Joshua Waldron

Bio

Joshua Waldron is the founder of SilencerCo, the company he built from a garage and less than five thousand dollars into the largest manufacturer in its industry, doubling revenue every year for a decade. He has held executive roles at Vista Outdoor and served as interim CEO of Ball and Buck, and he advises mid-market companies as an embedded operator.

He was paralyzed at 15. He destroyed the wheelchair anyway and has been walking ever since, on forearm crutches and leg braces that have become as ordinary to him as shoes. He’s spent his career proving that the path of least resistance is rarely the path worth taking.

Hard Is Fun is the worldview that has organized his life since the hospital bed at 15. He writes, speaks, and consults from that single conviction. Joshua lives in Virginia with his family. To learn more about Joshua and the Hard Is Fun brand: [email protected] www.hardisfun.com

Intro

Joshua Waldron's extraordinary journey from a paralyzed teenager to a successful entrepreneur is a testament to the power of resilience and grit. After a devastating car accident at the age of 15 left him with a grim prognosis, Joshua defied the odds, teaching himself to walk again and subsequently embarking on a remarkable career in business. In 2008, amidst economic turmoil, he took a bold leap into the defense manufacturing sector, an industry typically shunned by others due to its complexities and regulatory challenges. Over a decade, he doubled his company's revenue each year, ultimately achieving $70 million in annual sales while developing profound insights into the nature of productive difficulty. This episode delves into Joshua’s philosophy on embracing challenges and his newly released book, "Productive Difficulty," which encapsulates his experiences and strategies for thriving in adversity.

Conversation

A conversation unfolds between Jothy Rosenberg and Joshua Waldron, where Waldron recounts his remarkable journey from a life-altering accident at the tender age of 15 to becoming a leading figure in the defense manufacturing industry. Following a catastrophic car accident that left him paralyzed and with a dire prognosis, Waldron's refusal to accept limitations catalyzed a profound transformation in his life. Ignoring the bleak predictions of medical professionals, he embarked on a rigorous journey of physical rehabilitation, ultimately teaching himself to walk again. This indomitable spirit persisted as he transitioned into the business realm, where he founded a manufacturing company amidst the tumult of the 2008 recession—a decision many deemed reckless. This episode highlights the core themes of resilience and the necessity of embracing hardship as a pathway to success. Waldron emphasizes that the most rewarding experiences often arise from confronting challenges head-on, a philosophy that permeates his newly published book, 'Productive Difficulty.' Through Waldron's narrative, listeners glean valuable insights into the nature of grit, the importance of seeking out difficult paths, and the transformative power of adversity in both personal and professional contexts.

Takeaways

• Joshua Waldron's journey from paralysis to building a $70 million company exemplifies resilience and determination.
• Choosing to enter a challenging market often leads to unique opportunities that competitors overlook.
• The importance of establishing proper systems before scaling a business cannot be overstated; neglecting this can result in significant losses.
• Best practices should serve merely as a foundation for developing customized strategies tailored to specific business needs.
• The concept of 'productive difficulty' emphasizes that embracing challenges can lead to personal and professional growth.
• Vertical integration allowed Joshua to maintain control over quality and production timelines, showcasing a strategic approach to business.

Useful links:

• Who Says You Can't Startup | Full Bundle | Incorrigible Entrepreneur - The online course for startup founders
• Jothy's TEDx talk - On why those with disabilities tend to overachieve
• The Who Says I Can't Foundation - Jothy's non-profit that helps disabled kids get back into a sport they love to restore their self-esteem
• Our YouTube channel
• Designing Successful Startups — Jothy Rosenberg | Author | Speaker | Podcaster - Site with all podcasts
• Tech Startup Toolkit book
• Please leave us a review

Hello. Please meet today's guest, Joshua Waldron.

In that part of the industry, it was a very obscure. It's like $10 million. All competitors in that industry is around that amount. And I doubled revenue every year for 10 years.

And when I exited the company, we were at 70 million in annual revenue.

At 15, Joshua Walden was told he'd never walk again. Paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident, doctors handed him a wheelchair and a prognosis, nothing else.

He walked away from a successful photography career to build a manufacturing company in one of the most highly regulated corners of the defense industry. No experience, no playbook, just an industry everyone else was avoiding. Which is exactly why he chose it.

He doubled revenue every year for a decade, grew the company to $70 million, and turned everything he learned about grit, regulation, and vertical integration into a new book called Productive Difficulty. This is a conversation about choosing the hard path on purpose. Let's get into it. Well, hello Joshua, and welcome to my podcast.

Thank you for allowing me to be on your podcast. It's great to be here.

I'd like to start with a simple context setting question that people seem to like, which is could you just tell us where you're originally from and where do you live now?

Born and raised in, in, in Alpine, which is a small farming community south of Salt Lake City, and then moved into Salt Lake when I was a, an adult and was there for, for years and years. And that's where most of my career, I mean, obviously all of my career start and, and a lot of the movement was there before I came here.

So you have something of a disability. What happened? And after you tell us what that was, what were you told your life would be like after that incident?

I was, I was 15 years old and out on a, a night out on the town with some friends and you know, we're on a date and we were driving too fast, slid across into the oncoming traffic, got in a head on collision. Long story short, I was never supposed to even live. I was dead on arrival, revived. And then I was told that I was never going to walk again.

I broke my spine and. Paralyzed from the waist down. And, you know, waking up in the hospital a couple weeks later, I was in a. In a coma.

And to find that news was Fairly devastating at 15 years old, especially when, you know, growing up in Utah, I was just really close to all of the natural, amazing beauty that Utah has and all of the recreation that accompanies that natural beauty. So I lived outside. I was extreme sports guy. And it was just. My whole. My whole world was just like a rug pulled out from under me.

And the doctors would not allow me to even try to walk. I said, I really want to try to stand in parallel bars with the leg braces. I'm. You know, I see people on TV do it, like, why can't I do it?

And the doctor said, because you don't have the balance, and you're never going to have the function, and you don't have the ability to do that, and it's a liability if I prescribe those braces to you. So, no.

So about six months later, after I had gone through the process of learning how to be in a wheelchair, my life in a wheelchair, that was basically what my rehab consisted of. There was no trying to figure out where my capabilities actually were. It was just. They put me in a box, gave me a prognosis, and said, this is it.

And so about six months later, I had. I ran into a guy, and he said, you know, I have an acquaintance. He's a.

He's the weight training coach for the BYU football team, and he does some experimental work with spinal cord patients. You might want to go and check it out. So I went down.

First thing I noticed when I walked in was he had a shelf full of braces that people don't need anymore. And I saw a guy struggling to walk with a cane and immediately learned that he was a quadriplegic for over 15 years and was on a ventilator.

Couldn't move his hands or legs or anything. And there he was walking with nothing. No braces, just a cane. And so I strapped on his braces that he used and no longer needed.

And that's what I used to learn how to walk for the. For another year or so before I convinced a family friend who was a physician to get me the prescriptions that I needed to get my own braces made.

But, you know, five years of physical therapy, five days a week, two hours a day, Was a, was a lot for a 15 year old and going through high school that way and, and you know, it really created and started the idea that challenges and overcoming challenges and leaning into challenges is really where the most enjoyable parts of life are. And I think we can all look back on even the most challenging, taxing, trying times of our lives with reverence.

And maybe we don't ever want to repeat that area, but it's special and it's special because it's significant and it's significant because it means a lot more than doing nothing.

And that's, that's really the, the antithesis and the start of my entire thesis here that my entire psychology of, of hard things and doing hard things is, is from that one experience and then, and then, you know, snowballing from there.

So speaking of snowballing, were you a pretty hot skier by the age of, of 15?

I was, yeah. I mean at 15 I was already pelly skiing backcountry skiing. Snowbird is, was my favorite ski resort in Utah.

If your listeners are skiers, they'll know that's the best resort in North America as far as I'm concerned.

And before, when I was a kid, when I was skiing before my accident, the whole backside of that mountain had not opened yet and it was all back country.

And it just so happened that I lived on the other side of that mountain so I could pretend like I was going to the bus stop, get on a city bus that would then get me to the slopes. It would take about two hours to get there. I would ski all day.

The last run of the day, I would go up on the tram and then go off the backside of the, of the mountain and ski home and get home before my parents knew I didn't go to school.

And, and I, and, and I, I focused my like 40 years on Alta right next door.

Yeah, I love Alta. Yeah.

And now, and they share a backside or if they do, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And in fact, I, I, I loved Alta, but I, I often never went there because a lot of my friends that I would, would go on the slopes with were snowboarders and they don't allow snowboarding. So. Yeah, it's great, great area though.

Well, it's funny because lots of snowboarders that are friends of mine out here in the east, they, they sort of look down their nose and they say, and they treat Alta like it's the same class as Deer Valley, that they're being snobs. But I, I was there long enough and I got to Know everybody that they had three deaths.

They allowed snowboarders early on and they had three deaths off the high traverse.

Oh, wow.

Because, because what happened was if you're, you know, if you're skiing along and you fall head first into deep powder, but your feet are trapped in a snowboard, you're in very big trouble and they die. And whereas if you're a skier, you're probably your skis came off or.

And if not, you can, if you can get your hand out, you can knock them off and, and then you can get out of the situation. Anyway.

That's an, that's interesting. I never knew that,.

But I have.

Been caught upside down in snow several times.

But you're a skier. You were a skier, not a board, right?

Yeah, I was a skier.

Yeah. It's interesting. We have some, some real distinct parallels. So, you know, you were 15 and I was 16. Yours was an accident. Mine was cancer.

Took a leg and I was, I was also told non stop can't, which is why this other book is called who says I Can't?

I love it. Yeah.

And they were saying, well, you can't ski again. And if you tried to bike, you'd fall right over. And if you tried to swim, you'd swim in a circle. And it was like, it was ridiculous. It was nonstop.

But I also had the, you know, additional whammy of three years later, the cancer spread. And this time I was told, and no one has ever survived when that happens, which was like a 19 year old hearing, you are going to die.

And, and that's why I quit school and became a ski bum at Alta, just to tie it back. That's amazing. And had, you know, and then I just skied and I thought I would drop dead while I was there, and I didn't.

But what I want to tie it to, both of our experiences, the willingness to take on something as hard as a startup, you know, maybe we can move sort of move to that and you can tell us a little bit about. You kind of did some crazy things here. You started a manufacturing company without knowing anything about manufacturing.

I did.

You can. Absolutely. Yeah. And.

And I'm going to back up just a little bit because getting into that profession was kind of a. I often describe it as I was standing next to a river, kind of putting my toe in the water and the Rapids sucked me down.

Never a million years had I thought I was going to start a manufacturing company in the defense space in a highly regulated market, highly regulated industry, in a very difficult, challenging time, not knowing anything about manufacturing, not knowing anything about even running a company.

Before that, I was a photographer and a musician for the first 10, 12 years of my career, and I was a studio musician and I did editorial photography for magazines. And so I came from the art world.

I'd already looked at things very different from most startups, especially a startup that's so dramatically in the numbers and math side of the house with engineering.

And the reason that I chose that was because that industry in that time was because I looked at where we were politically, where we were socially, where we were in the industry. I took all of these different indicators and it exposed all of these opportunities that were very easily seen.

If you remove the filter of hard, if you, if, if you took away the daunting task to create an industry in a highly regulated market, which is the defense industry, to create a new industry or, or I should say not a new industry, but reviving an old, old antiquated industry.

And, and to do that was just market research and looking at all of these different indicators and realizing very quickly that everyone was choosing to avoid it. And I was like, why?

And, and the, and the, the answers that that question gave me was because it was hard and that was the only reason because people didn't really understand how to do it or it was too much of a heavy lift or whatever it was. And so I was like, yep, I'm leaning in. This is the business model I'm choosing because everyone else is avoiding it and I'm going to do it.

And that was the single best decision that I ever made because it created that, that niche, that part of the industry.

And forgive my vagueness, I want to keep things a little confidential on this one, but in that part of the industry, it was a very obscure, it's like $10 million. All competitors in that industry is around that amount. And I doubled revenue every year for 10 years.

And when I exited the company, we were at 70 million in annual revenue. So I created a new market basically. And I did that by a myriad of different steps, right?

So one of the first things with regulation is like, if you want to make the environment better, then you have to reduce the regulation, you have to change laws, get rid of the red tape, all of those kinds of things.

And I, and I realized, you know, growing up in a farming community, I never really understood the political or the legislative process or lobbying or any of that. And I went out guns blazing, went to D.C. tried to make some waves. And I.

No congressman or senator would talk to me because I was representing my company. So I said, well, I didn't know that you couldn't represent your company. It makes a lot of sense. You know, I was young and dumb.

I didn't realize the, all of the news that talked about, you know, campaign contributions coming from, from, you know, donors that were this and that. So I didn't have any concept of this. I was just like, okay, let's learn about this. And, and so learning. I created an ngo. So I had.

Now I had to go to all of our competitors, all of my competitors and say, hey, I want to change things, sign up for this ngo. And everybody was very reluctant. They're like, ah, this new guy is coming in, shaking stuff up. And.

But I ended up getting that NGO founded and it's still thriving today without any, in, you know, without any influence for me at all. It has a full executive staff and everything. But after I started that, we changed 37 state laws in four years.

And then it took about 12 years to, to reduce the red tape to make a viable industry and basically open up a more commercial route for that same product. So I basically just created my own market. And it wasn't, what are you doing for a paycheck? That is the thing about startups. I was poor, thankfully.

I, I did very well as a photographer, musician, and I was able to pay my house off. And so I leveraged my house and I lived on my home equity line for two and a half years without taking a salary.

And then the next two years, I had to supplement my salary with my credit line because I only put myself at a $60,000 salary as CEO of a company for two years. So it was hard. Yeah, there were, there were very few pieces of furniture and things left in my house.

I sold everything that wasn't bolted down to survive that.

The one thing I'm missing so far is you were a very successful photographer. You just told us you paid off your house with that success. And so. But now you made a decision to take kind of a step backwards.

And yeah, I, I got that it's something hard you learned about, but why did you. There were a lot of, There are a lot of hard things, and you probably could have found something hard in, in, in your art world.

But what made you decide that you wanted to leave the art world?

It was kind of a long, a long time Coming and, and, and what's interesting about it is I write in depth about how strategies change and how we should not set a strategy and just run, run it to ground without double checking, without, you know, having check ins and that kind of stuff. And that this is one of those instances that was right in there as a great example of that.

And the reason being is, yeah, I did have a great career and I was known regionally for my profile, my color profiles, for my photography and you know, digital photographers don't even really understand what that means.

But I took every film made, I ran tests on with, and created a booklet with saying, okay, if I use this film and then I process it this way and I shoot it this way, this is the color profile that it turns out to be and look like.

And I had this huge book of color profiles so my clients could just say, yep, I like this look and feel and I would know exactly what film to shoot, how to light it and all that kind of stuff.

But as soon as Photoshop and a lot of these tools and digital photography and things started to really be prolific at the time those color profiles started become digital to where it would be like a one click kind of a thing. And it took the fun out of it. It made it so that there was, you know, someone that didn't have the expertise that I could, could fake it.

And that took a lot of the value and the authenticity out of the entire like idea of it.

And I started to get burned out and then my day rate started to go down because, you know, digital photography was a lot easier and in house photography was a lot cheaper and all this kind of stuff. And, and so I, you know, if I had my framework that I write about now, back then it would have been a very clear, very easy, quick decision.

But I had to basically come to terms with the fact that like what was serving me once is not anymore.

And I just didn't have that significance, that excitement that I, that I really love about working, especially when it's something that's so meaningful. And I just had to, I had to do something else. I just had to do like, I had to, I had to enjoy photography again.

And the only way to do that was to not do it professionally. So that was, that was basically.

That makes so much sense. I, that fills that gap for me. Okay, so you spent this 12 years as a starving startup CEO, like almost literally.

You were. Well, thankfully about year four, five or five, it started getting real fun. So, so it wasn't all starving, but.

Okay, so so it wasn't 12 years that, that it took you to start making money as this, as this company. But, but it took a, a few years before you were, you know, gonna start this doubling of, of revenues every year.

Once that started, once you had, you know, manufacturing figured out, I'm, you know, you had to go find someone who could manufacture these high tech devices and but I'm sure you were able to find that. And then, and then you had to sort of, now you had an interesting problem. You had to pay the manufacturer before of course, you sold anything.

You know, you had to prime the pump a little bit before you were able to, to, to really start things going well after that first initial, it's starting to go, you know, the engine is running, I'm pretty sure, because never, never is true for any startup. I know that. You know, everything goes perfectly.

So what kind of hiccups or challenges or mistakes, you know, happened to you where you had a big surprise and you had, you learned something that you had to fix?

Yeah, there's a lot of them. And let me kind of go back a little bit and make a little correction on you. So I actually did not go out source manufacturing.

One of the decisions that I made, which was an extremely hard decision at the time as well, was to be vertically integrated.

And the reason that I did that is because the industry was small enough and the licensing that the manufacturing had to hold made it so that outsourced manufacturing only had a few vendors available. Which means that all of the competitors are running the exact same playbook. Exactly, because they were all using the same people.

And, and I was like, no, this, this can't happen. Like, we have to control this. If we're going to do the best of the world, then we have to have the best manufacturing in the world.

And that was very hard in the time when banks didn't want to give money. You know, back before the Great Recession, you could go to a SBA or you could go to a bank with a good business plan and sometimes get funded.

Or if you didn't have a good business plan, you'd have a good asset that you could put up as collateral. And the recession changed the banking rules and from then on it has to be cash flow based.

And so like starting up a company as you know, is a lot harder than it used to be because of just that like the cat, the access to capital is a lot harder. You have to go straight to equity capital raising and things like that when you want to do a startup.

Because SBA just Does not help small business unless you have like years of profitability. Which is stupid, right?

Yeah, it is.

And so you know, we had to make that choice early on to say, you know what, it's worth it because we'll own the process, we'll own the quality and we won't be gated by the schedule of outside manufacturing or the quality of outside manufacturing or the price.

And so we just brought in one machine at a time and we learned that machine and learned how to implement the machine and learn how to program the machine and then we optimized the machine and then we got another one and, and, and then that those iteration steps created that loop of self efficacy and those wins and that, that, that excitement. And then you start hiring people that are also excited because they've seen you do this and, and you start bringing in all of the right people.

And then I'm like, hey, anodizing is a serious problem. It's very difficult to, to like deal with, outsource manufacture anodizing, we need to bring that in.

I had everyone that I talked to say do not do that. Anodizing is very hard. That is not your core. Don't do it.

I did it and I did it so well, in fact that our quality was so well that we started doing our competitors anodizing and it became a profit center for us.

And so that was kind of the ethos is hey, if we can do this, we're going to do this and we're going to learn how to do it and we're going to take that knowledge and expand it to the next thing.

My staff implemented robotic arms and lights out manufacturing and all sorts of automations that most companies spend millions of dollars paying consultants to implement that machinery. We did it all in house. And so it was a very, very difficult but very poignant choice at the time.

That isn't the right choice for every startup, that's for sure.

Sorry for the interruption, but in addition to the podcast, you might also be interested in the online program I've created for startup founders called who says yous Can't Start Up In It, I've tried to capture everything I've learned in the course of founding and running nine startups over 37 years. It's four courses, each one about 15 video lessons, plus over 130 downloadable resources across all four courses.

Each course individually is only $375. The QR code will take you where you can learn more.

Now back to the podcast when, when you went to get the first big machine that you needed for doing, you know, the manufacturing. Were you able to find a used one or lease one or you know, is that a very expensive item?

It was. The first machine that we bought was $285,000 or something like that.

And it was a fully autonomous CNC machine that had dual spindles and live tooling and bar feeding and all of the things that needed to happen to get the most out of one machine so that we didn't have to worry about hiring more than one operator. So we really did put a lot of thought into that one machine. But then the question of how do we get this one machine?

We don't have any capability for SBA or companies need, you know, for, for leasing through different machine tool companies. They're going to need the same requirements. And so that was when I started saying, all right, it's time to put a pitch deck together.

I started looking at every kind of private lending that you can find and ended up taking some pretty outrageous hard money loans like 21%, 22% out, you know, just to be able to get what I needed to done because I believed in it that much. And so I think that. And back to your original question about the big surprise or the big mistake when we were just launching Product two.

Product one was a smash hit. We caused obsolescence in the industry where our competitors basically fire sold or removed their products from the industry.

And we just had great success. And, and so the growth was a lot faster than we had anticipated.

Like this to cross the place.

Yeah, I mean we were, we were hitting hockey pucks across the building and doing all, I mean, riding four wheelers through, I mean, just playing around doing stupid stuff. Cause we had so much space.

But over the next, like I would say 18 months, we had about $15 million worth of machinery come in and the amount of orders increased and the amount of people and, and hiring. And then here I am just thinking that I'm on top of the world. I'm seeing all this growth and it's so exciting and it's so fun.

And then I'm like, we don't have an MRP system or CRM or anything that makes accounting or manufacturing easy in any way, shape or form. And I had the backlog that it's just thinking about it now still gives Me anxiety.

And I went to Costco and bought like, a bunch of folding tables and lined them down the.

The floor because, you know, we had 35,000 square feet, so why not just line up a bunch of tables and put receipts, or not receipts, but invoices, order numbers, and try to figure out how to track this terrible system that we had that we didn't have. I should say, remembering this conversation with my partner, that we should probably get an ERP system for manufacturing.

And I remember hearing his voice and me saying, no, we can't afford it. This was a lot more expensive. Me standing out there for days and days and days trying to work out the system was the problem.

Like, and had I had my framework in Productive Difficulty, my book that I'm releasing, I would have known very quickly and very easily that, that, like, that conversation back in that time, the. The money would have been worth it because it was asymmetric payoff in the wrong direction.

That one simple mistake of not getting an ERP system cost us a couple million dollars of. Of interruption, which would have paid for the ERP system.

Well, that's a hard, hard lesson. Okay, it's time to talk about your book a little bit.

So you've mentioned the title, and based on the date we're gonna try to drop this episode, it's going to actually physically be available within three days of when this episode drops.

Awesome. That'll be great.

And it's called Productive Difficulty. And on the YouTube version, I will show you an image of the COVID of the book.

Okay.

And so everybody will know about it, and there'll be no excuse for anybody not, you know, going to the Amazon and, And buying it. But. But tell us a little bit more about it.

I mean, I think we have a kind of a sense because right over your right shoulder there's Hard as Fun, and there. There's something about hard and this book that go together.

So there is indeed. Yeah. And I'm going to tell you how this all kind of came about.

And my daughter is going to an entrepreneurial academy that is basically, it's part of the public school system, but you have to test into it. And it's an entrepreneurial school instead of a regular school. And I was invited to give a master class.

And so I was like, and I'm going to back up a flow further. Hardest fun came from my daughter learning how to ride. I was trying to teach her how to ride a bike, and she kept falling.

And when she was crying, I said, what's wrong? And she said, this is hard. And I said, baby girl, hard is fun.

And it was something I just said, but I repeated it so much through their lives that it became something that we say as a family. And then I made dog tags for him to wear, and I made bracelets for him to wear that said heart is fun.

But really it was more because I wanted them to understand that if you work hard now, it creates a life that you want. And, and obviously the book is a lot more than that, but that was the start.

And so this masterclass, I. I didn't know what topic I wanted to choose, but that I was like, hey, I should do this hardest fun thing. It'd be cool. I could relate it to the family and to, to Isabella and my daughter and, and the whole bit. And so I wrote it and I kept writing.

I wrote the masterclass, then I wrote the book. But the problem was, is I wrote Hard as Fun. And it was stuck between a self personal development book and a business book.

And because to me, a lot of that goes hand in hand because I was driven to be a businessman through my adversity. And so I was like, yeah, there should be this book. But then I realized after I wrote that book that that wasn't the right book.

It's trying to be too much to too many people. So then I was like, nope, I'm going to write this. We're going to do a business book first, and then we're going to.

So I split the two up and I created Hardest Fun as the brand. And the Hardest Fun brand is the soil that the, that the books and the IP and the, and all of that grow from. I think I have.

My dog is going to come in and say hi here in a second.

Dogs are welcome on this podcast.

Oh, good.

And, and so, yeah, so I, I rewrote the book and, and actually Hardest Fun is actually coming out in, in January of 27, but that, that's for another time. But Productive Difficulty is the first book of the, of the split.

And it is business centric and it is about how to create competitive moats around your company to keep your. Your competitors out. And it's by choosing hard things that they don't choose. By running a framework, by.

By working with my matrix, by doing all of the things that it has in the, in the, in the curriculum of the book. It's basically a tool to help you make decisions, the right decisions and run a good strategy that's going in the right direction.

And this goes back to what I think about the term Best practices, which is one of my least favorite terms in the world. And I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a conference room and heard some executives say, well, what's the best practices?

That's the wrong question. Question should be about what the right practices are, not what the best practices are.

So yeah, the, the, the difference between best practices and right practices is, is really what I wanted to really focus on here because you can differentiate the right strategy by just getting out of the mindset that you should be doing best practices. Best practices should only be a baseline. That's, that's a playbook that's already been developed by a lot of other companies.

And that's not where you want to find your unique strategy.

That alone, you know, using the book, using the tools will, will definitely help you decide on, on strategy and which way to go on vertical integration as well as every other question and, and strategy and idea that you have as a company.

Is it self published or.

It is self published.

Yeah.

And you know something that I, that I learned about this because I was holding out for a publisher.

I wanted to get that publisher and then I realized that like 80% of books that are published right now today are published so by self published authors. So I was like, all right, let's look into that.

And I think that it's the right decision because I can control a lot of the marketing and a lot of the, um, you know, they don't edit it and change it. I, I hired my own editor. So they don't, you know, they don't have a, an idea of what they want the book to be. So yep, I did it myself.

I, I, I did self publish this one but, but this one, which is the business book, is through a traditional publisher. But I, I wasn't able to find. I, I like you.

I, I held out for a long time on this book and I finally, after I don't know, a year or so, realized I have to do it myself. And, and it's in his third printing. I mean, it's nice.

Yeah.

Hey, I want to, I want to ask one more question because I like to keep these, you know, reasonably tight. But when I ask you this question, it could mean this is, well, like, like asking myself this question because I want to talk to you about grit.

And we're sitting here, two people who have been through, you know, teenage serious hell and came out the other end with a lot of grit. But relative to startups, every startup founder I've known and I think every Startup founder who exists, has a lot of grip.

And I think obviously what happened to you at 15 contributed a lot to your grip. You must have had a lot, actually beforehand, because you're off at 15 already doing backcountry skiing. And, you know, maybe it was your upbringing.

Maybe it was just living in the Wasatch Mountains. I don't know. Give us your sense of the. The. The origin, the source of your grit.

I mean, growing up as the youngest of six siblings will. Will get you pretty gritty. I had to fight for survival every freaking day, you know, where.

Where a lot of them brothers? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I have two sisters, the rest brothers. And they. Yeah, I mean, we're all very close friends still, but, like, the.

The.

The torturing that they put me through was. Was fairly significant. But. So maybe that contributed. But I think, you know, the accident absolutely contributed.

But the interesting thing with my life and the reason in which I wanted to even start writing books to begin with is because I have always been in very interesting situations. I've always had very interesting opportunities, met interesting people, gone interesting places. I've done so much.

I've lived so much life that people don't even believe me when I'm telling them. Telling them the stories. And. And I don't want to say that, to say that I'm better than anyone else.

I'm saying that because the reason that I've had that life was because I was gritty, right? I had that grit because I was not scared, because I chose to do the hard things, because I put myself out there and stepped outside my.

I lived and do live outside my comfort zone, because I'm naturally just uncomfortable all the time. All the time. I wake up uncomfortable, you know, and then I go to bed uncomfortable, and everything in between. So, like, to me, what's the difference?

Life is hard. It's really hard. And everything that we do, if. If you want to be physically fit, it takes effort.

It takes going to the gym, eating healthy, doing all the things. If you don't, you know, if you. If you don't do those things, that decision is also hard.

Being overweight, being unhealthy, not looking the way you want to, not being able to physically do the things that you want to do. All of that kind of stuff also hard. So the differentiation is not so much grit, because I think we all have grit.

The difference is, is people don't know how to focus that grit into the right places, and they get burned out, and then they have a negative relationship with grit. And Then they stop this book, Productive Difficulty, and the following book for the, for the development side.

Personal development is all about choosing to not be that person. And I'll tell you the story. In Portugal two years ago, I took my family and I really wanted to get to the top of the bell tower in Porto.

It was beautiful bell tower. The amount of stairs was crazy. And it was their stone, super tight, you know, twisty spiral staircase. And I'm on crutches with my leg braces.

I'm paralyzed. And I'm like, I'm getting to the top of that. The question was why? For my kids, my wife, because they know that it's going to be hard for me.

Why do you want to do that? Because I want to see the view. Like, why else, why else does everybody else go up there?

And so on my way up, I'm hearing the laborious, laborious breathing of people that were out of shape. I heard snarky comments of people like saying like, you know, trying to, you know, me showing them up or something like that.

The amount of excuses and the, the complaints and the heavy breathing and the, and the just the bull crap of it all was like, man, these people don't have grit. These people like to allow life to tell them what's possible. And they complain about everything.

What they are failing to see is that it's going to be harder staying sitting at the bottom, looking at the top, wishing that you were there, than it is by doing the hard work. And the hard work is actually the fun part because when you get to the top, fleeting, it's a fleeting moment. You can see the view.

You can say, I'm proud I did it. The climb, it meant something. It changes you, changes your relationship with it. It changes your self efficacy, your grit.

That is where you get your grit is by doing. You cannot earn it any other way.

I agree with you 100%. So I, I do two major things a year that I consider. I call them pilgrimages.

Okay.

Okay. I need to go and do these things that are really hard for people with two legs because I spend every day being reminded that I have.

Either I'm on crutches with one leg or I'm wearing a prosthesis. And those two things are to go ski at a major, you know, Wasatch Mountain. And it's one of the few times where I don't mind being stared at.

I, I, I will ski right past people who are huffing and puffing at the top of the hill. And the other thing I've done every year for 30 years is I swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco. No way.

And not in a circle.

And not in a circle. Isn't that amazing?

Amazing.

And those both are just these. You feel so good afterwards, and it lasts a while, but a year later, you kind of need to do it again.

We use slightly different words to describe the same exact thing. Well, I'll have to get a. I have to get a copy of both books. Okay.

I would appreciate that.

And I will be sending you a copy of this one. Although maybe in your case, I should send both.

I would love both. I love reading. Okay. And I would love to. I would love to read both.

I will send you both books. And I want to thank you for doing this.

Yeah. This has been a fun conversation. I really appreciate it.

Great. Now for your toolkit takeaway. Lesson 1. The hardest markets are often the most open.

Joshua built a $70 million company inside a highly regulated industry everyone else avoided precisely because the difficulty scared off the competition. If a market looks too hard to enter, look closer. That difficulty might just be your moat.

Lesson 2 Stop asking what the best practices are and start asking what the right practices are for you.

Joshua chose vertical integration when everyone told him not to, controlling manufacturing quality and schedule instead of outsourcing to the same vendors his competitors used. Best practices are a floor, not a strategy. Lesson 3 Growth without infrastructure is its own kind of failure.

Joshua's company scaled so fast, he was tracking orders on folding tables from Costco, and skipping a proper ERP system cost him millions of. When growth outpaces your systems, fix the systems before you keep pushing forward.

Now go find the market everyone else is avoiding and ask yourself if the reason they're avoiding it is actually the reason to run toward it. And that is our show with Joshua. The show notes contain useful resources and links.

Please follow and rate [email protected] designingsuccessful startups. Also, please share and like us on your social media channels. This is Jothy Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.