Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building a Business That Outlasts You (David Grau Sr.)
19 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the Founders Treadmill and how does it affect entrepreneurs?
i was super busy one day and i was doing the hey boss just one quick question you know we couldn't get through a paragraph of anything in our discussion without somebody walking in for me to solve the problem and and i again i was just glowing i felt so good about it and and he finally walked over and just kind of slammed the door and he said Would you just stop it? This isn't a law practice.
This is a business. And it can't go any further than you if you're going to keep doing that. And I was kind of stunned. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm solving all the problems. Everybody needs me. And that was the point at which I realized I was on the founder's treadmill.
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
back again back again for another episode of like it says in the opening the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to go and today beaming into the studio from lexington kentucky i have an awesome guest if you are somebody that is a business builder you're trying to build a business you're thinking about building a business this guy has got you cold he is the founder and ceo of grouse esquire law group
national healthcare law firm representing physicians and healthcare founders. That was his previous life. And then he kind of fell in love becoming a consultant for small business and teaching you how to build a business that is going to last or outlast you. Anyway, he has published many books, including the stewardship advantage book,
building with the end in mind, and acquiring your future through a succession plan. We are lucky to have him and can't wait to learn from him. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is David Grau, Sr. David, how are you? Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
What a great way to end the week.
Yeah, a great way to end the week. So yeah, I've got y'all hyped up now. So obviously you were early in life, an attorney by trade. That's what you did. Tell me about the end of that career and pivoting into the new one.
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Chapter 2: How can a solopreneur transition to a CEO mindset?
Well, so I came out of college in the Midwest, and I was an English major. And from day one, I wanted to write books. But, you know, we're not all Stephen King. And I realized I also needed to make a living. And so I chose a profession that I thought would give me a chance to do a lot of writing. And I went to law school. And so I ended up...
in the securities trade i was a securities regulator right out of law school i graduated past the bar and eventually opened up my own securities law practice and not not a lot of writing certainly nothing creative um in that line of work so um i got into law and you know i made a good living i started my own small business and i was a sole proprietorship which was kind of my dream come true.
My dad and my grandfather, you know, they were all sole proprietors in their life. So I had to do it. But lo and behold, I kind of stumbled into a consulting business where I worked with independent financial advisors. Think, you know, the advisors under Charles Schwab, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade or, you know, Ameriprise. But I started working with them and really enjoyed
the work and obviously my securities law background, you know, parlayed into a really good meeting of the minds. And so what I did is I started a consulting business. You know, when we opened it in the late 1990s, I thought of it as eHarmony for financial advisors. You know, we were going to be the company that matched them up using this newfangled thing called the Internet. And
And that worked well enough. But I liked the consulting. I came to love teaching. And so during that career, I got up on stage a thousand times. I actually tracked them. And I got to teach what it was I did to the people in that audience. And most of the people I talked to they were sole proprietors too. And if they weren't, they thought like sole proprietors.
And so what I did is I learned how to help them think long term. So why build a business that dies with you?
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Chapter 3: Why are most small businesses not considered investable?
Why build a small business that statistically will last 10 years and then fade out of existence? Let's build it right. Let's build it to last. And let's take care of everybody that that small business touches. And so little by little over the last 30 years, I became an expert at building and rescuing small businesses. And it's what I love to do.
So when you walk into a, let's say you walk into a small business. And to me, I'm of the opinion that all businesses kind of run the same. The fundamentals are the same. You know, everything is kind of the same, just the widgets change, right? Just whatever's going out the door, product or service is the only thing really that changes.
But, you know, cost of goods and KPIs and all of those things kind of are the same, no matter what you're. So what is, if you had to say, what's the overwhelming number one thing that most people in small business, what's the biggest mistake?
I'm working on my newest book right now to answer that question. The book is called The Founder's Treadmill. The first thing that most, I think, small businesses stumble over is they make themselves the center of the business. It gives you total control. It feels wonderful. you're the smartest guy or the smartest lady in the room.
And your whole day is made up of, hey boss, just one quick question. And you do that all week long.
And you know- I'm sorry to cut you off. I feel like I've gone from a podcast into a therapy session right now. You are, yeah, keep going. This is going to be, if you listen to this, I'm turning this into a therapy session right now. I'm stealing this man's time, which is very expensive.
Go ahead. Literally, that is where my work starts. And so I don't style myself as a coach. I am a consultant, and I'm a teacher, and I love that.
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Chapter 4: What is the importance of creating an internal succession plan?
But trying to get a sole proprietor who feels great about their work and loves going into that office every day to say, yes but um there might actually a better better way because when you know uh let's say that you're super successful your business grows really fast in about year six or seven or eight um you hit
in the neighborhood of a million dollars gross that's usually where you run into kind of a wall you just don't have any more hours in the day there isn't any more energy and and all the people you've hired have been trained to come to you with every problem and all of a sudden you find out hey, maybe I don't own a business. I think I own a job. I have a job. Yeah. Overhead.
I mean, that's, that's, that's not a good place to end up, you know, seven or eight years down the road.
So one of my good friends, one of my good friends, Kent Clothier always said, if you want to really see where you're at, go out of town, go out of town for three months, come back. And if your business is completely crumbled, you don't own a business. You have a job.
Yep. And ultimately, while you're there, you're the bottleneck. And nobody wants to admit that or say that because for a long time, there was no small business without you and what you did and how you did it. I mean, it's not like you opened it up and jumped on that treadmill and made a mistake. No, that's how you start a small business. The key is you have to learn...
when to get off and and maybe understand why you know if we can get you to recognize the problem and learn the why then how is easy and so that's where i start well i've got see with with us just to let you know a little bit of background on me if you don't know but we own a very large luxury real estate brokerage in vegas um we're in a very large mortgage company we own a large title company and
For us, the real estate company itself has 585 agents. And the issue that I've always seen it within, especially the real estate industry, is the brokerage business in itself is kind of a commodity. You know what I mean? It's soup cans on a shelf. It's just this one might cost that much, this one might cost this much. But for the most part of it, we all kind of do the same thing.
So what makes one brokerage different from the other, and this is the problem I have in reconciling this, is the culture that's created by the leadership within it, which is why you have that like, man, I can't get out. I can't stop being that person that is the figurehead of the company. I can't stop being the day-to-day available to everybody. So you're on that track.
So I have that side of that coin, right?
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Chapter 5: How can hiring a professional bookkeeper lead to business freedom?
But here's my flip side. I have come to realize in some of this that being a solopreneur, if you will, I have a partner, but being a solopreneur, you always say, I can't replace myself in this one position because nobody, the lie we tell ourselves is nobody will ever do it as good as me. Nobody will ever be me in that position.
And what I've come to understand over years of struggling with exactly what we're talking about is If I can just get somebody that can do the job, 80% as good as I can, that's a win. And here's why. Because the extra 20% is just ego anyway. It's not real. So if they're doing it at my perceived 80% is good, they're probably 120% better than I was anyway. They're probably better at it than I was.
Yeah. How do I reconcile those two things?
I remember in my second small business, I was sitting there one day and I brought in an outside consultant to kind of help me see around the next corner because I was out of hours and I was out of energy. And so I had a law degree. They don't teach you one minute of how to run a business in a law school.
And so I sat down with a consultant and he followed me around and watched what I was doing for a long time. And finally, I was super busy one day and I was doing the, hey, boss, just one quick question. We couldn't get through a paragraph of anything in our discussion without somebody walking in for me to solve the problem. And again, I was just glowing. I felt so good about it.
And he finally walked over and just kind of slammed the door and he said, would you just stop it? This isn't a law practice. This is a business and it can't go any further than you if you're gonna keep doing that. And I was kind of stunned and I thought, Wait a minute, I'm solving all the problems. Everybody needs me.
And that was the point at which I realized I was on the founder's treadmill and I had to figure out a way to get off. But like any good small business owner and entrepreneur, I pushed back initially and I said, well, wait a minute. I mean, why should we go higher ahead of marketing? I'm passionate.
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Chapter 6: What are the biggest mistakes small business owners make?
I know this stuff called. I get up on stage and I can sell it. I can talk to the audience. I can get them to call us and sign up. We don't need a head of marketing. I'm head of marketing. And I went, well, who's going to run the company? I'm like, I'm going to run the company as head of marketing and a CEO. And he goes, and CEO and CFO and CMO. you're gonna run out of lifetime.
And so what we did next though, and I still remember this and I tell this story now, 25 years later, We went out and we hired a head of marketing. First time I'd ever done that, right? And this lady came in and she had a degree in marketing. She had years of experience in the field, actually working for one of the broker dealers that we helped service. And she was great at it.
She put together an annual marketing plan and she'd pair it up with a budget.
every week every month we knew what we were going to do we knew what we wanted from the marketing plan we knew how many clients what kind of clients who was going to service them we had a growth rate tied to it we could look a year ahead and say we're going to need three more people to do the work i mean it made all the sense in the world right after i saw it and i realized okay so i probably wasn't the best head of marketing and then we went out and brought in a head of sales
And then little by little, we brought in a CFO. We brought in a CIO. And all these pieces go into place. You sit back and you realize, oh, I'm not the best at all of those things. In fact, all the people we just hired last year in their particular skill set are better than me.
so over the course of the years to come i learned that as i did less and i made fewer decisions and i delegated more the business actually got stronger and grew faster i wouldn't believe it if i hadn't seen it sure no no so so what would you say to a guy like me that says that like well the problem is we've got to be those people because otherwise you know we we are you know in this particular business
We are, you know, plumbing business, nobody cares who shows up to fix the toilet. They just want it fixed.
You know what I mean? And great question. And so I wrote a book to answer that question. It's called Building with the End in Mind. And so in this book, I talk about a story where I sit down with an entrepreneur like you and I say, so how do you want your story to end? what's the last day on the job look like for you? And we're not talking, you know, fire a tragic end here. Do you want to retire?
The FBI in handcuffs leads you out. No, that's what we're after. Nothing but positive. But, you know, do you want to sell the business, you know, for, you know, $15 million? How would you like your story to end? And I've learned to ask that question and then just listen. And very few people, relatively speaking, want to sell it, walk away, and then figure out what to do next.
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Chapter 7: How does AI impact the future of small businesses?
And there's all these trades, just different kinds of businesses out there with no succession plan whatsoever. No thought to it.
And my argument is, compare the math to a full sale, I'm done, to I'm going to throttle back on the job, learn to delegate, and surround myself with people who are better than me as my business grows at 20, 25% a year, every year for the next 10 years, according to a professional marketing and sales plan. The money internally, by building it and staying, far exceeds that lump sum check.
And what you do is you get paid over the course of the last 10, 15, 20 years of your career, wages plus profits plus equity income when you sell your stock plus stock appreciation. Add all that up over the course of a decade or more, it's the right answer.
Yeah, it's far better than an exit.
The problem with an exit is all of a sudden you've got nothing to do. Most entrepreneurs aren't wired that way.
Well, no, or what's even worse is you go from having a company to literally having a job for two and a half to three years. You have to sit in the seat and you're like, why did I do it? Now I'm an employee of this company and why would I have done this to myself? I've had a couple of friends that have had some pretty decent exits that involved them staying on as an employee.
And, you know, I like to think that one of the things that makes people great entrepreneurs is the fact that they're chronically unemployable. And then, yeah. And then you put them in that situation. And I just, I don't know anybody that's been like, I'm super happy being an employee. They're just counting the days until they can step out based on their exit.
And then, and then in most cases, a lot of those guys just wait out their non-compete and then go start again, the same kind of business. Yeah.
overnight yeah so you know the the work that i do you know building with the end in mind is um if you want to build a business i'll call it equity centric right it's got to we have to set up an entity structure as corporate llc we have to give it shares of stock well shares of stock have to have a value well in order to have a value you have to have
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Chapter 8: What strategies can help retain top talent in a business?
So what I help them do is, and it can take four or five years to get all this stuff set up and done right, but we help them build a growing, valuable, profitable, investable business.
So what if somebody comes to you and they're, let's just say they're in a Red Sea business where there's tons of competition, and again, they say, I am the value here, and that's not investable. Do you advise them to pivot? Do you find blue ocean? What do you do there?
Well, and every situation is different. I agree with you that Most small businesses, and I tend to work in the professional services sector, you know, doctors, lawyers, dentists, architects, engineers, consultants, etc. And for that swath, they are mostly the same. But, you know, let me answer this. And here's kind of a funny story.
You know, when I first started out in the financial services industry, so, you know, they don't call them stockbrokers anymore. They're money managers or RIAs, registered investment advisors. I would go out on the road and I'd get up on stage in front of an audience of 150, 200 of these people, and I would tell them,
world is changing um you know along with the internet um we've created a marketplace and every time we list a practice for sale you know you work for you know charles rob you're an independent contractor a sole proprietor and you've got 150 clients you get 200 million in assets under management and and you gross you know
900 000 a year and i tell them that that practice you built has a value ascertainable an appraiser could tell you that but better yet let the marketplace tell you that and if you don't like the answer don't sell it if you do like the answer Now you have something to consider.
Oh, I take those meetings. I love those meetings when people want to sit down with us and tell us what our, you know, we want to buy your company. All right, cool. Yeah, let's have a meeting because it's just, for me, it's just a free valuation. It's a free price.
That's right. You know, for the first time, four or five years that I did this, you know, literally starting January 1st, year 2000. I would get off the stage and walk down, and afterwards, these guys would come up to me, and they were all guys back then. They're all white guys. That was the industry 25 years ago. But they would walk up and say, There's no value in what I do.
My clients wouldn't be here if it weren't for me. All they wanna do is work with me. So no one would buy it because they can't possibly replace me. But I mean, they're literally arguing against their own best interest here. And I'm telling them, I'm not telling you that you should sell or you have to sell. This is like owning a house when the real estate market is strong.
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