Bennett Maxwell - Deeper Than Dough: Building Wealth Without Sacrificing Your Mental Health

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome to Becoming Preferred, the podcast for entrepreneurs and business leaders dedicated to building a life of purpose and prosperity.

Today we have a guest whose journey proves that the most valuable lessons are often learned in the fire.

My guest is Bennett Maxwell, a serial entrepreneur who went from door to door selling to building a nationwide franchi empire with dirty doubt.

He's a master of turning adversity into a competitive advantage, navigating a high profile legal battle that ultimately propelled his brand into the national spotlight.

But his story is more than just business.

Bennett is an advocate for mental health and believes that true success is about building a business that supports your life, not consumes it.

Today we're talking about how he built a franchise system from the ground up, the critical mindset shifts required for explosive growth, and why he's now focused on help other entrepreneurs find their path to financial freedom.

Get ready to learn the business playbook from a man who's seen it all.

Join me now for my conversation with Bennett Maxwell.

Well, hey, Bennett, welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you, Michael.

Super excited to be here.

Thank you.

Hey, I'm excited about this one.

I was checking out your background and as an entrepreneur, as an investor, and your experience in generating business, building businesses, building franchise systems.

And so I'm always excited on a personal level and I know our audiences as well.

We have a lot of entrepreneurs.

People want to take responsibility for their lives and create something of value in their life.

So I'm excited about this episode.

So thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hey, well, let's go back to the beginning.

So you're back in school, you're in high school, you're living in Utah, Salt Lake area, it looks like.

And you know, you were going to decide what you want to be when you grow up.

So, yeah, I decided the Dr. Route not because I like blood.

I realized in college I was watching surgery videos to try to get a stronger stomach because I couldn't handle it.

But, you know, a doctor's respectable for whatever reason.

I'm like, if they make $250,000 pediatrician, I like kids.

You know, I come from a big family that.

But that was the only kind of thought process there, right?

Luckily, I got it right.

When I graduated, I did Cutcoat, and that was like really, really good referral based sales training.

I'm like, michael, who do you know, you know, that can listen to my presentation?

They don't need to buy anything from me.

I just, it's just 15 bucks if they sit down and listen to me and.

But afterwards I'm going to get 10 names from you and I'm going to make you call them and I'm going to grab the phone from you and set the appointment.

Like really, really good training that led perfectly to a Mormon mission, two years in Tijuana, Mexico.

Really good.

Again, communication, not only how to communicate with, you know, whoever you're trying to pitch your religion to, I guess, but also like, how do you live with some random dude?

Because in a mission you don't choose where you go.

They throw you in another country and you have a companion that you're always with from another country.

Call home twice a year.

So it's just you and your companion.

And it was more like a lot of the good lessons were how do I love this person?

Really?

And like, yeah, I guess be there.

What was the reference with your book?

Like the preferred met, you know, how do I get preferred with it, with that, with my companion?

I guess I don't know.

Lots of great lessons then door to door.

And that kind of led me to starting a solar company with my brother who's 13 years older than me.

So I got really lucky, partnered with somebody who's already been doing business, ran that for about 18 months and had a good exit in that time.

I purchased Dirty Dough with the intent of franchising it.

No experience in food or franchising, but that's just kind of how I am.

It just an opportunity came, I'm like, wait, I could buy this cookie company.

Tell them all about Dirty Dough.

I've actually bought some of your product at Dirty Dough so I know how wonderful and delicious.

Tell them what it is.

Yeah, Giant stuffed multi flavored cookie.

So it competes like with crumble.

From a franchise perspective, we had a really competitive advantage because I was selling against crumble.

It's hey, you could buy a crumble, spend 700 grand to open one of these, or you can buy one of these 250, 300 grand because we will make all of the cookies for you.

Quality control.

Still no preservatives.

We'll ship it to you.

You need 500 square feet, one employee in an oven.

The ovens are programmed.

So I had built it and was pitching it on like this is one of the most simplest food franchise concepts with a very unique product.

And yeah, we were selling 20, 30, 40 franchises a month.

Opened up a hundred.

Within two years we did 20 something food trucks.

Way too much for somebody who doesn't know what they're doing right.

I brought on the former CEO of Jimmy Johns as CEO, he ran the company for about 10 months and then purchased it.

He owns a company called Crave Worthy Brands.

They own maybe 15 restaurant brands.

So yeah, I'm glad that I'm done with that.

But what an experience, right?

What an experience on the business side, but probably more than anything, like on the emotional, mental and even physical side.

Through that process, I lost 130 pounds.

And that's, you know, probably as good as selling a business for eight figures.

Well, you're looking great cheap, so good for you.

If that's what it takes, that's what it takes.

But you're eating too much.

You're in quality.

I know I ate the cookies right at the beginning, but I started my health kick.

So I sold my Solar Company in 21.

I'd franchise Dirty Dough at the end of 21.

And when I sold my solar company, that's when I realized my million dollar goal was empty.

I'm like, I need to come up with another goal.

And a lot of that was my mind and my body and my emotional state rather than some, you know, arbitrary number in my cell phone bank account.

Well, you started to look after your health and you were a millionaire by 28, I believe.

And which is great, but things weren't right.

Things weren't right on going on inside.

And so the money was there.

You had the physical aspects of it.

But as you're talking about the mental health, go there a little bit.

Because I think entrepreneurs, we suffer from burnout sometimes we don't want to go back to the corporate.

Once you work for yourself, you never really want to work for anybody else.

But sometimes that's your job.

But even working within an organization, you can still be an intrapreneur.

You can still bring some of those lessons to bear.

What was going on with you and how did you move out of that?

How did you navigate that?

I would say blanket statement, like generally I just didn't, I didn't dive in deep enough to what I wanted.

I didn't know what I wanted.

I didn't ask myself really what I wanted.

So what did I want?

I wanted to be a doctor because that had status.

And then I dropped out a semester left before graduating with my pre med because I got status doing door to door and I can make a quarter million dollars, you know, in five months.

But again, it was like, why did I want that status?

What, what I was, what was the emotion that I was really after?

I never identified that.

It was just, if I have a million dollars, I'LL have less stress.

It's just a general idea.

If I have a million dollars, I'm going to have more free time.

More free time equals more vacation time.

More vacation times means I get to be with my amazing family.

And man, I love my family.

That makes me happy.

What I didn't realize is if I just narrowed it down, actually I just want to spend quality time with my family.

I don't need to be a millionaire to do that.

I just like chase this arbitrary whatever.

Got it.

Got the dopamine, got the serotonin.

Then I realized how dopamine and serotonin work is it goes up and then it goes down.

So it could go up again, right?

Like it has to go down.

So when you become a millionaire, when you get a fat paycheck, when you do anything like that, it's momentary and it's supposed to be momentary.

I didn't know that.

I had to internalize that.

And then, okay, now I need to change my entire life goal.

Not on the material, but on the emotion and the emotions typically attached with the journey rather than the destination.

Cuz the destination is empty every time.

Because typically you're measuring it based on your happiness levels, right?

Which is dopamine and serotonin.

And those will go down every single time after you achieve whatever the hell you're gonna achieve.

That is interesting.

I've never really equated with that, but no, you're exactly right.

Not a big tattoo guy, but you can see that forearm says ego is the enemy.

That's from Marcus Aurelius, 2000 years ago.

One of the stoics, right.

And I was always driven by image.

So when I was younger and to your point is, okay, I gotta have the nice car, you gotta have the nice house, gotta have the good job.

You want the status, you want the recognition.

What's driving that?

And a lot of us get into that, that on that hamster wheel and you find you, you get there and it's not fulfilling.

You know, we have different pathologies.

Wide, like as speakers and professional speakers, you know, comics are manic depressives.

Typically speakers are, we have the need to be loved by strangers.

All right?

We got to get up in front of an audience and get somebody to accept us.

And when you were door to door, even with the Cutco and by the way, they made really great knives.

Because I know we bought them from family, friends.

I literally still have some, like from 15 years ago.

The ones that they gave me, they still, they're still my best knives.

Yeah, it Worked like a charm.

But that payoff, if you sold a hundred dollar product, you were just as happy as you did.

One for a thousand, you got, you did this.

It was the sale, it was the dopamine.

Never considered it from a chemical perspective.

And then you get to a point where, hey, wait a minute, this is just never ending.

And I'm an addict to dopamine and I'm doing things that are behaviorally just the same as if we were taking something, you know, more harmful to us.

It's just as harmful, I think, is our quest for status or quest for money to keep up with the Joneses.

We look at social media, we see what people are doing, what they're not doing.

Hey, that's, I'm not doing that.

It creates a mental health issue, I think.

Yeah.

And if you don't figure out really what you want, what is behind that.

So for me, I started okay, I want dirty dough and I want it to mean something more because I know that I, I guess I, I just listened to this in a book.

I got fortunate.

I hit my goals faster.

Like I achieved all my goals that I wanted to achieve.

And the luck in that is I was able to see that it's empty faster.

Right.

Because a lot of people are chasing the thing that's going to fix their life all the way till they die.

My dad's still talking to me about a billion dollar road business company.

I'm like, you're 65, in terrible health.

Like really?

Is that what's going to give you what you want to like, no.

Right.

So I think really coming in and defining and being real with yourself.

I got the recommendation from someone here in Utah when I was, I told you five years ago is the first time I tasted coffee or alcohol because I left the Mormon Church.

Getting into psychedelics completely shook my world and showed me that there was no control.

I mean, I love your tattoo.

It showed me that is the only thing that I have to overcome is the ego.

Right.

And my attachment to the ego.

And if I could do that, there is no more suffering.

Blanket statement.

That's it.

Yeah.

And it helped me.

I very Buddhist.

It's narrow it down philosophy really.

It's detach.

And as you get older, I love it.

I love when you find that journey.

You know, I was on a bus once when I was in my twenties, building my fortune how I going.

And I'm sitting next to a.

She wasn't Jamaican, but she like a Rastafarian where they were all the colors anyway.

And we Got talking.

She had the dreads and everything else going.

And so we had a little visit and we're talking.

She said, there's a Bob Marley lyric and it says, 1E wanny no getty getty getty no 1E.

And I just went, whoa, that one sat with me.

And I remember it 40 years later.

I'm still quoting it.

And check out the lyrics.

So we want because we don't have it.

And it's elusive.

It's always.

We're always chasing because the bar keeps getting raised.

We get competitive, they get competitive.

You come out, there's always a roadblock, there's always an obstacle.

So you can use brute force and get there, but then once you get it, you're going, this was it.

The payoff was this.

I gave up my family, I gave up my mental health, I gave up my physical health.

I gave for what, some zeros in my bank account that none of it's going with me anyway.

And until you have some setbacks or the warning lights go off, you don't realize that.

And a lot of people don't.

I know a lot of really rich millionaires and billionaires who are miserable, absolutely unhappy.

And they don't do it for the money.

At this point, it's all about that, acquire more.

They want more and more and more.

Yeah, it's very hard.

So I want, I want, I want, because I don't have.

So I'm trying to gain out of fear, and then once I have, I'm trying to protect it out of fear.

And that describes, in my view, Western society.

It's just everything is fear.

That's what I was raised.

I mean, Mormonism is great in a lot of things, but it is all fear based.

Like fear, guilt, shame are very heavy.

Guilt, pride, like those are leveraged to you as if the illusion of control wasn't an illusion.

But anyways, gets to a certain way.

Put the fear of God into you and you behave a certain way.

People don't change unless the pain's so great they have to, or the fear of God's put into them.

But yeah, you get in that fear state and then how does your body respond?

Your body responds like you're fearful of a lion.

Like your cortisol level goes up, your blood pressure rises, you don't digest your food as well because you're living physically out of fear.

And then it's just such a different mindset to go and be like, okay, no, I don't need anything.

I already have everything I have.

I'm 32 years old, I've contemplated bankruptcy more days than I want to admit, you know, like for days and days and lost so many hours of sleep.

But guess what?

For 32 years, 365 days a year, I've always had everything I needed when I needed it.

And then it's trying to trust in that and not.

But what am I going to do for next payroll, Right?

But it's.

No.

Every time I've ever needed anything, like physically, I've always been safe, you know, so why is my body reacting as if it was in actual harm?

And I think it's because of how I was raised.

And again, it was all fear.

Like, everything that I've done has always been out of fear to get something because I didn't have or once I've had it, fear from loss.

And it's rewiring, all that, right?

We circle the wagons and then it's like, what if I lose it?

You know, to that point, I remember when the pandemic in 2020 hit, as a speaker, all my gigs canceled.

Everything just canceled.

Right.

So the years, next couple of years worth of revenue just went.

We had time, but I also owned a bunch of stocks in the stock market and I traded a lot in airlines and things because Warren Buffett did.

I, like I said, I worked for a bunch of his companies.

And he dumped them all.

He dumped them all and they crashed 60%.

Like, they still haven't really recovered.

And I saw a lot of zeros.

I tell the kids it's their inheritance.

Like, good luck, just go wash away overnight.

If things I'd spent years building.

I watched literally dollars going down the tube.

And I cried for a week.

You know, I'll be honest, I cried for a week.

And, and to your point, you know, a bourbon or four to kind of soften, dull it out a little.

Yeah, it was a terrible time.

But then I learned, I thought, wait a minute, this is all a house of cards, everything we're building, if that's where our value is, if that's where our identity is, we're barking up the wrong tree because it can vanish and disappear just like that and so many things.

So I think you're bang.

And good for you for discovering it at such an early age, because I.

It's put you on a different road and there's a lot of people need to hear that message.

Well, let's get back to the business stuff.

Your dirty dose.

Growth was explosive and the product was amazing.

What would you say, though, as you were Building because you saw the opportunity.

What was the single most critical decision you made that enabled the rapid expansion?

The single.

Give me a couple of them as well.

I know there's.

Yeah.

I mean honestly it's.

It was my response to our lawsuit, which is kind of a weird answer.

Like before that I would say hiring a team.

I hired really good advisors that have been in the game.

I hired a CEO, Jill Summerhays, who founded Maui Wowie Smoothies and Coffee.

Like that was probably one of the best decisions.

She ran that for 40 years, 600 plus franchises.

She was the CEO of the month that we franchised.

So I think that was really good.

But it was May of 2022.

We had zero franchises open.

Just the corporate store I bought in Tempe.

And we got sued by Crumble.

And nothing happened other than I read the lawsuit.

This is stupid.

Whatever, I'm gonna have to fight it.

Six weeks later the news picked it up and they said crumble suing, dirty dough, whatever.

So I've already sold 60 franchises, have a huge pipeline.

I have to give every single person explanation of this lawsuit now.

Or I could just go on LinkedIn.

I chose a ladder and my personality is very smart ass, I guess.

So like the first post was a screenshot of that, of the lawsuit, whatever the news article saying, because it mentioned sprinkles.

And it's like crumble.

$1 billion cookie company suing a startup over sprinkles.

If your grandma makes cookies, watch out Crumbles.

Coming for something like that.

Some stupid.

Right?

And then.

But it got a lot of views, got maybe half a million views.

And then they had done some billboard.

We had done some billboard saying Dirty Doe coming soon on I15, the only freeway really in Utah.

The month later they flood the freeway with we're the best company in the whole world.

Number one restaurant, thousand stores, billion dollar company.

Like really bragging billboards, whatever.

And they sue us the same month.

Then the next month we responded with billboards that said cookies so good we're being sued and our cookies don't crumble with the competition.

Let your taste buds be the judge.

Things like that.

And again that got maybe a few hundred thousand people watched on the freeway.

But Good Morning America showed in there with an interview with me, right?

And same with cnbc.

So that actually like openness to just be a smart ass and accept it and say I'm just going to be completely open by.

As I'm getting sued by a billion dollar company when I have no money in the bank.

That was Actually the single biggest decision, because at 450 franchises, that's 10 million plus in revenue, which we spent.

And I also raised another 9 million.

So I promise you, I needed that first 10 million.

That just, yeah, gave us the national exposure.

It put the eyes on us.

And I already had the team in place to say I have the best franchising team in food right now.

I think for this concept.

And also the simplicity of the model was already in place.

We just needed more eyes.

The lawsuit gave us lots of eyes.

No, that's interesting.

And how you handled and turned that adversity into an advantage, I think is good because it was a very high profile lawsuit with crumble.

And so obviously going through that, it created a massive challenge and you obviously got it resolved.

And you have a podcast called, which I love the name of it, Deeper than Dough.

And you often speak about mental health and why mental health is such an important topic for entrepreneurs.

How do you integrate that into your entire business philosophy?

What do people want?

What drives people?

Right.

But it's an emotion.

It has to be an emotion.

If you have a goal, that's not an emotion.

It's not the end goal.

Right.

It's I want to have something physical because I want to feel something.

But we're always after feeling, I guess, that emotion.

So have we narrowed it down into that emotion right now with franchising, I'm saying, I guess the new mission statement is freedom from constant thought, to live a life of ease and gratitude.

So it's the constant thinking that causes all the suffering.

Right.

And those expectations.

So how do you get more control over your mind?

And if your mind's more calm, then yeah, you can live a life of ease.

You're not battling with everything.

And that's easy to have gratitude.

So I guess that's what I'm after.

And how do you get that?

If you buy a franchise or you buy a business, that's great.

There's some freedom there.

But typically you just bought yourself a job and it's actually worse than your 9 to 5.

You're working longer hours and you're getting paid less.

But if you learn how to do it, then you open up your second, then your third, then your fourth.

Now you have four franchises then that are each doing a hundred or two hundred grand a year.

And you have a really good organization now.

You have freedom of time and money.

That doesn't guarantee you freedom from constant thought, but it gives you the ability to now start working on your mind.

Right.

Like I started working on My mind a hundred percent last April when I thought I was going to die and I wasn't sleeping.

And it's just like I could solve all my external problems or I could solve the problem on your wrist, which is just my ego.

Why do I have a problem with all of this?

Right.

Just one problems.

Why am I identifying problems?

Because it's all perspective.

And once I lasered focus on that.

Now I'm at a 20 hour work week and in the best shape of my life with the best relationship of my life with my kids and my wife.

And I think it was because I just lasered in on my mind rather than everything else.

And why did I do that?

Because I did have a little bit of freedom from time and money that allowed me to do that.

So I guess that's a long story.

But it's not about buying franchises, it's not about buying businesses.

It's what do you want to feel on a day to day basis.

I used to think it's joy and fulfillment, but those are great.

But now I think it's more ease and gratitude.

Right.

Because I can have gratitude and cry over a good movie and I could be grateful that I'm feeling that deep emotion and I have tears running down my face.

Right.

Or I could cry and be embarrassed by it.

Either way, it's just perspective.

Yeah, no, I'm with you on that one.

My wife and I, we were watching the Way we Were the other day after Robert Redford, also from Utah, passed away.

So she'd never seen it with Barbara Streisand.

Of course, it's an old movie.

Right.

And you know, we're at the end of it and she looks over at me and she goes, you're crying.

No, I'm not.

No, I'm not.

Just.

But it's just such a sad ending to the story, but a great story.

And they're all, they're filmed in the 70s.

73 was the movie when the movie came out.

But it's good that you can get in touch with that.

And I think as we get older that sometimes happens.

You start having children, you get kicked in the teeth and you've learned a lot that probably will save your life in the long run.

And a lot of other people listening to it because why are we doing it?

Why do we have the need in the first place?

What's so deficient in our existence that we think, I got to have this and this is going to make it better?

Because we're bombarded with here's what success looks like we see athletes and they're living large and then we see them collapse.

So you look on men's magazines, you see all these beautiful people and look on women's magazines, here's the same beautiful people.

Well, here's what you're supposed to be.

And we're watching marketing messages and we're looking at our lives and going, wait a minute, I'm not measuring up.

And then we get depressed.

We all kinds of different things.

No, it's interesting.

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And now back to my conversation with Bennett Maxwell.

What's the most common mistake?

Because as an entrepreneur, and you've been one for most of your life, really 20 plus years.

What's the most common mistake aspiring entrepreneurs make when they're first starting out?

And what advice would you give to them?

They don't just make decisions and go, I will make five decisions.

Four of them might be wrong, or maybe two of them are wrong, but I'll make five decisions and act on all of them before the average entrepreneurs can even decide on one.

It's just, you just go, right?

And then fail.

And then you go and then you fail and then you go and then it's like I just got off a sales call right before this franchise.

Second opinion, new ad, no sales script, no nothing.

I'm just like, let's figure this out, right?

I don't need to prep for it.

Whatever.

It's like again, I'm going to go back to the.

I guess the faith.

Maybe I call It.

I've always been able to do what I need to do whenever I need to do it right.

But the suffering comes from, I guess, over prep or whatever.

On, like, is it good enough?

So to also respond to your last comment, I think the not good enough is the mentality, I am not enough.

I need to be more.

Is the underlining cause for pretty much most the suffering.

So if you can address that and really set your goal on again, like, it's an emotional state.

I don't need to be more.

That's just.

How do you find a role model in American society?

I can't tell you a role model that I have.

And I said, I want to have the brain patterns and the thought patterns of this guy.

I don't even know, maybe Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk.

But also, like, he doesn't really spend time with his family.

I don't even have somebody in all of America that I follow.

I'm sure they're out there, but, like, who's somebody that's working 10 to 20 hours a week, that's really good on fitness and business and spends time with their family and.

And has freedom from constant thought because they know how to control their mind?

I don't know anybody out there.

So then it's like, so what does the entire generation do?

There's not a role model in Western culture of, I want that guy's mind because he looks like he's having a peaceful, calm life.

It's just like Hustlers and Grant Cardone always trying to do more and more.

And it's, no, that's not my role model.

I don't want to follow you because I don't want your life because you're not doing what I want to do.

And I think that's the issue with Western cultures.

Who are we following?

Yeah, you've got some really good insights here, beyond your ears, I got to.

Tell you, because mushrooms, I think those are mushrooms.

Psychedelics.

Yeah.

Well, they help you focus.

What I've read about them anyway.

Yeah, those microdoses.

And no, it's really interesting because where does the drive come from?

And we talk about becoming and getting rid of it, which, again, is a very Buddhist concept.

Without going into all the religious stuff, I don't describe everything they believe in, but I do love that aspect of it.

There was a guy who wrote a book called Essentialism.

And the metaphor is you go to your closet, you look at your closet.

If you haven't wore that thing in six months, out it goes.

Now, if you still want to hang on to that Grateful Dead T shirt from the 70s that you attended?

Turn it around on the hanger, mark the date, and in six more months, if you still haven't worn out, it goes.

Then Marie Kondo shows up in the Konmari method, where, you know, on Netflix, whatever.

And if it doesn't bring you joy, toss it.

So that came at the right time in my life, those types of things.

And my wife loved Marie Kondo.

And we call it, you know, she condoized our homes.

And I mean, we got rid of everything has its place or joy or it disappeared.

And we've really moved to more of a minimalist footprint.

You know, I had planes, trains, automobile, like, literally.

And building the corporation, I had to have more overhead, more people working.

You know, we had my own plane.

I loved all of that.

That was nice.

But the amount of work I had to do and be away from home and family in order to generate those revenues versus got rid of it all and then just started building.

It's like, how can I build?

Adopting your philosophy of, I want freedom, I want time.

We got our family around us.

I can be with them.

Can I add something?

It's like my first mushroom trip.

Not a micro dose, like an actual mushroom trip.

I didn't know what happiness was, and it drove me crazy because I imagined myself on the beach with my family.

I'm like, I don't even like this.

It's not like it's bad, but this isn't heaven to me.

And reflecting now, three years later, on how different my brain is, it's because my thought patterns were there.

So it wasn't even that I needed to be on the beach with my family.

I couldn't fully enjoy it because I could never be present.

Because I'm on the beach and I'm thinking, what happened yesterday, what could happen tomorrow?

Or I'm not thinking about work, but I'm still like, always on to the next thing.

I'm always in a hurry.

We got to hurry to the beach.

We got to hurry in the water.

We got to hurry and play at the waves.

We got to hurry and get dressed, to hurry and go to dinner, to hurry and do nothing.

And it's like, what am I doing, man?

I, you know, I still got work to do.

I still have work to do.

You raise a good point.

Well, and it's like you talked about with presence, you know, my brother did a lot of work with people who had dependencies just in his work, and alcoholics, drug addictions, and he Says the one thing that I've learned that they all crave and addicts or business or workaholics is it's all about presence.

Like I'm thinking of people who you talk about getting older and they're working and they want to start business.

It's that constant drive until we run out of gas and we just, it's over, right.

Versus hey, how can we get there quicker and do we have enough?

And you made a really good point about you've always had enough.

Same for me.

I've always had enough.

I always had enough.

It's kind of like get, where are we getting?

Yeah, but where can I get to that gives me more happiness than I have today?

You know, we learn the lessons.

When you learn the lesson, you talked about the importance of building a strong advisory board in your businesses and as you're growing, so you brought in good people.

Can you explain?

Because that works in life in general, even having and listening to things we talk about.

Can you explain the value of this and how our listeners can go about finding the right advisors in their world?

Yeah, and if you don't mind, I'm also going to do the technical side on what to offer them because I think that that's the most useful.

So I took a startup course after I sold my solar company thinking like, man, why do I need a startup course?

I'm hot, didn't know nothing, go there.

And I'm taking a startup course by John Richards and he teaches me about advisory boards.

He had a company that IPO'd for $31 billion called Info Space in like 2000.

Anyways, like just a very different business, right?

Like I had a small business that I scaled and sold in a year and a half and I didn't know anything.

Advisory board.

So I'm like, okay, who better to have on my advisory board than John?

He was my senior advisor.

I gave him a percent and a half of equity for Dirty doe.

We weren't even a franchise yet.

So this is a percent and a half of nothing of a company that doesn't have any money.

But I'm selling on the future, right?

Look at Crumble's numbers, look at my model, look at my plan, look at my team.

This is what I'm doing.

So I get him, I gave him a percent and a half, but it's over a two year vesting period with six months a quarter of investing.

So if he doesn't answer my calls after month four, I could fire him.

And I take back all my percent and A half and I could go hire somebody else.

Senior advisor expectation is answer your phone, you know, whenever I call or text, in an hour or two a week, whatever.

And it's usually front loaded.

Maybe a few more hours at the beginning and then less.

Then go get a few more advisors, try to get an odd number.

These guys, it's not an actual board of directors.

They don't make decisions, they just give you advice, which is nice.

Then go find two other people, offer them a quarter percent to maybe a percent.

The expectation is one hour a week.

Ish.

Right?

And then same thing.

It's subject to a two year vesting period with six months.

So now I got John and I say, John, you built a $30 billion company and you bu the number one entrepreneur program in the nation at BYU.

You got a really good track record.

I'm going to sell franchises off of John and him supporting me because what have I done?

Okay, John, who's our next advisor?

He gets Steve Hart.

Steve Hart owns Property Management Inc.

It's the largest property management franchise.

So now as I'm selling franchises or recruiting team, it's like, look at my advisors.

I have a really good business guy and I have the number one franchising and property management in the world.

Like, then I got to go get my third advisor, Greg Majewski.

My third advisor was a podcaster, Eric Van Horn.

I was on a show once, I sold, it was like $900,000 in revenue from being on a show once.

And he was an advisor.

Paid him half a percent, right?

Got 900 grand out of that.

Then I brought on the Jimmy, John's guy, Greg Majewski as an advisor as well.

Gave him a percent.

He ended up becoming CEO then purchasing the company.

So it all lined up really well.

I would definitely recommend doing that now.

How do you find it?

I found them through my Cutco methods.

Right.

I asked my employees, hey, who do you know?

That's how I found Jill.

Summer Hayes, who became my CEO.

Who do you know to be my Advisor?

Asking a Mrs. Fields former employee and she says, contact Jill.

And then I contact Jill anyway.

She became CEO.

But ask everybody, tell everybody what you're doing and try to find really good advisors.

And know that they're only for two years.

So after two years you might need to replace one or you might need a sub amount, whatever.

But go get three advisors, give them a quarter to maybe a percent and a half of your company, even if it's worth nothing.

Sell them on the vision and, you know, go from there.

Yeah, it's great advice.

Like, amazing advice.

And like I say, you're bringing in a team because these are people who have done it and they help you navigate the landmines.

Right.

So you learn a lot from them.

And then over two years and you're vesting it so giving a percentage.

And most people.

Some people will help you for nothing and no percentages.

But when you're offering, absolutely, yeah.

They're always looking, going, hey, this could be a sleeper.

But.

But there's a very, extremely good advantage on the sell side.

I don't care what your business is.

If you're a consulting business and you have really good advisors, you will sell more consulting because you're selling.

People buy out based off of trust and experience.

And to say, like, how many people know somebody that had a company that was $30 billion?

Nobody, really.

And if you need to talk to that person as part of our consulting package, or if you need to talk to John as part of buying a franchise, like, I will facilitate that.

So it's not just getting their advice, but.

And for sure they'll give it to you for free.

I would recommend you formalizing it so you can use it in your sales presentation, whatever you're selling.

Like cost of sales.

Cost of sales.

No, exactly.

It really.

I get it.

100.

It's funny, I could say that when I started my speaking career, because when I look back at it, I.

Nobody knew who I was.

I wanted to be a speaker, right in my 20s.

So I used to produce events.

I produce six or six events a year, eight events a year.

I'd bring in the top speakers.

The Mark, Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul.

To your point, Name recognition guys, Brian Tracy, all of these guys.

I bring them in and negotiate a better fee to get them all in for an event, sell their product at the event.

But I always put myself on the program so there'd be six speakers, five of which everybody knew.

One.

You didn't.

Me, but I could hold my own and speaking.

So people came and they're going, he must be good because he's with those other guys.

So to your point, I actually did.

I just never capitalized on it.

But I've known about that for a long time and it worked.

And basically I was off and running on my own.

After a decade or so of doing that, you exited Dirty Dough.

So you did sell.

What did you learn from that experience and how has that shaped your perspective on a founder's exit strategy or for selling our business?

Are there anything we should be considering.

There, Yeah, I sold because I was underwater.

I didn't want to deal with any of it.

My brain was going crazy, I was losing sleep.

So I would say don't sell under that condition because again, I was just like, whatever happens, happens.

Like it was.

The sell was supposed to happen before the end of the quarter or else the share price was going to go up.

And I had all this work to do over the weekend, but I'd already set my boundaries.

I'm like, I don't work weekends effort.

I'm not.

I don't even care.

It closed like two minutes before midnight.

So I think that was all crazy.

We did a stock swap.

So instead, rather than cash, I swapped my equity for equity in the parent company.

It's a lot bigger.

I think they did 300 something million last year.

That's the third year.

But it's still high risk.

Right.

So I just rolled over my risk, spread it out a little bit more.

But it's still a startup.

So that is a strategy.

I think obviously you'd rather have cash.

That would be great.

Right.

But there's also ways.

I guess what I learned from there is I'm still very grateful and I would definitely do it again because I didn't want to run the business anymore.

So there's so many different creative transactions that you can make.

I would just say try to make them with the right people.

The fact that this guy was an advisor and then a CEO and then he purchased the company, I think definitely helped.

Not that there still wasn't surprises probably from both ends, but yeah, I guess really take your time on the transaction.

The solar transaction, same thing.

It was pretty quick, didn't really pay any attention.

And all of a sudden I got money in my bank and I was just like, like, cool.

I didn't want to force it either way.

I guess it's setting up expectations like, oh, it needs to happen.

Because if I told myself it needed to happen, it was going to happen.

And if it didn't, I didn't want myself to be let down.

Especially if it was already super stressed.

Yeah, no kidding.

You see franchises now and you help business professionals and entrepreneurs who want to get into a franchise.

You help guide them and counsel them on different ones.

What are the hot things today?

Are there no brainers?

Because you're buying systems typically and then like you say, sometimes you're buying a job.

So if you're coming into it today and you're coming in clean and hey, I want to get a franchise, where do I go?

How do you align that with maybe my skill sets, my abilities?

Do I have to align it if I don't know anything about this, should I get into that?

How do you help them choose?

Yeah, it's jumping down to like what are your goals?

But not even what are your financial goals, but it's like what are you trying to fill on a day to day basis and what does your day look like?

Okay, and how do we get you there?

And pretty much always you're going to be starting with a job.

Now there are franchises like one that is really hot, ranked in the top 10 in Entrepreneur magazine.

Like a lashes laser, hair removal, Brazilian wax, that's super hot.

It's receptionless, so you can't even work full time.

Like corporate does the marketing.

I think it's $7 they charge you every time you, you get a paying customer for $60.

If you don't make money, they don't charge you, which is really cool.

You're hiring estheticians, they're doing the work and then people are self checking in.

So it's only like 10 hours.

And I think the average profit that they're making because there's 4,000 different brands you could choose from, most of them don't show you financials and a lot of them do show you financials but they only show you the top line revenue.

Right.

Very few of them are actually showing you the profit then.

And then if they're showing you the profit, what's the payback period?

So that's what I look to kind of cut through the noise.

I guess if I was to give one piece of advice to somebody, it's if you're in this for finances and I get, if you're in it for a passion project, then this doesn't apply to you and you just want to go own a karate gym, that's fine.

But if you're in it for the finances, for the freedom and the scalability, just toss out the 3,900 brands that don't have a really strong item.

19.

Just look for the ones objectively.

First make your decision objective, like do the numbers make sense?

And then make sure the emotion ties in because you do need to enjoy it.

But it doesn't matter if you enjoy.

It's very hard to enjoy it if you're losing $10,000 a month and you don't have money in the bank to lose.

It doesn't, I don't care what you're doing on a day to day basis, that's going to be very hard to Enjoy.

In that scenario, would you still look.

At a franchise before just going starting your own and building something you've done?

Yeah, I've never.

Yeah, that.

It's really hard I think to start something because you just don't know what.

You don't know if you've never been in payroll and then in taxes and then what's workers comp like, all of that stuff.

So franchising is just the next step.

If you pick the right brand, you should never have a question of what do I do.

They've already figured that out.

It's not guaranteed but if you pick the right brand it is.

But the other thing, the other really big opportunity right now is just buy an existing business.

You have all these baby boomers that are retiring.

You could buy that.

The only issue with that is usually those are not really built on systems.

So it's harder to scale.

But if you're a systems person, buy a business.

This guy's a plumber, he's making six figures.

His son doesn't want to take it over, his daughter doesn't want to take over.

He's going to close his doors unless you come and pay them.

150k seller finance, you give them 50k and 5k a month immediately, already profiting 5 +k.

You could do really cool deals like that.

I would always recommend buying a business or getting into franchising versus starting one.

If you've never done it because there's just so much to do, well then.

You to your point, then you can go in and renovate it.

So if you're scaling and putting in systems and processes, somebody who hasn't done that, like I've had businesses that were just good businesses, they paid well.

But you can't scale it like my speaking business.

So it's a great business but I'm limited because they're hiring me to come speak 90 minutes.

I can't scale that, it's impossible.

So the only way I can scale through online training, virtual bigger events type of thing.

So it's like a Gary Vee you talked about.

You're getting paid for your engagement, your books.

You've got all these little channels and nobody buys books anymore because they don't read them.

Last question for you then.

For young entrepreneurs listening today, what's the one non negotiable principle that they got to adopt in your mind to build the successful and fulfilling business?

Yeah.

Your goal has to be an emotional state and then you have to start achieving that emotional state daily rather than it's going to be a goal.

So like my dirty dough was join fulfillment was my mission statement.

Those are the two emotions I was trying to achieve.

And then it's do I take this investor's money or this investor's money?

Which one makes me more money?

I don't know.

But if I say which one brings me more joy and fulfillment, that always just was.

It was easier for me to decide do I hire this person or this person.

And then when I say, you know, what's going to be the better decision?

I don't know which of these two people is going to bring more joy and fulfillment to my life.

That's just much better.

So I would say that's the non negotiable.

Make sure that your emotional state and you're trying to achieve that every day and you're using that as your metric to make decisions rather than I want.

A million bucks book right there, my friend.

Mr. Bennett.

That's good stuff.

That's great advice.

Hey, this was just absolutely amazing and interesting.

Lots of great insights and such a young age too.

Good for you.

You're in your early 30s.

But hey, we can all benefit from this.

I know I certainly will.

Bennett, thanks for being with us.

We'll put everything in the show notes and I know if they reach out to you, they can get on your website, BennettMaxwell.com, we'll have all of it in there.

They can listen to your podcast.

They can.

If they want to talk franchising with you, they're open to give you a buzz call, talk about opportunities.

Absolutely.

That's all available to them.

Bennett, thanks so much for being here.

Appreciate it.

Michael, thank you.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that has caught your attention and why does you and who is one person who you can share that with?

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