Lloyed Lobo: From Refugee to Entrepreneur Inspiring a Journey of Community-Led Growth

Hey everyone, thanks for listening. As you know, we're on the HubSpot Podcast Network, and we recently made the switch to go to their CRM platform as well. With this, I get some inside knowledge and some of the products and services that are rolling out, and I'm super excited to share that they're relaunching their sales hub with some really exciting new features. The new sales hub connects the dots with sales engagement, so prospecting, deal management, and analytics and coaching, and it aligns all of that so you can have a single view of your customer, and also with some of these new AI tools that they're integrating, you can actually automate all those annoying admin tasks that take you away from selling.

Trust me, you've got to check this out. We are just scratching the surface with this here at JV Sales, and I've already seen some massive improvements. With Sales Hub, closing deals is no big deal. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com slash sales. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect did I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, today's guest is Lloyd Lobo. Lloyd is an entrepreneur, podcast host, and community builder. He experienced the Gulf War as a young refugee in Kuwait and witnessed the strength of community and how it helped evacuate the population to safety.

This experience led him to focusing on community-led growth, which helped him bootstrap his own startup to eight figures in revenue and secure over $100 million in funding. His recent book, From Grassroots to Greatness, 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands with Community-Led Growth, was the focus of our conversation. And we dug into his six common traits of winning cultures and communities outlined by his camper acronym and the one superpower you can develop as a founder. We also talked about the three different types of communities, identifying which one you want to build and how to monetize them. Now, community-led growth has gotten a lot of attention these days, and this conversation will help you understand why.

Let's make it happen. Lloyd Lobo, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Excited. Stoked to be here. Thanks for having me. Let's make it happen. Yeah, let's make it happen, man. That's what we try to do every day. I'm looking forward to this conversation because I think there's a buzz around this community-led growth and, you know, traditional marketing and sales stuff are struggling these days, so I'm really looking forward to getting into this. But before we do, you've got a pretty interesting background that drove this community-led growth mindset for you. Could you give the audience a little bit of background where you're coming from and what you're up to these days?

My experience as an entrepreneur started probably way back when I was eight or nine. Not really entrepreneurship, but, you know, if you look at what entrepreneurship is, is dealing with risk and uncertainty and trying to figure out and make sense of the unknown. So I was eight or nine and one morning my mom wakes me up and says, I don't think you can go to school. We got to get out of the country. And I'm like, what happened? And she said, the war has hit and we're getting bombed, refried, and center. My first reaction as a fifth grader was, damn, I never have to go back to school. You're never going to find out. I failed that exam. So what happened was I was serial procrastinator as a kid, studied for a math exam, ended up being a geography exam.

And I knew I was going to fail the grade. And so that was my first reaction. But then when things started to sink in, I see the worry on my parents' face. The currency is invalid. They know cell phones. They don't know what's going to happen. And that was my first experience with not only entrepreneurship, but also community, right? And every building ended up becoming a sub-community. And what is community duty? Somebody raises their hand, says there's a problem, or they have an aspiration. They look around, other people share the same, and they come together to get stuff done. And so when my dad went down the building that day, I went with him, and I see all these people standing, and they were just stressed and started figuring out, what do we do?

Somebody's like, okay, we'll guard the building from X to Y time. Somebody's like, hey, I have access to food and supplies, so I'm going to coordinate that. And that's where it all started. Each building became a sub-community that coordinated with the other building and the other building. And all those voices came together, turned into a grassroots movement, and evacuated the people of that country to safety, to their hometowns. And as I was going on this refugee bus from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan, Highway of Death, the famous picture you'll see, buses were bombed. You weren't sure if you were going to live or die. And as I looked around the bus, everyone should have been stressed, but you had these adults who were laughing and singing and playing the guitar.

And that day I realized it's neither the destination nor the journey. It's the companions that matter the most. You could be with great people and in the most scariest place, but it'll be fun. It'll be memorable. But you could be on a private jet with people who are energy vampires, and you'll feel miserable, right? And so, you could be on a crappy journey on the way to hell, but great companions make it memorable. And that was my first experience with entrepreneurship in the sense that you're dealing with uncertainty and try to coordinate stuff and make it happen, make something from nothing when you have no resources, and also with community. That's powerful, man. I mean, I think that getting that perspective at such a young age, without question, had to shape you into what you're doing today.

So, what are you working on today? Because I think what I want to start with this conversation is, you know, we've seen, we've leaned into community more than a few times, right? And there's, you know, starts and failures and good and bad communities. And I've been a part of a million communities for a little while, and then I've not. And there are certain brands that have done incredible things with communities and built their, you know, I think of just, for instance, like Taylor Swift, for Christ's sakes. I mean, she's a force of nature. She's impacting GDP here. Her community is insane. So, there are some that do it right and some that do it wrong, but what are you working on right now to help brands and organizations with community?

And then let's back into how it relates to marketing and sales. Definitely. So, I've been writing a book called From Grassroots to Greatness, 13 Rules to Build Iconic Brands. with Community-Led Growth. And this book covers the stories of iconic communities and small communities, communities both big and small, and how they did it, how they brought people together, and how they built movements, and eventually became cult brands from leveraging their people. So, that's what I've been working on. And I came up on this idea because, you know, I was... It's funny. I bootstrapped a company, Boast AI, with the most boring sense of a business, meaning we were automating tax credits for innovators, right?

So, globally, hundreds of millions of dollars are given in funding to people who innovate, build product, but it's a cumbersome application process. It's prone to frustrating audits, and receiving the money takes a long time. So, we were automating that process to help companies get more money. But initially, when we started the business, nobody would talk to us because it was done by big four accounting firms, and now you're going in and saying, hey, give me your R&D data. Who the hell are you? You're two guys, right? And we started, you know, we had access to a good network of people, so we started hosting Pizza Nights where we'd invite a successful entrepreneur, innovator, who had taken the product to market and grown, and share their tactical journey on how they went from zero to one, one to ten, how they hired the key people, how they raised money, how they did better product development.

And every time we'd do these meetups, more and more people would show up, ten to twenty to fifty. One day, two hundred people showed up at the co-working space, and the general manager there was like, listen, this is not a freaking meetup anymore, it's a conference. And that evolved into Attraction, which is a community I run with over a hundred thousand subscribers now, podcasts, meetups, conferences, and a YouTube channel. But that community, the more events we did, the more we started getting the brand rub of the speakers and meeting customers. And as our community grew, so did the revenue at Boast grew. And we, you know, we had this one slide, it was after ten million, we did end up selling fifty-two percent, fifty-three percent of the company, like majority stake to a growth equity firm.

And we had one slide that showed this path to ten million. And they're like, what is this inflection point? What is driving? And, you know, we had no marketing. We literally had no marketing team. Marketing team was zero. It was like founder-led marketing by doing community events. And there was this other slide that said, we're doing two events a week. And, you know, the events were going up into the right and as the community grew to a hundred thousand people and the revenue grew to ten million. And then, after I sold a majority stake in the company, you know, no matter how good the financial outcome for a founder, it's your baby. Like, I sacrificed my family, my health, everything else. And all of a sudden, I found myself with a lot of cash but not with an identity.

I felt like I lost my identity. And that ended me super depressed. I, you know, I started calling friends and saying, hey, I'll fly you here, I'll fly you there, let's meet, let's go party. And I did that for a while. And then my wife comes to me and she's like, listen, you know, I understand you were going through some mental health issues and I let you grieve. But look at you, you've turned overweight and you've become insufferable. And she's like, if something happens to you, you might not get a third chance. Earlier that year, I had gotten bilateral COVID pneumonia and I was hospitalized right after this exit, this good exit. Oh, yeah. And so, so she's like, you might not get a third chance.

And so that stressed me out and as I looked across the room that night, I saw my Peloton bike that had turned into a makeshift towel ride. So I hopped on it and I instantly felt this, this connection with the, with the instructor and the riders and there was this energy, there was this vibe and the instructor said something that struck me real hard. She's like, you know, I'm coming from maternity leave and I don't feel as strong, right? It sucks. I don't want to do this. And then she yells out, like, self-pity is toxic. One crank, one shift, one rider on the block. I am, I can. And so that one ride turned into two, turned into four. Peloton made sure they constantly rewarded me with streaks and high fives.

And so I found myself super fit. And so that was the third time I feel like the community saved me. So the first time the community saved me was Gulf War. Then the community helped us bootstrap the company and then when I was sick and, you know, and like unfit and unhealthy and mentally depressed, the community helped me get back to normalcy. And so when I found myself with all this free time, I said, what's the best thing I can do? I said, I need to educate the world on community. That's why I wrote this book. All of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast, you'll get 20% off.

Let's make this happen together. I love it. I love it. I love it, man. Let's back up to the growth component. So I'm just curious tactically, right? As you had these meetups and as you were growing, the revenue was growing. How was it growing? Was that community because of the people that were showing up there, were they buying your stuff? Were they referring your stuff? Was it an automatic intro? Like, talk to me a little bit tactically about you have this community because I think a lot of people do have a great community, but they don't buy shit. You know what I mean? And they, or they don't proactively go out there and promote the thing. So how do you drive revenue from a community first?

And then I want to back up into the other pieces as far as mental health is concerned and we'll tackle that. But talk to me about how to monetize a community or how you do it. Definitely. So I think a lot of people, you know, if you don't monetize the community, eventually your community will die, right? And there's multiple ways to monetize a community but one of the best ways, you know, one of the best ways is either you have a product that people buy or you sell subscriptions or memberships or sponsorships. But if you don't monetize your community, you will eventually burn out, right? That's the reality of the situation. So for us, an example of what we did was we started, when we started hosting these meetups, we didn't want to make money from the meetups or the conferences, right?

We didn't monetize that specifically. But more and more people who were showing up, they were our customers or our partners and they would refer us or they would buy from us and that was that cycle that drove growth for us and that was a direct line there. But the thing is, a lot of people ask me, how do I monetize community? I think you shouldn't start with that question of how do I monetize community? Because if you do day one, how do I monetize community? You may come across inauthentic and people will just say, people are going to sell shit to me, right? So I think if you want to have a quick return on investment, then look at other channels like maybe sales or running ads, right? Community is a long game and eventually it becomes really hard to attribute.

Like Atlassian, their community hosts self-organized 5,000 events a year. How do they do attribution and who comes from what? Eventually it starts to take care of itself because you will see the brand recognition is proliferating everywhere. But I had a little playbook here, right? So say you want to build a community. The first thing you want to do is figure out what kind of community you want to build. So there's three kinds of communities. There's a community of practice which is similar to what a HubSpot did, inbound community. Before they had a product, they were educating people on how to become better digital marketers. There's a community of product which is turning your customers into evangelists like Atlassian or like Harley Davidson or Red Bull in many ways, CrossFit.

Your customers become evangelists. They're coming together around your product to learn, to get insights, to implement it better. In their jobs or in their lives. And then the last one is a community of play where people just come together to hang out like your basketball club or your corner sports club, those kinds of things. You're playing poker, those communities of play. So you got to figure out what kind of community you want to build. I tell people that if you do not have product market fit, do not build a community of product. Start with a community of practice or a community of play. Because if you try to build a community of product when you don't have product market fit, nobody's going to come.

Would you go to a community where like they're talking all about their, like a vendor is talking all about their product bells and whistles and features and how do you integrate with it? And you're like, what am I going to get out of it? I'm not even a customer. So that is step number one. Number two, and in parallel, you got to figure out who your ideal customer profile is. Figure out an underserved niche, identify their pains, figure out where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep. Going back to that Gulf War experience, figure out what their goals, problems, and aspirations are so you can help them become better versions of themselves. So once you have this ideal customer profile, you can draw three spokes around them, right?

One is like, who do they fund? Meaning, what services and tools they pay for. This will give you a list of potential partners, people that you can partner with. Who do they follow? This will give you a list of influencers you can invite to your events as speakers, at podcast guests, as guest writers, as whatever, like featuring them. And then the last one is who, what do they frequent? Meaning, what events, what magazines, what blogs they read? This will give you a list of places that you need to be present at. And so once you have this ICP and you figure out who do they fund, frequent, and follow, you can dominate their circle of influence. And so it's similar to like, let's say somebody had to invite you to a party.

You go to the party and you open the door, nobody's there to greet you, you don't recognize anyone, you don't have a meaningful conversation, and you leave. I mean, this happens every once in a while. But let's say you go to a party and the host opens the door, it's like, hey, so great to have you here, John, like, let me pour you a drink and then let me introduce you to two cool people. And you're like, hey, these guys are in the same field as me. Then you go across the room and you meet a couple vendors like whose services you already buy, like you may use their tools. Maybe it's like a rep from Slot or maybe it is the founder of Notion there. And you start to feel like, oh, I'm jamming. Then you meet some influencers, maybe some authors, some LinkedIn influencers, some podcasters who you follow and you're like, this is my tribe.

I'm in the right place. And then you stay through the night and maybe you're, you know, at the after party and you say, so that's what it is, right? But how do you engineer that? You cannot engineer that without figuring out who your customer is. Once you have that customer, you can determine their circle of influence and then you can create the content plan. And then the next step is this framework is actually a framework used by everyone from Christianity to CrossFit without thinking they use this framework, right? So you start with an audience. When that audience, right now, most people, they have an audience. Now people, you know, influencers on LinkedIn, TikTok, they all say community. Community is so over.

But they don't really have a community. They have commenters. They talk. People listen. So one-way communication for the most, right? Yes, you engage on comments and all of that, but for the most, it's an audience. When that audience comes together, it becomes a community. Now, when that community creates impact, it turns into a movement. And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose, it becomes a religion or a cult. And that's why I said, think about Christianity to CrossFit and how it's all come together. It had an audience, then the audience came together and became a community. The community started spreading the word. It became a movement and then now, if you argue with people who have that undying faith, they'll cut you, right?

It's a cult. It's a religion. And so, how do you engineer that? The first step is you start creating an audience. Now that you know your ICP, you can either be a curator, meaning summarizing content from experts for your niche or be the niche, be the expert for your niche yourself or do a mix, right? If you have some authority, you have some experience and you can lead the way for that niche or you can curate content. But to do this really as a part of your exercise of understanding your ICP, write down 100, 200 burning questions your audience has so you have a repository of ideas. And think about it, like if I had to write the ultimate guide to X, what chapters, subchapters and topics it would include?

Like a HubSpot did, right? In the early days, I don't know if you saw, they had this inbound marketing certificate. So, I graduated engineering and I've only ever worked at startups. And the first startup I joined or the second startup I joined in product but I had to figure out how to talk to customers, what to build and take it to market. That was a time, I think it was 2005 or 2006 where everything was offline marketing. So, I'm like, I got to differentiate and I started looking up SEO and digital and video and all of this stuff and everything that came out was HubSpots. Now, many, many, many years later when I had money, I bought HubSpot but I had this affinity to HubSpot because I learned they build a community of practice around digital marketing.

So, it's like that, educate your audience. Now that you've started to develop and build this audience around education, whether it's education or it's play but you're building this audience, you can now turn, especially in 2023, that one form of content into multiple forms of content. Imagine like interviewing experts on Zoom for best practices. We would do two traction live webinars every week and over time, hundreds would join. We were averaging like five, six hundred registrants for each webinar done twice a week. So, then what you do is you take that long form video and you post it to YouTube. Another tool you can post it to is e-webinar where it's an interactive webinar after the fact. It's evergreen.

People can keep logging in, checking it out and you can interact with it via chat and everything else. But post along from YouTube, you'll get organic views from YouTube. Make sure, of course, it's SEO optimized, the headlines. Just search for that topic and YouTube will give you the autocomplete of what people are searching for. And you'll see even on our Traction YouTube, each session gets 8,000 to 10,000 views. That's pretty high for a B2B niche channel, right? Yeah. And then you post the audio to a podcast, you turn the highlights of the video into shorts for YouTube shorts, Insta Reels, TikTok, if your audience hangs out there. But basically, pick the channel where your audience hangs out the most and spend time there.

And the others is just for distribution. Then turn the text of those highlights into LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, tweets, wherever else. And then you can turn a series of those videos into an e-book. You can run a weekly newsletter with a summary. So you have this audience developing that, right? You're engaging the audience. There's so much content out there that, one, if your content is not better and differentiated for the niche, no one's going to care. But even if it is great for that niche and you're doing better and better than everyone else, but you don't communicate it, you don't distribute it, nobody's going to care, right? Right. Like, a lot of us spend time trying to create new and original content, but the reality of the situation is you've got to spend 80% distributing it and 20% creating it, right?

Like, try, like, people don't want to promote the same blog post they wrote, like, two years ago. Go repurpose it and promote it. How, who remembers? I don't remember what I read last week. Right? Keep promoting it. A lot of focus on, oh, let's create more, let's create more. Repurpose it. So, now you have this audience coming together, the next step is bring, you know, bring, you'll have this audience developing, bring them together. So, how do you bring them together and turn them into a community? First step is easy. You have these podcasts, these webinars, make them live, turn them into AMA sessions, let people tune in, let them interact with one another. That's the easy one. I'm a big, big fan of in-person events, IRL events.

I kid you not, man. Like, anytime you incorporate more than two senses, you start to build stronger connections. We're sound in sight. And I write about this in the book, The Science of Senses, is when you incorporate taste, touch, smell, right, you start to build these stronger connections. This was told to me by Jonathan Yaffe, who was a guest on my podcast a couple years ago. And I looked into it and I'm like, this science is fascinating. And I did try running some interviews in person and even our meetups. Anytime they're in person, people stay for hours on end. That builds stronger, stronger, stronger bonds. And then people are likely to get to know you personally and do things for you, right?

And so, that is key. And then you can augment it with like chat groups and other things, but I'm a big fan of in-person meetups. And then the last one is being consistent, right? Make a commitment to post weekly, bi-weekly on your podcast, you know, daily to shorts. Like a typical flow would be maybe daily social posts, weekly podcasts, monthly meetups, a quarterly retreat and an annual conference. And so, we did these at about to 10 billion and it costs nothing because it's all, you know, when you bootstrap, your team is doubling up to do these things, right? Yep. And the conference, we partnered with a non-profit Launch Academy and we donated all the profits to them. As a function of that, it generated revenue because people wanted to come and support this non-profit community incubator and we got a lot of volunteers.

So, as you think about that pattern, right? Audience that comes together becomes a community. The community that comes together to support a cause or to create impact that becomes a movement. And so, what causes you can align up? A perfect example would be like Mr. Beast, right? He has an awesome, he's the biggest influencer on the planet, right? He started with some of these same unscalable things, getting out there, talking to people, but he does a lot of like stand out from the crowd. Let's do something that's different, right? and at the same time focusing on the little things and making them right. He pays a lot of attention to being consistent with the little details. And, you know, it wouldn't go to being, it wouldn't turn into this iconic brand though because between that iconic brand, that cult-like status and a community is this key step of becoming a movement.

It wouldn't become a movement if he didn't bring people together to create impact, right? And if you say what he's done is raising this $20 million to plant 20 million trees, raising 30 million to take 30 million pounds of plastic out of the ocean, creating food banks and giving out 10 million meals, your community likes that. See, the thing is everyone, like I personally believe 99% of the people are well-intentioned. There's no this is good or this is bad. There's always like scales of gray. People are well-intentioned but lives get so busy that even if they don't want to after paying taxes and fees and after paying for life, they're left with very little but they want to create impact. If they align with your purpose and you give them the opportunity in any small meaningful way to feel like they're part of a bigger impact, they will.

And Mr. Beast does that. You know who else did that? I don't know, this is an urban legend but the president, I think it was Kennedy, he walked into NASA and he sees this janitor past midnight sweeping the floor and he's like, what are you doing here? And he's like, sir, I'm putting a man on the boat. And that is an alignment with a great purpose where people in the community, they do stuff not to say, oh, you know what? My job is to check people in or my job is to give out meals or my job is to stamp tickets. They're all with this common vision, this mission is no, I am saving the world or I am curing breast cancer. And when your purpose aligns with your community to that level where everyone feels like they're creating an impact, you build something massive.

You have this massive movement approach. I'm going to ask how do you do that with the mundane, if you will, in the sense that, look, going to the moon, yeah, we can all, like, that's a vision, that's a purpose, right? We have, you know, breast cancer, cancer, like, yeah, fuck yeah, we're all going to, like, this is bigger than me and we all know it, right? I sell CRM software. Who gives a fuck, right? Nobody. Yeah, exactly. How does a company, for instance, right now looking at their marketing, you know, their marketing results aren't getting as much as they want, their sales efforts are struggling right now, and they're toying around with this idea of, okay, well, we should build a community, but so many companies have built communities and failed because they think it's, oh, we'll just add value, right, to your point earlier.

It's like, here's a bunch of really valuable posts, and so to bridge the gap of purpose versus community, because I agree with you, like, if you can connect to a purpose, if you can connect to values, I always say to founders when I talk to them because they'll always ask me, like, well, John, how do I get my employees to care as much as I do, right? And my first answer to that is you can't. Like, nobody's ever going to, as a founder, nobody's ever going to care as much as you are, so don't expect that, and don't expect them to work as hard as you, but what you can do to get them bought in and do more than what their job is, is to paint a picture, paint a vision for them, and help them understand how they fit into that vision, because if you can say, hey, this is where we're going, right, and this is our, I won't say higher purpose, but this is the vision of what we're trying to accomplish, and this is how you fit, that's where you can get people to do more than their job, but that's an individual manager, I think I look at that as a leader within an organization, right, if you want to translate that to community, where you're now trying to leverage a software tool, whatever the hell you do, to create this groundswell of people, how do you connect, or do you need to connect the product itself, the service itself, with the vision of the community?

You know, great communities and great companies are built on great alignment, right, I talked to maybe a thousand founders, community leaders, in figuring out what makes them tick, and I'll share some common traits I found, I found six common traits, and I created this framework, which I call Camper, which sounds really cheesy, so I apologize to the audience in advance, connection, autonomy, mastery, purpose, energy, and recognition, but it all starts with your values, right, it starts with the vision, it starts with the purpose, a lot of companies, and I suffered for this at boast, right, not doing this soon enough, but everyone has a purpose, it's your why, why do you come in, why do you do this, it's your forever, and then it's your vision, what will the world look like as a function of you, and then it's the mission, how do you do it, and it's the values, how do you behave, if you don't repeat this, and when people say enough, man, stop saying the same crap over and over again, that's when you know it's enough, right, it's important to say this because I kid you not, if employees in 2023 with the recession and the firing, there are less jobs maybe, or the jobs are going in the tech companies, in the tech world, but people have opportunities, you can drive an Uber and you can do DoorDash and make 100k if you want, right, you can stretch yourself, and be independent and free, you don't have to go in the office or be on somebody's beck and call, you can be an independent contractor, do stuff on Fiverr, so if I can go and work anywhere to make an income, why would I work for your company?

The key differentiator is that alignment around a purpose, like I talked about, everyone wants to innately give but they don't have the time or the energy, help them align with a greater purpose, selling CRM software is very different than a vision that inspires people, so I'll give you an example at Post, automate tax feathers, it's like the most boring thing, in a nutshell what we do is we help companies get innovation and R&D funding, but how we put that vision, that purpose across is our vision, our purpose is to enable innovators to change the world, every dollar spent in innovation returns 20 to the economy, from vaccines to robots to clean drinking water is a function of innovation, yet 99% of the innovators fail and die, innovations die on the vine, and in the last 15 years more than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies have evaporated because they don't know how to innovate, and our mission, what we do is we help them accelerate innovation through funding and the know-how, and that, saying that over and over again, initially, everyone was like, man, this, come on, what are you saying?

Like, we do tax credits, we do tax credits, but you know what that did? Everyone's like, we automate tax credits, what's this big vision you're painting? Like, it's vaporware, I get that a lot, but you know what that did? that set the path to 10 million, that enabling innovators to change the world by giving them the capital and the know-how to drive innovation, because everyone knows, R&D in companies is a black box. You know what sales is doing, you know what marketing is, do you know what R&D is doing, do you know how it ties to financial outcomes? You don't, right? Most companies don't, especially the smaller of the company, even larger companies, otherwise, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies wouldn't have evaporated, 90% of the innovations won't die on the bottom, right?

And so, we started saying this more and more, it attracted our investors. We, when me and my co-founder stepped down from the day-to-day of Boast, we brought in a CEO who's a former CTO of Sage Intax, a 13 billion market cap software company, and now he's building this vision. We started with automating tax credits, then we raised a $100 million credit facility because the government would take a long time to pay out the tax credits, so we would say, integrate your technical and financial systems to Boast. We'll figure out what government funding you qualify for, but you don't have to wait till you finish the projects and get the money from the government. For every month you spend on R&D, we'll give you the money now, so you don't have to wait 12 to 16 months.

And now that we have this unique data, which is your R&D data, your technical data, your financial data, we're coming out with new products around R&D intelligence, which is who you should hire, what projects you should invest in, how you should innovate, how you should develop your R&D, so AI-driven engineering productivity and R&D intelligence. But if we didn't start by saying that, we would always be a company that disbursed or automated tax credits, right? You've got to not fall in love with your solution, you've got to fall in love with your customer and the problem they're having. Customers don't want R&D tax credits for the sake of it, they want R&D tax credits to fund their R&D. Why do they want to fund their R&D?

So they can grow it. Why do they want to grow it, right? Because they want to grow their business. So help them understand that customer journey. So I think that is key. And so if you look at, there's a few other examples here, right? So look at Patagonia, for example. Perfect example. They lead by example in the sense they're not only giving, right? So Patagonia actively promotes environmental stewardship by asking its employees to volunteer for sustainability initiatives. But they're not doing that as lip service because they donate a percent of their sales to nature preservation anyway, right? Another example would be Adobe. So you see now these days Adobe's all the rage, right? With this autocomplete Photoshop that's happening.

How do you get people in such a large company to continue to innovate and drive market value? Adobe has this kickbox program which provides employees with resources, mentorship, and funding to just explore new ideas and projects. Like you're the CEO of this idea, go and do it, right? So it's things like that that you have to do. You have, you know, employees don't just want a paycheck. They want to feel connected. They want to be in charge of their own destiny. They want to get better and better at their craft. They want to be tied to a great sense of purpose. You need to energize them. You know, one of the key things which people fail, everything in this world is communication, it's sales. From convincing your spouse that you want to do startup after startup after failed endeavors to your investors to employees when you have no money and need to hire them early in the days to customers.

It's all communication. The job of a leader is to inspire and motivate people around the vision and the purpose of the company. It's not a one-and-done activity because when people are energized, they're inspired, they're motivated, they'll move mountains for you. But not a lot of leaders and communities do this. Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot, phenomenal. Nick Mehta at Gainsight, phenomenal. What is Gainsight? You see, this company came out of thin air. They had a community before they had a product. They talk a lot about category creation, right? Customer success is a new category, but it wasn't like a new, new category. All customer success was is a play on customer service. Customer service became so broken that it became customer frustration, right?

in the sense you were so frustrated being bounced around, and it became a sort of center of reaction. When you're pissed off, you call them and you're on the line 24-7. So Gainsight's idea was, it shouldn't be this way. You should proactively know when your customers are going to have a problem and reach out to them. So they called it customer success. That's how customer service should have been to begin with, but it never was that way. So they called it customer success, and they started educating the market and bringing people around how to deliver great outcomes and delight your customers. And they started bringing people together around that. And Nick, I mean, he is such a great evangelist.

I mean, you'll see him at events. He'll wear like rainbow sunglasses and fancy suits and like red shoes. And he evangelized people around the idea of customer success. And, you know, that's what you need to do. You need to get out there and you need to communicate to entertain, evangelize people. The job of a leader is to build, inspire, and motivate a team to deliver. Deliver is the lagging indicator. The issue is we focus so much on delivery by beating people rather than build, inspire, and motivate people. And all those three things is a function of how you communicate. You attract the same energy you give out. If you're drab, people are going to be drab. Look, you know we're on the HubSpot Podcast Network and we love spreading the word about other podcasts that we think you should check out.

And you should definitely check out the Side Hustle Pro Podcast with Nikaela Matthews Akolm. This podcast showcases diverse entrepreneurs who have scaled from a side hustle to a profitable business. And I absolutely love Nikaela's real and authentic depiction of what it's like to do a side hustle while working full-time. And all the emotional rollercoaster that it takes to build a viable business on the side. She tells all of this from her own personal perspective of doing this herself and brings on guests who share their own journey with practical advice that you can take action on immediately. So listen to Side Hustle Pro wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, it's also a reflection of your business too.

I mean, if there's anything like, if there's anything I've learned as an entrepreneur and building a couple of businesses is your company is a direct reflection of you, right? So whatever your weaknesses are is going to be your company's weakness. Whatever your strengths are is going to be your company's strength. And so if you are charismatic and you can do this, then you can, you know, build it. But if you are drab, like you said, you need to find another head of your community, if you will, unless you want to build a drab community. So let's finish up on something real quick on this because you've mentioned something about mental health, which I think is important to touch on here. And you had said that when you had cashed out and you had your Peloton and it was more of a towel rack than anything else, there were some issues and your wife even said, hey, I understand you're going through this, but you need to step the fuck up here.

So how can you, I think you wrote another book or seven steps to leverage pain to unlock exponential personal professional growth there. What are some of the things that you've learned about pain and how to turn pain into success? You know, the one thing you realize eventually is pain is the precondition for growth. Everything that's great is on the other side of risk and pain and suffering. Now there's two kinds of pain, of course, right? There is, you know, this growing pains also gets thrown around a lot which is a big BS business trope. Growing pain as a function of taking on hard things and overcoming them makes you strong. But growing pains as a function of ego and stubbornness and just encountering difficulty as a function of your ignorance because you're just too stubborn to listen is very different.

the latter, like growing pains as a function of encountering, taking on challenges makes you strong and the former makes you weak, right? But one of the things I realized in this journey is it's really important to surround yourself with the right people. I recently read this thing about, I think, the blue boxes, the nine blue boxes. Have you heard of that concept? Blue zones, sorry, the nine blue zones, right? So the blue zones are areas in the world where people live the longest. Like basically they adopt these, right? And there are five cities like that, five towns like that. Yeah. And out of those nine blue zones that people adopt, five of them are community related. Yeah. Right? So what does that tell you?

These folks live not to a hundred, but functionally to a hundred. And that is really important, right? So like that's Icaria, Greece, it's a place in Costa Rica. There's a bunch that meet that criteria, right? But I think what's really, really important when you're thinking about mental health is the number one thing is cut out negative energy. There's so much negative energy in the world, like left wing, right wing, wokeism, cancel culture, people are looting, shooting. And the news fills you with this nonsense. You know why news and social media fills you with this nonsense? It's because bad news perpetuates and perpetuates and festers into new demons. Good news just stops right there. Think about it.

When is the last time like, you know, something good happened and you kept like reminiscing and reminiscing for hours and hours, but you discuss something negative or some gossip and you find yourself like hours later, you're discussing this talk. Right? If I give you another example, if Warren Buffett came and told you, just invest in BRKB, which is his stock, for the next 20 years, you'll grow 30% year over year. This is Warren Buffett, one of the richest people on the planet. You got to think he's an idiot if he says that because there's risk in the market. But if some person who you barely know comes and tells you, hey man, have you looked at your 401k lately? It's all going to tank. I have inside information.

It's all going to tank. What do you think you're going to do? You're going to get on the phone with your banker. Because negativity sells. And this is the problem. And so one of the things I did was cut out negative people. I don't watch the news. I disengage from negative conversations and content. I just avoid negative people. And I actually kickstarted this journey by just killing all social for five months. I just killed it all. My publisher reached out to me and he's like, bro, do you have a book coming out? And I literally can't do anything if you don't go back on social. He's like, at least LinkedIn. I know you don't like the other channels. At least LinkedIn, that's where your audience is.

At least send out the newsletter. And so I think that was key. And that had a profound impact on my mindset. The other was cut out dopamine. To deal with the stress of society, the things we love eventually turn into addiction, like doom scrolling, drinking incessant amounts of energy drinks, like caffeinated drinks, coffee, vaping, sugar, alcohol. Anything done in moderation is good. In these blue zones, people drink. They have a glass of wine every day. But that doesn't mean that you have a bottle of wine every day. You're having a bottle of wine every day. Exactly. And so that was the second thing. The thing is, I have, as a founder, and I think most entrepreneurs do, we have this kind of extreme personality.

We do a lot of something because that's how you will things into existence from nothing. So whenever I drink, it becomes like drink to get drunk or lots of energy drinks. Sugar is like you're eating sugar all day. So I had to cut that out. Clean my diet. So we don't emphasize this enough, but this is the other reason why media screws your brains. I saw this study which said eating cereal is healthier than eating eggs. What they don't realize is the calorie is not a calorie because the insulin spike from eating something that's predominantly sugar is very different than having an egg which doesn't. So clean out your diet. If it comes from a package, I'm not eating it. It has to be whole. And that also has a profound impact.

A lot of these things are partially diet related and partially company related. And then it was intermittent fast. It was just personal choice. I don't know if it works or not, but the thing is I like eating and if I eat four meals a day and I eat four heavy meals a day, then it doesn't do me any good. So I fast 18 to 20 hours a day, mostly one or two meals within a four to six hour window, mostly ketogenic is what I prefer. I don't know the carbs. I found out recently that these processed carbs are causing something in your system, right? Me and a lot of my family members all of a sudden have had these bowel issues and gut issues. And we've done like colonoscopy and endoscopies and we're like finding out these things which historically we didn't have, right?

And I think it's the amount of like bleaching and processing and chemicals that go into these breads and processed foods. Here in the States. It was funny, I went to Italy and ate more than I usually eat here and I actually lost weight in Italy. And you're thinking like pastas and breads and all that other stuff, you think that's all super heavy food. My wife and I actually lost weight because the food was so fresh and it didn't have all the GMO crap in it. It didn't have all the artificial things in it. And so it was just a wake up call for us because we were like, oh, we're going on vacation, screw it, we're just going to come back 15 pounds heavier because we're just going to eat everything that we can possibly eat.

And we did. And like I said, came back five pounds lighter. It was a real big wake up call as far as what is in our food, especially here in America. Isn't that insane? And then you realize there's this filler, right? blue zones that I talked about like Icaria, there's Costa Rica, there's Loma Linda in California, there's Okinawa in Japan and Sardinia. A lot of what it is is diet, eating whole natural foods, doing things in moderation and social connection, family and community, natural environment, like it's social connections, they all belong to some faith, right? There's a lot of physical activity. And it was just implementing that, walking 10 to 20,000 steps a day. So, you know, we in the United States, right?

And I hate saying this, but sometimes it feels like this American dream is a farce, right? What is it? You can't afford to live near your job, so you live somewhere where you have to commute. We've taught, we've been taught since childhood that you've got to go an hour early to work and leave an hour late, you've got to be the first and last there, like, don't just be another cog in the wheel. Now, if you have kids, you've got to get them ready, pick up them, right? Drop and pick them from school, get their meals ready. So now you're like two and a half hours, three hours waking up early to pick, drop, get them ready, go early, finish your day at work, come back. You have, you know, after paying your income tax, federal and state, and your property tax, and all these other things that you take loans or mortgages, whatever for, you're left with very little to just have maybe one nice family dinner and maybe a two, three week vacation.

That's why they give you two weeks. Like, if you go to Italy or like the Middle East, you get four to six weeks vacation, right? Then you can use, it's usable. And on Sundays, then, Sundays, I don't know, for most people that I talk to is like a working day in a way. You're preparing for the rest of the week. And I realize that it's a rat race, right? So that dream is a farce. What if you could live closer to where you work? Like, for me, walkability is number one. Now that I look back, I regret living in the suburbs. if I could just live in the city which encourages me to walk, you know, or close to a beach, which encourages me to walk, where walking is a part of living, that 10 to 20,000 steps a day is no longer a chore.

It's part of living, right? So that is key. Lifting weights, exercising, you know, because of my mental health issues and what I have went through. After the peloton, you know, the first peloton ride, she had Eye of the Tiger from Rocky there. And that coupled with my wife's comments always, the glass is half full. So I have this morning ritual where I wake up, the first thing I do is thank something good that happened the previous day, a person, a thing, an event, whatever it is, and then listen to Eye of the Tiger and bang out as many push-ups as I can and then go to the gym. I cannot do, cannot function if I don't work out first thing before taking on any tasks. And then I read a study on Zero Hour PE from the Naperville High School where they introduced this program where kids, before they even touched a textbook, had to come in and work out.

Nothing complex, just they're not competing with anyone, competing against themselves. And that school transformed into the smartest kids in the world, some of the highest IQ and some of the highest scores in standardized tests and also in athletics. So that's something to say that working out, there's no brain function that exercise doesn't improve. But doing it first thing in the morning, I know people are like, oh, I like to work out late at night. Try, trust me, try for 30 days when you wake up to one, be thankful, two, drink a glass of water or two and then work out. First thing in the morning for 30 days, you will feel awesome, right? And so those were some of the things. And then, you know, trying to do a challenge day every week where I push myself to the max and sleeping and drinking water.

Awesome, man. Well, we got to wrap this up. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I'm sure we could take this a lot further too, but let's wrap it up here and talk to the audience a little bit about where they can find out more information about what you're working on and where they can connect with you and everything else. Definitely. So thank you so much for having me. And you can find me on LinkedIn, double L-O-Y-E-D. There's an E in my name. Long ago, my mom dreamed of me being an entrepreneur and she said, Lloyd without an E means somebody has trademarked it, but nobody's. So you have the opportunity to brand your name, which is funny. Every time, because I get bullied in school with this E in the name, right?

Oh, Lloyd, Lloyd. And I'm like, why did you do this to me? She's like, someday you're going to be an entrepreneur. You're going to want to trademark your name and you won't be able to do it with a generic name. That's what she told me. Talk about a vision. Sometimes you will things into existence, law of attraction, right? And so find me on LinkedIn, Lloyd Lobo, also lloydlobo.com. We'll have the website launched by the end of next week. And from grassroots to greatness.com is the book. And then if you want to connect with our traction community, come to the traction events, it's tractionconf.io. And if you want to learn more about boast, it's B-O-A-S-T dot A-I. Thank you so much, John. Truly, truly enjoyed it.

Love you for having me, man. Stay in touch. Thanks for coming on, Lord. I really appreciate it. And thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, look, and like I say, at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day's going or you think it went, you make somebody smile today and you know you had a good day. And the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough. Now, to keep the momentum going, it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network.

Also, check out my new website at www.johnm.barrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day just like you are and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends in technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect, and let's make this happen together.