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In the world of business, not all deals are what they see.
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Fortunes rise, empires crumble, all with a stroke of a pet.
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Mergers, acquisitions, hostile takeovers.
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Welcome to Mergers She Road, where we examine strategies and stories behind the biggest deals in business.
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Because in MA, the real risks are the ones you don't.
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Welcome back to another episode of Mergers She Road.
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I'm Paloma Goggins, the owner of Nocturnal Legal, and your host.
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Today's guest has an incredible entrepreneurial journey from starting an accredited school to growing hemp and selling a CBD product.
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He's going to highlight how you shouldn't take no for an answer when it comes to building, growing, and successfully exiting your business.
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Scott Schwab as my guest today.
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Thanks so much, Scott, for being on.
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Thanks, Paloma.
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Appreciate it.
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To introduce Scott a little bit to everyone today.
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So Scott is an author, a speaker, an entrepreneur.
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He was the architect of an online business course called Business Plan University.
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And through that program, he ended up actually getting accredited.
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We'll go into that a little bit.
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And then in 2014, Scott authored a book, Standing Accountable, Increase Your Success by Holding Yourself Responsible.
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And I'm going to let Scott weave some of his bio in as we go through the question.
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So, Scott, I'm just going to launch right in.
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You started your journey creating an education platform.
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Can you share what inspired you and what problem you were trying to solve?
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Yeah, a little bit of it started when I was in college and I was going to school and in the business management program and didn't actually even have to write a business plan.
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And I thought, well, that's a miss.
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I have all of my marketing classes, my business classes, finance classes, but nothing that ever brought it all together.
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And I think since, you know, I graduated in 06, and I think since that time you've had a lot of advancements and, you know, uh pitch contests and universities sponsoring, you know, business plan events.
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That was the problem that I saw.
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And so after college, post-college, I really felt like, hey, we need to teach people why having a business plan in place is one of the most crucial things that they can have.
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And so really that's where it started for me.
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That's so true.
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I feel like the evolution of entrepreneurial academies has blown up over the course of like the last 25 years.
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But you're right.
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Before then, the idea of a traditional business program really omitted the entrepreneurial journey.
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Um, so true.
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So early on, what were you, what were some of the biggest challenges you were facing in building and scaling your platform before it it evolved?
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And I we kind of touched on this in the intro, but I'd love to hear the the portion.
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So for listeners, Scott and I had a call before this.
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And one of the things that I would love for him to share today is he started this platform for education purposes, for business plans, which obviously, for anyone starting a business, even if you're not getting a business loan, creating a business plan is hypercritical to align with your goals and figure out how to build your business from the ground up.
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And Scott had shared with me on this call that essentially he had been told no in this process.
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And part of it was accreditation.
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And so, Scott, I'll let you tell the story.
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Yeah, thank you.
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And I would love to just speak directly to any entrepreneur who is in a scenario where you don't know what you're doing, keep going.
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Because that was me.
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I didn't uh do my education in, you know, uh uh an educational program.
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I personally just had an uh idea and a dream to be able to start something that would help other people.
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And so for me, it was to start researching what went into a business plan, putting all of those thoughts together and putting them into what would be a curriculum so that it not only tells you what needs to be in the business plan, but it also uh kind of details out why those things are important, like a competitive analysis and you know, a SWOT analysis.
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We learn these things in school, but sometimes the application isn't always there.
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And so I had gone through this whole process of writing all of the curriculum, and then I thought, okay, learning management systems are gonna be the future of learning, at least from an online or a hybrid perspective.
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So I'm gonna build my own.
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And we went through that process of building a learning management system and putting in all the curriculum and getting all the digital assets, and I take this pretty package to like the first couple of colleges and uh high schools, and they're like, You don't understand publishing, do you?
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And I was like, uh I guess not.
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And uh they're like, We're not buying your program, we're not buying the book, we're not actually doing anything with you because you're not uh, you know, McGraw-Hill and you're not a Schuster, and you know, we have our our professors choose the book that they want to use, and you're so unknown that we can't support your business at this point.
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And I I was crushed, I was defeated, but at the same time, I thought, well, then I'll become my own school.
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I'm like, I don't have to go through this publishing kind of uh you know pathway, I'll just become a school.
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I just I love this this part of your story.
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One, because I feel like a lot of people, when they're running and operating a business and they run into what would be a major obstacle, right?
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Being told, hey, we don't know you from Adam.
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We like the program, but you know, you're missing things that we would consider incredibly important for accreditation or something like that, right?
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And for you to turn around and just say, okay, well then I'm just gonna do it.
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Like I'm I'm just gonna look them in the face and I'm gonna tell them this hurdle is not stopping me from moving forward.
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But I think what's even more shocking about that part of your story is that for someone who has created a platform, but perhaps never, you know, gone down the path of creating an accredited school.
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I mean, how did you even go about figuring out what your first steps were?
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Because I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs would look at something like that, like couldn't even be an education, right?
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Just a government contractor or something that requires tons of hoops to jump through.
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I can just see it being so overwhelming that, like, where do you even begin?
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Yeah, great question.
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And I I looked at it in a couple of different ways.
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I felt like a textbook was something that could be valuable.
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And so I did start reaching out to publishing company companies and ultimately chose Scottsdale Publishing.
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Um, and it was a good fit for me, right?
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But I wasn't my intention wasn't to just become a textbook and wipe my hands of it.
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For me, it was the platform that was the genius of it, and the developers and how much time and energy that they put into it to where you could work in kind of segments, but it would take that information and populate it throughout your documents so that you could literally like start writing your thoughts and your ideas, and they would become part of that document segment that would help kind of spur ideas in the other areas.
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But for me, I knew no one in education.
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You know, my mom had gotten her master's in education, and uh I thought that that was pretty cool, so I asked her.
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Um, but ultimately it was reaching out to accreditation bodies, and one out of like dozens finally said, Yeah, we'll work with you.
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And it was a relationship with Northwest Accreditation Commission, NWACC, and that was the first group that ever looked at me like, hey, we can do something with this.
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I think that there's something here.
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And so for the course of 18 months, we just met consistently and went through the course, went through the delivery, went through what the pedagogy is of the uh delivery and the intended outcomes and the syllabi.
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Like you have to start thinking differently, which is not how I initially started thinking.
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I was really just like, okay, what does it need to be for a delivery?
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But they forced me to think differently, which I'm so grateful that they did.
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Well, and I was gonna say for them to be able to, so it sounds like in that process, they were able to kind of hold your hand through the accreditation process and also provide you guidance.
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So it wasn't necessarily you were out on your own just, you know, floundering around trying to figure it out.
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It sounded like more hands-on.
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Okay, that's I think that's really neat.
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Um and maybe that's a kind of a take-home message too for entrepreneurs who are facing really significant either accreditation licensing or whatever it may be in that specific industry, is to find that person.
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And maybe it's not a regulatory body, right?
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Because a lot of times if you're working with the government for regulatory purposes, they're not going to hold your hand through that process.
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But I'm sure there's someone uh you know attached to that industry that could potentially help you.
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And it sounds like that was a pretty critical component of you being able to get through the accreditation process.
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Yeah, very much so.
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I I there's no way I would have gotten through without the help of NWACC or um their, you know, uh leadership.
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It it was pivotal for me.
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And so for any entrepreneur, I would say get a mentor, get an expert, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are or who know things that you don't know.
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I like that.
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I also like, you know, just as an aside, that it seems to me from an outsider's perspective that a lot of your, even with your business plan, software, and like the platform, right idea, um having it kind of build with blocks, same idea and concept.
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It sounds like when you went through the accreditation, you're like one block at a time at a time.
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And I think a lot of people, when they look at really big, insurmountable issues, they don't realize that if they just take it one step at a time, it will eventually come to fruition, right?
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But I like this kind of theme you have going on, which is like building things out one part at a time to eventually make a whole.
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And I want to go back to the business plan because I can guarantee you that the majority of entrepreneurs who are successfully running their business, not startups that are just thinking about what they can do to get their stuff right, don't have a business plan.
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And I I want, because you've spent so much of your time and your history in this space, the education space, around helping business owners and new entrepreneurs create business plans, you know, what what would be your suggestion for someone?
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Like, is it ever too late?
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Right?
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We we we kind of know the answer to this question, but Scott, if you could just explain some of the positives around why a business plan is awesome for for people who are listening and thinking, oh, this doesn't apply to me.
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I've been in business for five years.
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Yeah, I I have many thoughts.
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Um, I think the first thought is it's great to be organized in any type of a discussion.
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And most investors, most partners, most people who want to engage with you, even consumers, they're gonna want to have some idea of what makes your product unique or what makes your business unique or special.
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And I think that that's where it starts for everybody is really just writing out your ideas or how you're solving a problem.
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I think one of the biggest things that a business plan should really detail is the product market fit.
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Because if you don't know how your product fits, then you really don't have a business or even an idea yet.
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And I don't want to be harsh and discourage people.
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It's more or less like, hey, encourage you to take that idea that you've had that you've told a couple of friends about, take that further.
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Maybe understand who else is doing that thing, whether it's a product or a service, there's always somebody else doing it.
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Now they may not be doing it in the way that you want to do it, and they may not do it in a um in the type of way that you can see the opportunity, but that's the beauty of it is you've got to be able to detail that out.
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And that's where in my mind it all starts with an executive summary of you writing out your idea and sharing about all of the aspects of your thought process.
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Because that thought process will say, okay, how do you sell it?
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Who's going to be involved?
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Why is this market an interesting market?
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Like what is the total addressable market or your TAM?
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You've got to know those things if you're serious about the business.
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Um, and you don't have to know everything, but you've got to know some key components to attract other people to you, whether that's partners, investors, customers, you've really got to be able to tell people or share your business with others if you want it to be a success.
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I think the idea of putting your ideas and your thoughts on paper can be so powerful and people forget about the power of writing down, whether it's on a computer or even in a notebook, um, writing down what your goals and your plans are for your business and and how critical that can be to success.
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I was lucky enough, I took one course when I was in law school that was about starting a law firm.
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And I didn't know if I would ever start my own law firm, but I was like, I'm gonna take this course just in case I do.
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The irony of it now, looking back on it.
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But they forced us to create a business plan.
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And in all honesty, I'd kind of forgotten about the business plan that I had created.
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It had been so long ago.
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And I stumbled upon it actually.
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And it was funny the timing of it, the irony, because we were gonna have sit down and have this conversation, and I knew the platform was about business plans.
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And I found it in my drive, and I was like, oh man, I'm blast from the past.
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So I opened it.
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I was like, man, I wonder how much of this stuff I've actually done, right?
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Because you got to use it, you have a marketing section, right?
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What are you doing to market your business?
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What, who are you gonna serve as your customer, your client?
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And I was so pleasantly surprised to find out that I must have just absorbed all of that because it was a huge project in the class.
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So it of course was like a you know big thing for me at the time.
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But there were so many things that I had been doing in my business and I hadn't even realized that I had written it down.
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So I think even if you don't think you're ever gonna use your business plan, I think me finding that old one and realizing I had done exactly what I had told myself to do, you know, like eight years ago, I think uh, you know, stands to the testament of the practice of doing a business plan, even if you're not taking it to investors or private equity or whatever it may be.
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Yeah, Paloma, I love that you brought that up because I don't know if we always understand the power of thought and the power of dreams and what's going on behind the scenes.
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So a lot of times we're, you know, cognitive of what our, you know, consciousness is, like how I feel, how I think right now in this moment.
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But I don't know how often we're really tuned into our subconscious.
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Some of the things that happen when maybe we're not told to think about anything.
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What is it that we dream about?
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What are the things that we are interested in?
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How do we treat people?
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I think all those things show up in subconscious.
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And uh I think that there's a loop between subconscious and conscious.
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I think that we see that in dreams, but I also see think that we see that when we're down the road enough to be able to look back with a little bit of wisdom and knowledge and say, that came from something that was a seed that was planted.
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Maybe it was by somebody else or maybe it was by us.
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But I really feel like subconscious feeds conscious if we'll allow it to, and then consciousness reinforces subconscious.
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I could not agree more.
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And honestly, we could probably have a whole podcast episode about the power of thought and and having things uh really kind of get absorbed right in your subconscious and making it a reality.
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But I I I really couldn't agree more.
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And and two, I think people always talk about how your vision and your goals really drive not only your life, but your business, right?
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And I think a lot of people underestimate that when you're when you're thinking about your business and on such a micro level, like you said, the seeds are being planted to grow things that maybe you hadn't even thought about, right?
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I I had recently read a book.
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Um, and I I always want to call it a moment to think.
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I can't remember if that's the actual title, but the the it the book is awesome.
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It pretty much just says that we need white space in our life, right?
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And the white space is for us to think about things and just daydream.
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And with the phone and the internet and Netflix and everything else going on, there's so little white space left in our lives.
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And I think it's it's kind of sad and unfortunate because we don't spend that time with our brain just kind of in resting state where some of our best ideas just come.
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I mean, if you're folding laundry and you're like, the best ideas come when I'm just doing the most mundane task.
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But I'm not doom scrolling, right?
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Uh, I'm sure you could relate.
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Yep.
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Um, totally agree.
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I think that the uh things in our lives are often there because they're intentional.
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Um, I think that the people, especially that are in our lives, are very intentional.
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Um, but little things, little moments, we really should be paying attention to those because too often we breeze right through everything, like you talk about the doom scrolling and the time on the phone, it really is out of hand.
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Um, but none of us want to admit it.
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And none of us want to admit that we're part of the problem.
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Like I have the problem myself.
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And at times I have to cognit uh cognitively say, no more.
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I can't, I can't keep doing this and go and do something.
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But again, time on the phone isn't the uh worst thing in the world.
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Um, but at the same time, there's gotta be limits and there's gotta be moderation.
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So yes, everything in in small doses, small quantities.
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Well, okay, so you had this idea, this vision, right?
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You wanted to create an educational platform for people that were going to be making business plans to help guide them, to help grow their business.
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You ultimately were growing it, tried to bring it to market.
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The market said, We don't know you.
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You're not like the biggest name in publishing for education.
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And so you're like, okay, screw this.
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I'm gonna get accredited as like a school, really.
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Um, I wouldn't when you had first told me this story, I was thinking of that movie.
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Um, and I I cannot remember the name of the movie.
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I'm terrible, by the way, at remembering names of things on the fly, but it's like they find an abandoned school and they like accredit it, and it it's like an old movie from the 90s.
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And I was thinking of that where like everybody's like faking going to college and like lied to their parents, and then they actually get it accredited and it becomes like an actual school.
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Um, so you've gone through this kind of metamorphosis and you get the accreditation.
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Was the ultimate goal always to sell the school once it got to a certain size?
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No, um, I had a passion for education and I just wanted to do things differently.
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And different to me isn't preventing people uh from doing things that they're passionate about until, let's say, four years or a time frame, right?
00:19:58.240 --> 00:20:06.720
Because sometimes we put uh qualification in terms of buckets, like, hey, when you get to this point, you can be paid this.
00:20:07.039 --> 00:20:17.200
Well, I think a lot of what our society is is seeing now is that education can come in a lot of different ways, particularly badges, certificates.
00:20:17.440 --> 00:20:31.200
And we were always very much forward thinking in that idea that you could take something and do something with it in a short amount of time and get your experience in another way rather than the classroom, right?
00:20:31.440 --> 00:20:46.559
Maybe it's the classroom of hard knocks, maybe it's you travel and you do a study abroad or live abroad, or why would those be any less valuable in who you become and the ideas that you have and you generate?
00:20:46.799 --> 00:20:51.599
So for us, it was let's look at uh education and time in a different way.
00:20:51.759 --> 00:20:54.720
Maybe not time in the seat, but actually competency.
00:20:54.960 --> 00:21:01.279
And so that was one core thing that we did very differently is we didn't want to just have a certificate of completion, right?
00:21:01.519 --> 00:21:03.920
Anyone can give a certificate of completion.
00:21:04.079 --> 00:21:16.079
We wanted accreditation so that we could accredit the learning or accredit the process of someone becoming something enough to where they can share and be able to uh create.
00:21:16.400 --> 00:21:26.079
And whether that's sharing it with friends and family or whether it's sharing with a global audience or whatever it might be, I believe that we're meant to create.
00:21:26.319 --> 00:21:36.079
And uh, in some of the ways that that shows up, I love entrepreneurship because it really taps into well, what really why does this matter to you?
00:21:36.240 --> 00:21:39.359
And why should it matter to a customer base?
00:21:39.519 --> 00:21:44.880
And so that's what we tried to do differently is really establish ourselves in core values.
00:21:44.960 --> 00:21:48.079
And and I would recommend any entrepreneur to do the same.
00:21:48.160 --> 00:21:52.799
Like understand what is your why, and then never let go of that why.
00:21:52.880 --> 00:21:57.519
Because if you give up, generally your business will give up or it won't make it.
00:21:57.680 --> 00:22:02.799
It's gonna be on life support if you choose to not give it the time and the attention that it needs.
00:22:03.039 --> 00:22:07.599
At least that's what I saw over the years of just trying and trying and failing.
00:22:07.759 --> 00:22:15.279
And, you know, it's years of accreditation, and accreditation reviews are like the most intense audits I've ever been a part of.
00:22:15.519 --> 00:22:23.359
But you get to the end of it and you're like, holy cow, we did something that never in a million years did I think that we would be capable of doing.
00:22:23.759 --> 00:22:28.559
When you go through an accreditation audit, are they looking?
00:22:28.799 --> 00:22:41.279
Is is it super holistic and that they're looking at everything with a you know magnifying glass, or is it that they're looking for specific metrics or, you know, I don't even milestones.
00:22:41.359 --> 00:22:48.799
Like I what are is it an audit, something that is kind of like a tax audit where it's that detailed and that you know introspective?
00:22:49.119 --> 00:22:50.720
Can you tell us a little bit more?
00:22:51.039 --> 00:22:51.920
Yeah, it is.
00:22:52.079 --> 00:22:59.359
It's it's very much the latter, but I do believe that there's holistic moments because it's really gonna depend on who your reviewer is.
00:22:59.599 --> 00:23:06.240
I was impressed each of the interviews because they weren't there to try to punish you, they were there to try to teach you.
00:23:06.559 --> 00:23:12.400
And uh many of the things that I experienced was, hey, where's this document?
00:23:12.880 --> 00:23:19.039
We can tell them anything, but then they're like, show me where's the proof, where's the documentation?
00:23:19.279 --> 00:23:20.960
Who knows how to do this?
00:23:21.119 --> 00:23:31.920
Rather than it just being something like, hey, I can tell you, Paloma, all the great things about what our school's doing and how we do it, they're going to press you for where's the documentation?
00:23:32.160 --> 00:23:35.839
Okay, it's here, but where is it in the program?
00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:38.720
Like, show me your online portal.
00:23:38.880 --> 00:23:40.640
Where do students see this?
00:23:40.960 --> 00:23:46.559
How do you interact with these students or the shareholders or stakeholders within the education?
00:23:46.640 --> 00:23:49.279
And that might be parents, that might be grandparents.
00:23:49.440 --> 00:23:54.000
How do you put together a plan if there's some type of like emergency?
00:23:54.160 --> 00:24:01.440
Like, how are you gonna contact students that you may not necessarily see their parents or they're not coming to a campus?
00:24:01.599 --> 00:24:09.519
And so there's a lot of things that they're really going to press you on that you have to think through, like, oh, we actually haven't thought about that.
