Scott MacGregor
speaker
92 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Scott MacGregor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I don't build a network. I build friendships. I build relationships. There's a huge difference. Networking to me is transactional. And I think as soon as you're transactional, things change. You know, if you need something to happen by a certain time, that's going to be like a drive-by friendship. It's probably not going to be sustainable.
Heather, I could not be more excited for this. I've been looking forward to it all day. You know, I absolutely love you to pieces and I hold you in the absolute highest regard. You are one of the best podcasters on the planet.
Yeah, you know, I grew up relatively poor in an affluent town. So I stuck out like a sore thumb because economically, you know, we were very, very different from everybody else. So, you know, as a kid, I was just trying to figure out the world and the world when you're a kid is the town you live in. Like, it really doesn't extend much beyond that.
And and I was just trying to figure out why were my experiences so different from my peers? and so that spur i think really spawned kind of a lifelong curiosity so i thought it was because of my circumstances but i'm 57 now and i will tell you i'm as curious at 57 as i was when i was seven So part of my journey has just been that trying to satiate that curiosity.
And I recognized early on in life that I was an outlier. I didn't call it that, but I knew very early on as a kid, I knew I thought differently about things than my peers. But when you're a kid and you think differently about stuff, Heather, you just think you're weird. Like, I wasn't celebrating it.
I'm like, there's something wrong with me because I do not think the way that everyone else thinks. And then later on in life, especially when I got into business, I was hitting levels of success that my peers were not. And I really stepped back and I'm like, why is this happening for me? I wasn't more connected. I didn't have more money. I wasn't better looking.
I didn't have anything that I saw as a distinct advantage, but I pretty quickly realized that That by being a contrarian, by always, when everyone was going left, I just intuitively wanted to go right. And by taking that path less traveled, that's where the pot of gold is in life. So I have leaned into that heavily, always in my career, but even more so now as an entrepreneur.
Yeah. So the first business I started, I was a chief revenue officer. Sound familiar? Like somebody I know. And, you know, we had had massive success. We grew a company from about five people to nearly 300 and had double digit growth every single year for 17 straight years.
And so through that, I was drinking from a fire hose every single day and we were hiring people like crazy and especially like 08, 09. The economy sucked, but we were hiring people like crazy. So every recruiter and their brother was calling me supposedly going to provide us with exceptional talent. And I will tell you that my experience as a sales leader for 17 years dealing with recruiters
i thought it was the most backwards uh industry the most antiquated industry i had ever seen in my life and i thought i could build a better mousetrap i thought i could build a different mousetrap so i started a company 10 years ago called something new and that company won eight consecutive american business awards for innovation which the record was three prior to that
And we literally built a different mousetrap. So everything that I had seen that drove me nuts as a CRO, we just did the opposite. And sometimes that's how easy it is. It's just what are the things that drive you crazy about, you know, a certain industry or vendors that you may work with and just do the opposite and you'll probably meet with success.
And that's exactly what happened, you know, at Something New.
So I started the community because I had all these relationships that I had built for decades with super interesting people. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if I could bring these people in to talk to a community, but do it in a different way, in a live and interactive format? And so that was kind of the beginning of starting a community. And then again, access to these amazing people.
And some of them, you know, are billion dollar CEOs or famous musicians or chefs or Navy SEALs or pro athletes, Olympians, et cetera, bestselling authors.
I knew I had an opportunity to leverage that again and decided to start a magazine called Outlier Magazine where I could celebrate the people that I admire the most in the world, which are people that are unafraid to show up differently and unafraid to travel down that path that is less traveled. Despite the fact that they know it's going to be dark, it's going to be scary.
They're not going to have a lot of company. They're going to probably trip and fall and skin their knees. Those are the people I want to celebrate. And I'm now able to do that through the community. But I'm also able to do it through the magazine.
We're about two and a half years into the community. We have about 750 members in 35 countries, and we're five issues in on the magazine, and we have 30,000 subscribers, which I wasn't expecting that kind of growth. But I think people are really... They're thirsting for not only a digital magazine, but also a physical magazine. So we are both a physical magazine and a digital.
And I think people love to read about outliers. I think people love to hear the stories of those brave people who buck the system and are rebels or black sheep or mavericks. So those are the people I like to celebrate.
So when I started my company, Something New, 10 years ago, giving back to me was super important. But I had a huge problem. And the huge problem was I'm a total control freak. So I did not want to take any VC money because I didn't want anybody to tell me what to do.
So I'm like, how am I going to give back when I'm literally bootstrapping this business and I'm pouring every penny that I'm making back into the business? So I sat back and I'm like, well, what are my assets? And my assets were not a gigantic bank account that I could write checks to these organizations that I cared about.
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