The Entrepreneurial Life is less about skills and more about the drive. What matters is that you determine your goals and live them out, whatever that looks like.

Jeff Adamson, Co-Founder & CMO at Neo Financial and Co-Founder of SkipTheDishes, is on the podcast as he is the definition of embracing the entrepreneurial life. He shares the nitty-gritty details of what he went through to ensure he succeed in his undertakings of being an entrepreneur. From sleeping in his car, having nothing but doubters saying this won’t work, and using his credit card limits as the investments. Jeff has not only successfully co-founded not one but two organizations to a multi-billion valuation.

Jeff Adamson is a former world-class athlete who ditched his comfy corporate job to co-found Canada’s most popular consumer tech brand, SkipTheDishes.com. Having grown SkipTheDishes to a multi-billion dollar brand, Jeff is once again venturing outside his comfort zone as co-founder and Chief Merchant Officer at Neo Financial, where Jeff and his team are building the future of Canadian banking and rewards. When he’s not building startups, Jeff can be found running ultra-marathons or at home changing diapers with his amazing and ever-supportive wife.

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Introduction

George: Welcome to this edition of the Conquer Local Podcast. Well, startups, what an incredible journey that can be for somebody if you’re going to start a business, and also, what an awful journey that can be. So the startup world is either amazing and we hear a great success story, or unfortunately, sometimes with startups, there’s a crash and burn. I wanted to bring in, who I consider to be, an entrepreneurial expert and a startup expert, and I didn’t have to look very far. I could go right within our local circle here of the prairies in Canada. Let me read a couple of headlines from some of our news organizations over the last few months:

“Can digital-only Neo successfully challenge Canada’s Big Five banking establishment?”

That was in the Toronto Star just a couple of days ago. Here’s another one:

“Neo Financial teams up with a company to build a high-interest savings account. Hudson’s Bay, one of the most iconic brands in the Canadian market, and actually a global brand, teams up with Neo Financial to offer new Hudson’s Bay Mastercard.”

We’re going to talk to Jeff Adamson. He is one of the founders behind a brand called SkipTheDishes and a brand called Neo Financial. He is at the heart of these headlines that are being put into some of the top news organizations out there today. We’re gonna talk to Jeff about his journey on the startup road of two of these brands when we return on the Conquer Local Podcast.

Jeff Adamson, the Co-Founder and Chief Merchant Officer at Neo Financial. Jeff, good to see you again. Thanks for joining us on the show.

Jeff: Good to see you too, George. Thanks for having me.

George: You know, we’re excited to have this discussion, but I think we need to tell a story. Well, we need to get you to tell the story because it’s a hell of a story. You know, SkipTheDishes is a juggernaut in the Canadian marketplace. I can’t watch NHL hockey without seeing ads for it. It’s gotta be pretty cool to see what’s happened to that brand that you guys created. So why don’t we go back to that beginnings and then we’ll talk about what you’re doing with Neo Financial, which is very cool as well, but let’s talk about SkipTheDishes and how this all came about, you know, as one of the Co-Founders of this company. I’d love to hear that story.

The Beginning of an Entrepreneurial Life

Jeff: Sure, and I guess maybe to start, George, like, you know, we tell the Skip origin stories quite a bit, but at the end of the day, we had a massive, talented team that built the whole thing, so I’ll tell the story but I just want to make sure that any of the listeners know that it was definitely a community and a team effort. So we co-founded Skip in 2012 and it was actually my Co-Founder, Josh Simair, was overseas in London, and he was working as an investment banker there. I was actually competing on the national team with Team Canada wrestling, and then Josh’s brother was actually working for a company based out of Saskatoon called Cameco, and Josh had actually seen kind of the rise of these digital marketplaces, the rise of on-demand services, and, you know, he looked back in Canada and it had just seemed like Canada hadn’t quite adopted them at the same rate that the rest of the globe was. You know, if you look at San Francisco, if you look at London or Boston, New York, you know, you could get kind of on-demand everything, and this is, even in 2012, you’d get, you know, on-demand dog-walking, dry cleaning, delivery, Uber, all these things, and yet back in Canada, it really wasn’t there yet, and so we were kind of, we were concerned, I think, because we thought, well, listen, if we don’t do something or if someone in Canada doesn’t do something, eventually these companies are just gonna come to Canada and it’s gonna be like the same old story of a big multinational company coming to Canada and kind of taking all the market share, and then we’re just kind of this kind of colony or outpost for these big multinational digital companies. I mean, that still happens today.

George: Right.

Jeff: Because Canada doesn’t really build a lot of consumer brands, period, and aside from, yeah.

George: I think that that was, you know, well-founded insights that you were bringing us, like, you know, we need to take a look at this, so it’s interesting to hear that part of the story.

Jeff: Well, I mean, there’s so many things that are really easy in hindsight, that you kind of see the gap, but at the time, I mean it was talking about, I remember sitting down with my mom and telling her I was gonna quit my job and do a food delivery startup. She was just like, her jaw hit the floor, like she was just like, ’cause the idea at the time, this is in 2012, the idea was like food delivery was pizza and Chinese food. It wasn’t what it was, or what it is now. So, we really kind of set out, you know, we headed a small team at the beginning. It was kind of Josh, Chris, and I, and then Andrew and then another brother of Josh and Chris’, Dan Simar had joined a little bit later on, and we started up literally just like very, the primitive version of the website. It was like a screenshot, we’d go around to restaurants showing them an iPad and if they actually tried to touch a button on the screen, it would like swipe over to like a picture of our dog or something, so we like, couldn’t let them touch the iPad when we were demoing it, but we launched in Saskatoon, that was our first city.

George: You know, I remember when you came to present to our team at a Friday Ideas on Tap to explain this thing that you guys were starting, and I was actually around, which is weird ’cause usually I was on the road, but I remember that presentation and I remember thinking, that’s pretty damn cool, I’d like to skip the dishes. You know, like I don’t like dishes. I like eating, but I don’t like dishes, so that was pretty cool. I remember when we were prepping for the episode and you and I have talked a number of times for the last few months ’cause you’re embarking on another journey. You talk about, and I love this part of the story because I think, you know, the fact that this was a digital startup and you guys did really well and it, you know, it gained a lot of national news, and you know, it’s a great story, but you were telling us this story about living in your car, and when we think about startups, you think about the sacrifices that people need to make to get a business rolling. I’d love for you to tell that story.

Jeff: Yeah, so I think that it’s important to start with kind of the reason why we actually decided to quit our day jobs and do this, and, you know, I had spent the better part of a decade on the Canadian national wrestling team and I was kind of looking at what am I gonna do in the next phase of my life? And then the idea of going and kind of working a corporate job, and then kind of following the same path as my parents did, they had the same jobs for 30, 35 years, that was terrifying to me ’cause I couldn’t imagine anything that I liked doing for even, you know, five years, let alone 35. And so this idea of building something that has at least a slim shot at impacting the lives of millions of Canadians, that to me kind of like, succeed or fail, was something that I thought was worth doing, and I think that, you know, people will look at Skip and now people look at Neo Financial and they think that it’s kinda just like comes out of nowhere or kind of like, all of a sudden, you see it everywhere, but what they don’t understand is the like dozens of people who are kind of grinding away in the early days, and the story you’re talking about is in the early days when we were launching Skip. You know, we had no money, we had no investors, we had a barely operating website, we had restaurant owners saying this is never gonna work, like ever, and like looking at you straight in the eyes and like not blinking, and so you kind of have to just figure out a way to make it happen, and for me, like I had spent almost my whole life as an athlete, and I would travel all around the world to some pretty like wrestling is not like a glamorous sport. It’s not like you’re getting paid millions of dollars or, you know, you’re getting all the fans and, you know, all the sponsorship. I would be traveling in like these really remote places, like really, like the mountains of the Caucasus near Russia and I would be going to like the remote parts of China, and I would sleep on the floor sometimes, I would sleep, you know, like on, in closets. You know, your meals are kind of sporadic, the training is super difficult. So when it came down to like trying to figure out how do we get this business off the ground and how do we like to scale it, it’s like, well, hotels are super expensive. Like that’s a hundred bucks or 200 bucks that I probably could spend on buying tablets for restaurants or putting gas in my car, and so sometimes if I was kind of driving through town ’cause I would drive from city to city, launching the initial cities with Skip, I would just be like, hey, see if I can find a buddy’s couch I can sleep on. If I couldn’t, I would just crash in the car. And then, so then when I kind of graduated from crashing in the car, you know, I get to a couch sometimes, but then, I remember the first place we rented, it was like our first kind of rental for Skip. I was actually sleeping in the furnace room, which also happened to be the kitchen of a basement suite in kind of Northern Calgary, and that was kind of like actually pretty good at that point, I was actually, that was comfortable, but it didn’t really matter to me ’cause I was so used to just the grind from my athletic career.

George: You know, the passion around solving this challenge, you know, is the thing that comes to my mind. Like you’re a very passionate individual, and you recognize there was an issue here that you wanted to solve and, you know, and willing to make that sacrifice I think is an interesting story. So let’s fast forward, we get SkipTheDishes, a multi-billion dollar brand, the exit. Can we talk about that briefly? You got bought by?

Jeff: Just Eat, yeah, so it’s a publicly listed company in the UK. They were kind of like the global pioneers in online ordering for restaurants.

George: And I wonder if it was, was that what your co-founder looked at when he was in England in the first place? Was that the platform that kinda, we should start this in Canada and then you end up being acquired by that organization? Does that story come together that way?

Jeff: It is kind of interesting story ’cause like Josh did, he was a user of Just Eat while he was in the UK, but like they had such a headstart on everyone globally, and then Uber got in and DoorDash, you know, they raised 10, $20 billion in capital, and so we were the Saskatoon startup that, you know, had basically our credit cards was our investment that we were making, and sure, yeah, so it’s kind of like a going full circle where you’ve got Josh having ordered in, you know, off of Just Eat in London and then fast forward a couple of years down the road, you’ve got the CEO of that company in Winnipeg signing the agreement to acquire Skip and then the story of us growing Skip post-acquisition because, you know, we all stayed on and continue to grind for, you know, another three years after that.

George: Right, no, I remember that part of the story, so in the preamble, I talked about all the headlines that I’ve been able to find over the last few months about your new venture, and that’s what I’d like to talk about now is Neo Financial. So at a very high level, you know, when did you guys get going? What’s that goal? Cause I know you, I know you’ll have this goal of what you’re trying to do. Let’s share that with the listeners.

The Next Start

Jeff: Yeah, so Neo Financial, I mean, we left Skip, so Andrew left in 2018, I left in 2019, and, you know, I think we’ve always wanted to do things that were gonna have an impact on millions of people, and we got a taste for that at Skip. You know, I’d be lying if I said that I knew that Skip was gonna grow to be, you know, tens of millions of users and, you know, every single pocket of Canada. That was the dream but, you know, I can never say that it was guaranteed, but you kind of get a taste of that and you kind of realize what’s possible and you kind of see like, wow, this kind of band of misfits that we put together can really build some really cool stuff. So as we were kind of thinking about what’s the next thing, the idea of the kind of just chilling out and just relaxing was pretty terrifying, and so we felt like we had this window of opportunity to kind of capitalize on the momentum that we had built from Skip, and we were looking at these other industries and trying to figure out like, okay, well, what was the reason why Skip was successful? How do we replicate that? Is it a different industry? And we were kind of, part of the reason why I think Skip was successful, obviously, the main reason was tons of incredible people doing brilliant work. Another part of it I think is that the restaurant industry, in general, had really lagged behind the rest of these industries when it came to their adoption of technology. So we were kind of going through the industries and we looked at another one that had really fallen behind, and the Canadian banking industry is one of the ones we landed on, and if you look at the banking industry, I mean, customers in Canada, I mean, we’re so used to these kinds of dot-com-esque era interfaces and clunky, like I think TD’s is called EasyWeb, you know, easyweb.td.com or something, and you know, all these things, like you can tap and get on-demand streaming services, you can order an Uber, you can kind of get everything with a few clicks, and then, but then our banking is so clunky. So we had this idea of like, well, what if we kind of re-imagined banking from the ground up, and actually give Canadians a banking experience that they deserve? What if we could expand people’s purchasing power by providing them with, you know, better financial products, make things more intuitive, make them as intuitive as everything else that they exist with online, and so that’s really how we kind of thought up the idea of Neo.

George: You know, when we look at the industry of banking, I think all of us have been involved since, you know, I remember getting a bank account as a little kid. It was, you know, it’s one of the things. Your parents take in, you get a bank account, you stop using the piggy bank, and it is very, it’s a part of our daily lives, but there are a number of online banks that I could participate with. What’s gonna make Neo different?

Jeff: Well, it’s funny you mentioned parents because if you think of all the buying decisions that people make, how many buying decisions do you make just because your parents also did it? And the number one reason why Canadians bank with their current bank is that that was the one that their parents banked with.

George: Yeah, that absolutely is true.

Jeff: And so, it’s like, you’re not gonna, you know, there’s so many other buying decisions we make, yet the one that’s probably one of the more important ones that we make, the one that really involves our own financial wellness, we’re kind of just choosing to settle, and so, you know, in terms of what we want to do is, I think what we want to do is provide Canadians with better options. I mean, why the heck can’t we get high interest on our savings account? Like right now, I mean the national average across the Big Five is like 0.01 of a percentage point. It’s, you know, it’s very, very small. It may not be that exact number, but it’s very, very small.

George: The one question I have on that interest rate, Jeff, this is again, one of the headlines that I said in the intro. How are you solving that issue, and you’ve teamed up to be able to do that.

Jeff: Mm-hmm, yeah, so Neo is really, in terms of what we are, we’re really a technology layer that exists between consumers, retailers, and banks. So we’ve done the integrating in so that Canadians can get CDIC-insured up to $100,000, high-interest savings accounts. We also teamed up with ATB to issue a next-generation Mastercard, and what we do is we then partner up with small, medium, large businesses across Canada to give Canadians the highest amount of cashback possible. That’s personalized to every single person’s spending habits, and so it’s literally the only credit card, the only banking app that you can use, that is actually gonna get better the more you use it, and people who have joined us early are already seeing some of the enhancements that we’ve rolled out. You can literally link your other bank accounts together, you can transfer money with two taps, you can pay off your credit card bill with two taps. It’s very, very easy to use and we’ve removed a lot of the friction out of the banking experience and expanded people’s purchasing power by giving them an incredibly high cashback amount.

George: And I also saw a headline in the Toronto Sun where you’ve teamed up with Hudson’s Bay, one of the most iconic Canadian brands. It’s a global brand now. How did that come about? That’s great business development work, by the way.

Jeff: Thanks, yeah, well, team effort, George. So we, yeah, so I think, I mean, we have a, like, so at Neo, we have a partnerships team, it’s structured. We have this kind of small and medium-sized business team and they’re working on marketplace style so we’re going and launching cities and building these partnerships with local legends in every single city. Then we have an enterprise team and they’re focusing on these larger retailers, and I mean, everyone’s kind of trying to figure out, how do you acquire, grow, and retain customers? That’s kind of like what every business has to figure out. And so what Neo’s been able to do, you know, with large retailers especially, is actually tap into a lot of the data that can allow these brands to know, what does incremental business really look like for every single customer? Because of that, this whole idea of loyalty too, like when you think of loyalty, people just think of points and rewards programs, but what it really comes down to is are they loyal in terms of how they engage with your brand? Are they spending the majority of their category with you as a business? And the truth is that most retailers have no idea.

George: Right.

Jeff: ‘Cause they don’t have access to the data in order to make that decision. And so what Neo’s been able to do is really give them that full picture and say, now let’s create an incentive structure that is going to drive incremental sales, truly incremental, to your business, and that’s an example of what we’ve done with HBC and empowering the HBC credit card.

George: So we’re sitting here, you’ve done one successful startup, ground it out with your team, you’ve had an exit, then you come up with this idea, we’re gonna go into the banking business, which, talk about Goliaths that you’re going up against there, and you’re finding success. I really would love to get into this story around the entrepreneurial spirit because, obviously, you and your co-founders have this in spades. What would you attribute, you know, some of the key components to be in, you know, this level of an entrepreneur? Like if we were to reverse engineer it, say this is where you need to be like Jeff and the team that started SkipTheDishes and now are in Neo Financial, what lessons do you have for entrepreneurs, or what disciplines or skill matrix do you need?

Jeff: Well, so there’s a little bit, quite a bit to unpack there, George, and I think, so first, I don’t see us as being successful. I actually never even felt like at Skip that we had arrived or ever really felt we were successful, and so even when we look at Neo, you know, we have an amazing team, we have an incredible product, but like, I don’t know if we’re ever gonna kind of look at ourselves like that. I think we, and maybe that’s kind of like the athlete in me that refuses to kind of settle because I feel like the moment that you look at yourself and say, hey, we’re successful, what I’m afraid is that you start to relax because you feel like you’ve made it, you feel that you don’t need to maybe work as hard and you just have to do so many things right in order to really build something that’s gonna endure, and so we’re always kind of looking at what do we need to be doing better? What do we need to be improving on? And on the second part of that, George, when you talk about entrepreneurship and, you know, I feel like there’s this kind of romanticism around entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, and I think it’s kind of, I think we need to dispel that myth a little bit because I think there’s a lot of people who just look at that and say, hey, oh, I just don’t have it, it’s not in my DNA, or I wasn’t that kid putting up a lemonade stand and hustling all the time when they were in grade school and high school. Like, I actually don’t think I have an entrepreneurial bone in my body. My parents did not, they weren’t entrepreneurial. My dad was a firefighter for 35 years, my mom worked the same job for 30 years. To me, it was just really about like, what are your goals? How do you want to have an impact? Like what kind of purpose do you want to have? And I was just really, really fortunate that I met a group of people who were really aligned with what my own ambitions were, and that was to build something that was going to create a lot of value for a lot of people and hopefully has a positive impact on a lot of people. So, and to me, like you can do that in a, I think it’s easier to do it in a smaller company. I think it’s easier to start a company and then you can run it the way you want to ’cause it’s often pretty difficult if you get into a big company and that company has been around for a hundred years and maybe they’re gonna be around for another hundred years, and your ability to really move the needle there might be very difficult, so then you kind of have to be aligned with what they are, and I feel like more and more Canadians, and especially younger people, are not super aligned with the big corporate companies, and that’s why I think part of why startups are starting to pick up a lot of steam is ’cause people are like, hey, these are really purpose-driven companies that I’m aligned with.

The Vision

George: So in your vision of this entrepreneurial spirit, we’ve talked about starting, we talked about why you would want to start a business, but what happens when you gotta sleep in your car and you gotta go talk to some restaurants in Macklin, Saskatchewan or in Crossfield, Alberta or Steinbach, Manitoba? You know, what would be your advice to these entrepreneurs ’cause it’s gonna get hard, by the way. Let’s just set proper expectations. This is not a cakewalk, starting your own business.

Jeff: Well, I think it can be, I mean it’s never been easier to start a company than it is now. I think, you know, with AWS, with Shopify, with all these different tools, I mean you can get set up pretty easily. I think it’s maybe never been harder to build a global business or like build a national business. That’s pretty tough, but I think that you know, I saw it as a pretty simple choice, George, because I think I kind of had a pretty clear idea about what my values and priorities were, and I remember, this is a quick story, I was at the 2012 London Olympics, and I was with my teammate, Matt, and I was helping him get ready for his competition, and this is the biggest competition of his life, this is the biggest tournament I’ve ever been to, and I remember, I was warming up with him and I asked him, “How are you feeling?” And he was just super relaxed, he’s like, “I feel great.” I’m like, “You’re not nervous at all or anything?” I was probably like a bad friend, bad teammate ’cause I was probably, you know, making him nervous just by asking that, and he was like, no, he’s like, “I can go out there and whether I win or lose, “the things that matter the most to me aren’t gonna change. “You know, my wife is still gonna love me, “my parents are still gonna love me, I’m not gonna die, “so my health is gonna be fine.” So he’s like, at the end of the day, like kind of win or lose, I’m still, I’m fine, and that really hit home with me because this is a guy, on the biggest moment of his entire life that he’s been working his entire life to get to, and is completely relaxed and focused on the mission because he knew what his priorities and values were, and so after the Olympics, when we were starting Skip, I was thinking, okay, well, what do I really value? And I really value relationships, I really value my health, and I really value learning. So at the end of the day, whether your business succeeds or fails, as long as you are able to achieve those things, then awesome, and if it ends up being successful, that’s even better, but that should be the byproduct of your actual values and your goals.

George: So one of the things that I’ve noticed is you really speak about the relationships and I’m sure that part of it’s the business relationships that you built, and I did want to ask you about, it’s some pretty famous names in your last funding round. How does that presentation go? As a salesperson, I got to ask the question, like you pitched two of the biggest names in tech and got them to come on board in your funding round. How did that come about?

Jeff: Well, you know, so Tobi was an investor in SkipTheDishes as well, so I don’t want to, like, pat ourselves on the back too much, but I think that you know, I don’t feel like we had any secret sauce on that, George, so it’s like, you know, we had, you know, a pretty I think the innovative business idea and we have a great team and we were basically looking for the right fit. I don’t think we were, we’re not like begging Peter Thiel to invest money in us. It was more just like, hey, like, understanding what they really care about, and like they, so Valar Ventures is, who led our last round, and they really are into fintech. They kind of are our lead investors in a lot of these global challenger banks, huge fintech companies globally, and we’re like, hey, like that’s also something that we aspire to as well, and so it was really just a conversation. It wasn’t really like a hard pitch, and I think if anything, we kind of wanted them to pitch us a little bit on why they should be the right investors for us, and then you kind of go, and you kind of have the conversations with a bunch of folks and you figure out, okay, who is the best fit, and sometimes you have to say, hey, you know what, actually, we don’t really think that you guys are the best fit for us and, you know, maybe we’re not the best fit for you, and you’re just kinda matching up those needs and those goals together, so, I mean it’s kind of a boring answer but that’s kind of the truth. It was really just kind of having a conversation with the right people and finding out if it’s gonna be a fit or not.

George: Well the interesting thing to me is that you know, there’s a lot of sales that went into that, where you were looking for a fit as much as the investor was looking for an organization to invest in that was a fit. So, you know, I think without saying it, you’re saying that if there wasn’t a fit there, you would have walked away from the table, whether it’s Peter Thiel or not, or you know, it’s Tobi at Shopify or not. Like it’s gotta be a fit, right?

Jeff: I probably have better war stories from the Skip days ’cause that was when we really had no idea what we were doing, and then we couldn’t like, we couldn’t do anything to get an investor and I mean, I think throughout the whole history of Skip, we raised like a couple million bucks, so it was very, very, we were doing a very poor job on that front because we didn’t really know the process. We didn’t really know, understand venture capital and we didn’t understand like, ’cause sometimes people go to an investor and they’re like, hey, we want to build a $10 million business, and it’s like, okay, well, you know, and you know, like VCs aren’t looking for kind of a small exit. They’re looking for billion-dollar exits, they’re looking for 100X returns. They’re looking for people who have big ambitions, and you know, even like I get people contacting us, saying like, hey, how do I build a company to sell it? And it’s like, well if you’re trying to tell people that you’re building a company to sell it, like one, it’s gonna be hard to recruit really talented folks because you’re just building this thing to get rich, and they don’t want to just work for you so you get rich. Like they want to learn, they want to build relationships with people, they want to have an impact and work with purpose, and same with investors. Like they want to see, they want to invest in founding teams that have a big vision and that have a strong team and a good plan on how they’re gonna do it.

George: Well, I always find that when you and I have a conversation, I definitely learn something, and Jeff, I appreciate you taking some time out of building Neo Financial to join us on the broadcast. It’s long overdue, and for our listeners, you know, that is the entrepreneurial spirit right there with Jeff and his team, SkipTheDishes, just a fantastic story, and thank you for giving us the right down and dirty, living in the car and all those components, and the fact that it really isn’t that glamorous a lot of times when you’re grinding it out, and all the best to you and your teams in what you’re building in Neo Financial. I definitely think that you’re, you know, you guys have a track record of success, so it’ll be interesting to see how far you take this in the weeks and months and years to come. Appreciate you for joining us today.

Jeff: Well, thank you, George. I’m grateful to you and to your team and huge fans of what you guys are doing there in Saskatoon and yeah, I really appreciate you bringing me on.

George: Well, I’ve known and admired Jeff, I’ve admired him for a number of years and his colleagues that started SkipTheDishes. In fact, I think I might’ve used SkipTheDishes the other night to order sushi or something like that. It’s on my phone, it’s an app, they started that thing from ground zero, like living in his car, calling on restaurants, to bring the 30,000 restaurants onboard to that platform, and the interesting thing is you get that humble, and he’s a very, very humble guy, and, you know, you sit down and you negotiate with Peter Thiel and you negotiate with the CEO, now billionaire Shopify to be, you know, the funding group for your new startup, where you’ve got this idea where you’re gonna take Neo Financial and compete against the Big Five banks. So Jeff has big dreams, and Jeff is not afraid of hard work.

But I’ll tell you, a lot of learnings in that episode around what you need to do to be an entrepreneur, and I don’t care if you’re doing something like starting SkipTheDishes, which is now a couple billion dollar in revenue company, or you’re trying to disrupt banking, or you’re just trying to build a business to feed your kids in a small market, that entrepreneurial spirit and learning from folks like Jeff, who’ve been there, done that, and you’ll see what he talks about, he talks about the mission, he talks about the fact that they woke up every day to run a good business and not necessarily the exit and the money, and he’s trying to help people, like he wants to change the way that people do a thing, and having, I heard a couple of times in there, he wants to have an impact on millions of people. His whole reason for doing what he’s doing is not necessarily what you hear when you talk to a startup person. Sometimes startup people like, yeah, I’m gonna make millions of dollars and I’m gonna sell the thing, and that’s not where he’s going with this. I think you have to have an exit, I think you have to think about valuation, I think you have to think about building a good business, but when you listen to Jeff and his view of the entrepreneurial spirit, it’s around what are you gonna do when things get hard? What are you gonna do when you want to quit? Is it worth it? What, how can you make an impact? How can you do it with a group of people that you like working with? He talks a lot about his co-founders and the folks that he’s involved in these journeys with.

Conclusion

So a whole different view. I don’t necessarily think it’s that different because I hear it from a lot of startup founders, but for those of you that are out there running your business with that entrepreneurial mindset, I don’t think you can get enough entrepreneurial leaders coming in and giving you advice on this episode of those lessons that he has learned in being a co-founder and, you know, the hard work that is involved and maybe some of the things that just aren’t all that glamorous about being involved in a startup on a day-to-day basis and that battle and the fun behind it. I really hope you appreciate those lessons. I learn something from Jeff every time that I talk to him. It was great having him on the show today.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Conquer Local podcast. You can pretty much get our podcast anywhere where you can listen to podcasts and thanks to producer Colleen and the team for making that happen, and we’d love to get your feedback, and we’d love to have you as a follower of the Conquer Local podcast on our social media channels. My name is George Leith, thanks for joining us. I’ll see you when I see you.