Building Businesses: Lessons from a Career of Wins & Losses 6-2-25
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What are the key lessons from building businesses?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Again, before I get started, I am so thankful to our listeners, our sponsors, our guests, just having a tremendous run with the podcast, past 7 million downloads, and ranked really highly in the Apple list. Thank you so much. Today's discussion is building businesses lessons from a career of wins and losses. So lots of wins, lots of losses. And I'm just going to go through about 10 points on this building businesses, wins and losses. The first background I'll give, I'll start with this. I've been involved in building two successful businesses. First, a healthcare media company known as Becker's Healthcare that became really successful with a great team and great leadership in several niches.
Second healthcare legal practice originally built in a specific niche and then grew into several other niche practices and areas as we got bigger and more successful. I've also served on the board of a company that sold for nearly a billion dollars. I've served on a couple other boards. Some of those were successful. Some of those were not. I've had the chance by background to invest in venture capital and private equity funds, including with Andreessen Horowitz, one of the best known venture capital funds, incredibly successful people. I've also invested in several startup companies throughout my career. Some of those went well. Some of those went to zero. Zero is always a bad thing. I've started several businesses.
A couple of them have been very successful. A couple of them have completely failed or petered out. We've seen both of that. I've made lots of investments. Some have been successful. Some have been total disasters. In fact, some of the ones I thought were real wins ended up being real losers. We'll talk a lot this afternoon about building teams, niches, and a lot more, and try and also give some of my most miscellaneous points that I love to talk about. So I hope you enjoy this. What we're going to try and do again is discuss common lessons from wins and losses. So the core concept I'll start with next is teams. Every success I've had has been built around building teams.
How does team building contribute to business success?
And every failure I had was really where I didn't make the effort to want to put in the time to seriously build teams. where I've served on companies' boards, and I'll just go through this real quick. One of the boards I served on early, a company called Ambulatory Surgical Centers of America, they had droves of brilliant people, a ton of A-plus leaders, they ended up having huge success for a long period of time. Similar example, Physicians Endoscopy ran by a gentleman, Barry Tanner, significant success over a very long period of time and really succeeded with that team and that growth, ultimately sold to, went through several different private equity funds over the course of 25, 30 years, and then finally sold to Optum United for some crazy amount of money.
The flip side is I've been involved in a board where they had one supernova leader, but ultimately that was the be-all and end-all. They ultimately sold the company for a number that was not very exciting, and largely because you can't go very far with just one supernova leader. It just doesn't work. This leads me to the next point. There's this constant discussion today about the myth of the solopreneur, what I call the myth of the solopreneur. Peter Diamantes, brilliant business person says, we're going to see a unicorn built around a solopreneur soon. And he may be right. I have a very hard time buying into this concept of a solopreneur. I'm a believer. You've got to build teams if you want to be successful.
I am a believer that, yes, you have to outsource stuff. And I still believe very strongly you need a core team, but outsource everything beyond your core team. In building the media company, we decided we needed editorial staff. We needed a conference team. We needed a sales team. In a sense, we outsourced everything else for a very, very long time. We still don't have a receptionist.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What are the key lessons from building businesses?
0:00–2:19
2
How does team building contribute to business success?
2:19–12:02
3
What is the importance of focusing on niches in business?
12:02
4
How can businesses effectively outsource tasks?
7:38–10:07
5
What are the stages of a founder's evolution?
10:07–17:03
6
How do you assess competition within a niche?
17:03
7
What strategies can lead to successful investment decisions?
12:40–20:24
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