge around orchestration. Those are the things that I think are really, really important and that I think everybody can do. My task for everybody would be how do you get more clear on who you really are.
[0:48:31.5] MB: The idea that self-awareness is one of the most important business skills is something that I fundamentally believe and in many ways, guides many of the conversations we have here on the Science of Success. It's so interesting to hear that from someone who's been such a successful business person that you have a very similar perspective as well.
[0:48:51.9] MW: Yeah. I mean, I'm at this point in my career and in my life. I'm 43, I'll be 44 here shortly. I've raised two children. I’ve probably learned more than that than I've learned through business. I've had so many failures that have enabled me to have the short list of successes that I'm very proud of, but I'm not undefeated, right? I've got losses on my record. Even in my successes, I've got losses, right? I think as I look back, it's fine. I learned a lot about myself through those things, but one of the big things that I learned is I'm not good at everything and that's okay, nobody is. Nobody's great at everything.
You don't know until you try. I think that you have to be okay with failure if you're going to be a creative entrepreneur, because that's part of the self-discovery process is going through those failures. Yes. In reflection as I think about my remaining time here on earth and especially the remainder of my 40s and my 50s and my 60s, I want to maximize my impact. That means I'm not going to spend any time doing anything I don't think I'm exceptional and uniquely exceptional. Management would not be one of those things, right? I will manage to the degree that I have to. It's not something that I like doing. I know I have shortcomings in it and I'm happy to accept that. That's totally fine by me.
[0:50:06.1] MB: Another great insight that you can't be good at everything and acknowledging your shortcomings is a critical component to being a successful business person. Marcus, for listeners who want to find more about you, your work and everything that you're creating and doing online, what is the best place for them to do that?
[0:50:24.1] MW: MarcusWhitney.com. I would welcome you to come to my website and please subscribe to my e-mail, The Grind. It is I think the most important work I do. I send it out every week and it is a very, very personal note from me to you, where I am talking about my life and what I am learning from the experiences that I'm having in my life. Then I also keep you posted on things I've got going on, like online content and things of that nature. Just my website and subscribing to my e-mail list is my one simple ask.
[0:50:58.0] MB: Marcus, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom. Some great stories, some great insights about an incredible journey and some really fascinating business concepts and ideas.
[0:51:09.2] MW: Matt, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute honor.
[0:51:12.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.
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