Need an Investor for Your Startup? Listen to this with Freddie Achom

British-Nigerian serial entrepreneur and tech investor – Freddie Achom

Freddie is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He goes into exactly where you need to be to find funding and gives tips on scaling a business. Plus he wants to invest in 20 businesses by 2016 – so he gives you the opportunity to pitch him!

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• RosemontGroup.net
• Zirtual.com

Check out FreddieAchom.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I'm really excited to have Freddie Achom on the show today. You can check out his website at FreddieAchom.com. He's a serial entrepreneur in renewable energy and tech and a lot of different things. I'm really excited to have him on the show today - my assistant told me he's in the French Alps, we've been connecting from all different places all over the world. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Freddie.

Freddie: Really, it's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to this for a few weeks.

Jaime: That's amazing.

Freddie: Since our last conversation.

Jaime: I know, we had our last conversation and people keep coming back to me, saying "Make sure the audio and the video are really good," and last time we had to cancel it - I felt horrible because it was your time - but now we're good, we have a better connection, it's all good. Sometimes that happens in business and that's probably what we'll be getting into today. Tell me a little bit about your start and how you started as an entrepreneur.

Freddie: I'm not sure if it was by accident or it was hereditary. I'm sorry.

Jaime: And he also has a bunch of children in the background, who we were trying to tell to be quiet earlier but unfortunately it didn't work so well.

Freddie: I'm sorry, I'm in a house with six children and they've been told to keep quiet and I'm not sure if you can hear them but they're not being very quiet. But yes, my start, I'm not sure if it was by accident or hereditary because my father's an entrepreneur and seeing him every day break new ground and chase business and you could continuously see the worry and the benefits, you see him when he's chasing something, the worry, and you see him when he succeeds and you see the benefits. As a kid I guess I didn't know what that was but I could understand or break it down at a later stage in life. I could, I guess, understand what was going on.

Jaime: He has kids the exact same age as me so I totally understand. If you need to take a second, go ahead.

Freddie: Could you guys go back downstairs please?

Kids: No, why?

Freddie: Because I'm busy right now.

Kids: Stop then, you silly.

Freddie: Could you go downstairs, please?

Kids: No, never!

Freddie: Can you go downstairs, please?

Jaime: I so know what this is like!

Freddie: Can you take your cousins downstairs, please? Go down to the games room on the bottom floor. Go to the games room. I've just convinced them to go to the games room. They've been swimming for the last hour and now they're dressed and they're about to eat and they're just?

Jaime: Crazy, yeah, I get it. I love this stuff and I know it's kind of weird but you seem more like a human when you're like "Okay, children, let's go!" It's the same thing with any kids anywhere. It's one of those things where you're like "I can't yell, I'm doing an interview right now." You can't go "Go!"

Freddie: With kids you can't really well because then they adopt that going forward into their own friendships and how they interact so you can't yell, you must reason, you must make sure that they understand why and they will also adopt that in their own life, so actually raising kids is a whole new frontier actually. You can't do what you do in your normal life with children, otherwise you've got problems down the line that you again have to deal with.

Jaime: Let's talk about that for a second. I definitely want to get into your background and talk about business and all of that fun stuff but I think since we're talking about children now I get this question a lot about how to balance family and work and be able to give what you can give. I mean you're with your kids right now and you're doing an interview so you're working and you're with your kids right now - they're 8 and 6, almost the exact same age as mine = and it can be kind of crazy sometimes so how do you manage it all?

Freddie: It's really difficult but you just have to count yourself lucky and know that you've got work and you've got children and they're both enjoyable and they're both fulfilling so you shouldn't complain about having to juggle both, that's how I see it. I move a lot to be with my children - I will reschedule meetings, I will cancel entire days if my children ask me for me to be part of certain activities. I will reschedule important calls, meetings, because at the end of the day this is more important and you don't realize that until you have them because you always assume that work is so important but once you have children they are way more important and if I was to lose business because I had to go to my son's sports day, for instance, it would be fine and be worth it.

Jaime: I love that. How do you determine that, though? Because it's kind of crazy. My kids, I think, have 17,000 things for their school every single week and what do I decide to do, what don't I-

Freddie: I guess you have to try. If you know you're going to go that route you have to have the right people in place to run your business alongside you, so that's probably the key to being able to juggle both, is to have trusted people within your circle or part of your organization that you can offload at the very last minute - an important meeting or important details of your business, you just sort of pass them on and focus on your children. You're not focusing on your children for weeks on end, you're focusing on them for a day, a day and a half, for hours, so you're not asking to move the world. I don't see it as incredibly difficult but I hear other people and I've seen other people who do feel it's extremely difficult to balance both. I don't know why but I think it's just prioritizing.

Jaime: I think the hard thing is that you're never going to be able to get everything done all the time and the fact that you have a team is huge and a lot of people can't afford that right now and I know a lot of people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off - I know women who are trying to have kids and work at the same time, even though they're watching their kids all day, and that stuff is really rough, so let's dive into how people grow businesses well enough so that we can afford an amazing, awesome team that we can offload people onto. When you had your dad as an entrepreneur you saw the crazy worry and then not worry so did you know what you were getting into when you dove into this?

Freddie: I think it was accidental because I just really wanted to get into the crux of "doing business" as they call it - that's what people say, "I'm doing business. I'm chasing things." - and I just wanted to get my teeth into that. I didn't actually know it was the same thing that my father did but, at a later stage, I came to realize that, when I started to sort of calculate things and see the situations and the worries and the ups and the downs I realized "Okay, yeah." I think the word entrepreneur is used far more regularly today, whereas in his day they just called it business - "I'm doing business. I'm a businessman." Today, if you walked up to an entrepreneur and said "Are you a businessman?" he would find that a bit strange - he wants to be called an entrepreneur or an investor or some sort of niche element of his business, but back in those days it was just like "I'm doing business" and so, after a while, I equated the two to be one and the same.

Jaime: Give me a timeline of everything you've done - a quick timeline of when you first started your first business to now, the companies you've worked with and all of that fun stuff.

Freddie: Okay?

Jaime: Go!

Freddie: I read CVs and they're far more conventional than mine and they explain things far better because they usually work in big corporations for periods of time and rise up and they can quantify that, but I started working almost as an interim - I was waiting to go back to university because I stepped away from university and I wanted to go back and do a more business related course so I needed to work for a year so I got a job working for an office stationary company, I was working there doing new business development for them, and I seemed to do extremely well, being a 20 year old boy and earning a reasonable amount of money which was supposed to tied me over for a year and I was doing really well. After that somebody pulled me aside, one of the sales directors, and was like "You've been exceptional during the period you've been here." He said "We've never had anyone achieve the targets that you have," and nobody had ever said that to me before so I thought it was a bit strange and he said "No, I'm being very serious. You should consider a life in this sector," and I said "Okay, no problem." I went away and I thought about it, "Why would he say that?" I then applied for another job, which was working for a firm of surveyors, looking, again, for new business development and they employed me and I was extremely successful there, I rose within the company, and from there I moved on to a business development agency. I was 23, I think, at the time, when I started working for the business development agency and within the business development agency I grew. The company was a PLC company but I ran their business development sector for the whole south of England and from there I was headhunted by a company and I thought about it and then I thought "Well, I could probably start my own business now that people are chasing me," so I then pulled in a couple of senior members of the team and we started a small business called City Business Partners and we ran that company for about three years before we got acquired by another company called EGC. That experience was quite strange because I didn't know what to expect - I was not expecting that, it was not a business like today, where a lot of people will start a business with the hope of being acquired. Expanding was my chain of thought at the time, being acquired was not. It was just about continuing what I was doing previously but with a different environment with less answering to others. So the business got acquired and after that it was a very strange situation because I was always in the midst of things and here I was having to think of what to do next, which is always a big problem with entrepreneurs - they always assume that success is repetitive and they chase a secondary success for quite a while. I started doing exactly that - investing in a magazine, investing in a directory called "The Leisure Pages", investing in music - in all the things I loved, because you like to make money from the things you love, but of course none of them did. They were labors of love and that was okay, it was another lesson, and then, again, I started another business which was looking at trying to take events in a different direction, because I like wine and I collect wine so I started a company called Boington and Fredericks which was back in the day, around 1999-2000, and that company was trying to take investors in a new direction, trying to get them to invest in wine as an alternative investment, etc., etc. It wasn't well received by the financial authorities in the UK and it was pulled together with a few other companies and we were asked to shut down so we did that but we then re-pooled our idea and reengineered it and launched another company and that company is called BWC Management and that's been around for about 12-13 years now. In the midst of that I created the Rosemont Group which was, again, to manage my investments. It started as just a family office sort of thing, to manage the funds that had accrued into investments for my family and future family. The Rosemont Group has then gone on to develop in many other ways and, likewise, other companies that we also had within the Rosemont Group so that's the long and the short of it.

Jaime: I really appreciate that, though, because I think a lot of people don't understand that after you've had success you can have failures and it sounds like you had a handful, where you were like "Okay, that didn't really work and that didn't really work and that didn't really work," so you've seen the gamut of both sides of it.

Freddie: When people talk about failure I actually consider failure a success because how else do you go back to rethink and reengineer? If you do fail and you stay down then you were never meant to be there in the first place so if you fail and you go back and you pick up and you go again, hopefully you'll find the same potholes that you fell victim to before, you will not and you will learn from them and you will create a better product and for me that's what's happened - every time I fail I go back and I think about it and I look at the merits of failing and, to me, there's always bits in there. Solutions are one thing and problems also another thing that can be solutions in a different way.

Jaime: So how do you know when to quit, though? Because you've had both successes and failures so how do you know when it's definitely a failure and you need to get out?

Freddie: If you're going to quit then you shouldn't really be in the business of being an entrepreneur, I don't think, if you're going to quit, because entrepreneurs never quit ' they're always chiseling away, working, mining away at their ideas and hopefully looking for that burst where you come through and the sunlight is there and the idea is well received or your product is well received. For me, you never quit. Even if you take a small break and you're reengineering your idea, that's still not quitting, that's just a break, you don't quit. I don't think I would ever see myself sitting at home or waking up in the morning and going to work or sitting at home and sitting on success - no, I don't think you see that with any entrepreneur that you really admire, regardless of how successful, they're always onto the next project because that's what makes them tick.

Jaime: So it's a commitment to being an entrepreneur, not necessarily a commitment to the venture you're currently working on?

Freddie: Sometimes it's just a commitment of delivering ideas. Some people have these ideas running around, it's like an artist - once a painter has created his best piece, does he stop? If it's sold at an auction for X amount of millions does he really then stop? If he's considered to have reached his peak does he now sit on a beach and enjoy his newfound success? No, he will continue to break new ground, break new boundaries and hopefully again come to the point where he is considered to be pioneering for new ideas. You see that all the time in various industries, where somebody jumps from one to the other and you wonder why they're doing that - it's not because they want to fail, it's because they want to challenge themselves and achieve what's within themselves, which is just to deliver the idea to what they consider to be their audience.

Jaime: Tell me this, because I know, in reading your bio, that you want to invest in 20 companies by 2016 - what do you look for when you're trying to invest?

Freddie: When trying to invest we're looking for disruptive ideas and products, we're looking for well-structured, a business that understands its path or a founder that understands the path he's trying to take and a founder that can articulate his idea and generally somebody who understands how business works, because there's a lot of young entrepreneurs and founders with great ideas but really with traits that will hinder their products. Sometimes founders don't listen, they're so involved in their ideas that they are really quite controlling and that is also within their organization and also with their investors and therefore the relationship does not flourish and, generally, the investor does not feel the founder is the right person to take the business forward. It happens all the time where you see a founder create a business and then step down and step away from the business and sometimes it's not because the founder does not understand or can't take the business in a new direction, it's really because of relationships because now, when you look at the businesses that investors are choosing to invest in, they are almost relationship businesses and so the relationship really has to be built on solid ground and if it's not, you can always find somebody qualified to take the business forward or put in the personnel to do that. We, personally, when we're looking for businesses to invest in, definitely the founder and the relationship with the founder is very important. The energy, the commitment to its personnel, even if it's a small team of two or three people, you should be able to gage how committed they are, both to the business and to the founder on a personal level and that really does help as an investor.

Jaime: How does someone get better at that? How do they assess how good they are? Is it that they're going and pitching and nobody likes them? How do they assess and then get better at that?

Freddie: You have to be able to assess yourself and you have to be able to absorb your environment and be able to progress. For instance, you start a business and it's just what you would consider a local business. In the end, if your business is growing, you need to become more expansive in how you interact and how you think and with that it requires a huge amount of letting go of ego, adopting and absorbing your environment and for that you will grow and understand new ways of doing the same things you want to do but some founders they don't, they refuse to adapt because it's their baby, they refuse to adopt new ideas from other sources because they believe if it hasn't come internally then it has limited merit. I don't know why but that does happen. It's almost like a mother being told how to raise her child ' does she really take the advice on' Does she think it's some sort of taint on her way of raising a child' That's what founders do. Once that happens you know there is a limitation to that business.

Jaime: Which is so funny because entrepreneurship, you have to be adaptive, that's one of the whole points of it so I can totally understand why that doesn't work very well for founders.

Freddie: You would be amazed how many would say yes, they want more advice, they'll take people on advisory board but the moment you start advising and the moment you start really taking an interest in participating and advising, that's the moment you realize that these founders, if it hasn't come from them, they feel somewhat lacking and therefore they will not take the advice on. We've just had it with one business actually.

Jaime: It's tough with mine right now. Tell me what a disruptive business is. I get a lot of people asking me questions, like what are the new trends coming up in business or what are these things that are going to be hot soon enough?

Freddie: Disruption is about changing perception, it's about changing the way people do things. For instance now, you want to communicate with somebody, do you think it's about picking up a phone? No, the way you think about communicating has been disrupted, you think immediately about Voice Over IP, you think about Skype, you think about Face Time, you think about all of these different communication methods because there was an initial disruption and others have taken the baton and disrupted it even more. A disruption is just about destabilizing and taking things in a completely different direction. The majority of the time it's something traditional, something that we all utilize, products that we all use, solutions that we all think we can't live without, and suddenly someone brings in a new solution and a new program that is not so far removed from what we're using at the moment but certainly streamlines it.

Jaime: Even thinking about printers into 3D printers - that's a disruptive technology where we're like "Now what? What do we do with this?" In 20 years, what is that going to look like? It's going to change the face of what we're doing.

Freddie: I'm not sure if you can remember life before e-mail.

Jaime: I do, it's crazy!

Freddie: How disruptive is e-mail?

Jaime: Ridiculous. What's so funny though is I feel like our brains can't comprehend this stuff that hasn't happened yet, so 3D printing, I get that, but in 20 years there might be something completely new that we can't wrap our brains around right now because it seems so foreign to us but it's so hard to predict where the technology and everything is going. How do you dive into that and start trying to dig what the next disruptive technology would be?

Freddie: Luckily I don't sit around sit around trying to come up with the solutions. We look at companies or, like you say, startups that are young, with a far more expansive, far more pioneering mind and we look towards if they have the right solution. You're not always going to get disruptive businesses, you're not always going to invest in disruptive businesses. Sometimes the disruption is quite minor - there's already a disruption and someone is adapting on that or piggybacking on that. There's always a market, so you don't get a large market share with your business but you will get a reasonable share and sometimes, like I said, you start a business just to be acquired and sometimes you can do that. So the investments we make are not only in disruption but they are, again, about adapting ideas that already exist. If you can claim a reasonable market share, then your business is viable for anybody.

Jaime: What makes a really good business, numbers-wise, for you? How far in the cycle do they have to be? How many customers do they need to have, how much revenue? We get this question too - people are crazy watching Shark Tank now and they're like "Oh, this is what the sharks want!" What do you specifically look for when you're looking for a business, besides the disruptive and those sorts of tangible things?

Freddie: If you're looking at certain businesses I think the metrics are very important because the metrics will give you an indication of where that business can go. Let's just use a very basic example - if you've launched an app, like any school kid can do today, and suddenly you've got 10,000 downloads in your first week and you've got the metrics saying that you've got so much stickiness to your business, which just means repeat business, etc., then suddenly you've got the metrics to look for more funding, more investment and to take that business into the mainstream. With advertising, with marketing, with those resources at your disposal, how many users can your business acquire? So the metrics of a business are very important - even as a startup we're always talking about the metrics. What are your target metrics, what are you looking to accomplish and when do you consider your business to be at the next level? With that, we'll analyze the business, look at the metrics, because most businesses are startups that accomplish really metrics with marketing budgets, with refinancing, etc. and these businesses can grow exponentially so we look towards that and hopefully, if we feel the metrics are correct and various elements of the business can be expanded upon, then we look towards investment. We don't always lead but we'll take a small stake in that business and let them roll and do what they do.

Jaime: And see how far they can go on their own, at least for a little bit and you can always put more in later.

Freddie: With any business, if you're known to the mainstream and your product is a product that, like you say, is a solution for a large market, as soon as you know you're there, suddenly everyone's using your product and therefore you have value creation. A lot of the times, when you look at a lot of these businesses that raise funds, it's never to simply invest in the business, or should I say it's never to simply expand on the product range, it's simply about getting that product to the mainstream, to its target market, to more markets, so that it can claim a large market share. The product is not expanding - because some founders make that mistake and try to expand their range of products - sometimes it's simply to create more exposure.

Jaime: I need to highlight that over and over and over again because I don't think people understand that. I just had somebody in my millionaire hustlers group who had a great product, we did a beta test, he sold $10,000 in two days and he was like "Okay, I think I'm onto something," and then we talked again and he was like "Now I'm going to create three more things," and I was like "No, no, no, no, no - you're going to build it," and then he made $50,000 the next month and it goes from there and it makes  a huge difference. Most people feel they need to go and do extra - they know the product creation side so well that that's the easy thing for them to do and that's probably why they come to you for expanding market share. So let's talk about how you expand market share - let's say they have a product that's pretty darn good but they don't know where to start in getting out to more of the market. What do you do?

Freddie: I guess if they've created a solution or a product they must know where their market is, what they believe to be their market. It's a case of if you're generating or you're raising capital you just want to be able to take it through various mediums to your market and you can also be raising capital to tweak your product to make your product more streamlined, more accessible, because if you look at things like Facebook and how they came to the market, it's a classic and I think it almost set the trend for how these businesses go to market, because your go to market strategy is very important, and they kept it a closed network, which was just universities, and they did that and they did that to the point where you and me and everybody else who probably wasn't part of these university networks wanted to be part of this closed network and so once they opened the floodgates everyone comes running in. that's a market strategy in itself, so how you go to market is quite important, and then once you've gone to market how you them attract the larger market, because sometimes it's about going for a niche market, the higher quality clientele test your product, use your product, talk about it and once you're at a very good level it's always easy to attract the masses, it's mainstream. You look at products like fashion or something - everybody's always wanted designer labels, now you stick a designer label on a high street brand, do a collaboration, everybody goes to do that because you've created that closed network. For many industries there are very many different strategies. For me to talk about the marketing of various businesses would be wrong because that's where you raise capital so you can then go and pick the right marketing company to come in, strategize and then go to market. Even if it means expansion it's still a go to market strategy at the same point.

Jaime: So how do we find reputable companies? I know tons of people that have invested in marketing companies and they don't get them anything. It's like "We tried this Facebook ad strategy, we dropped $20,000 on it and we didn't really get what we want out of it." So the question is how do we find the right people or find the right strategies to be able to do it?

Freddie: Sometimes when you go to market the product isn't correct, of course, the product isn't right, maybe your target market is wrong, you have to go back, re-strategize. Sometimes you create a product and you've got to understand that sometimes products need to pivot so you need to have a good pivot position. Some of the best products have started in a different way - you look at Twitter, Twitter was not started to be Twitter, it was started to be another product and they stuck four people in a room and suddenly you've got a product that is able to pivot and they understand that they're onto something so I certainly think that you pay the best marketing company in the world to do your marketing, but if your product's not right and you're set in stone, they still won't be able to help you. You need to be able to have a very expansive mindset, where it's "Okay, the product is supposed to do this but maybe we're onto something because this group of people is using it this way. Let's focus on this demographic and let's use them as a test, let's use them as the beta." We've done it in various businesses where we've had to sit founders down and say "We weren't expecting this but this seems to be an interesting direction to look at," and they struggle and then suddenly, if they're with the idea, something has come of the marketing because the marketing has produced different demographics from what you've understood and the business pivots towards that. It's difficult, you can't also focus on the marketing, you must also focus on your metrics again, if your metrics show you that something else is happening with your solutions or your products then maybe you should go back to the drawing board and take a very good look. This is where advisors come in - this is where your advisors say to you "You know what? I'm looking at your product, I'm seeing your metrics, I think maybe you should look at getting a team of developers and look towards developing it in this direction." So the marketing can only do so much - you can't always blame marketing companies.

Jaime: I have a really good friend and I remember when she very first started her business, she just got funded last year for $2 million from Tony Hsieh from Zappos but before that it took her a year, year and a half, before she actually had the business that she had now. She was doing VA work and now she has a company called Zirtual and they're only US based virtual assistants. Before she was doing only Filipino, all over the place.

Freddie: What is that? Virtual customer services or something?

Jaime: You can hire for 10 hours, 20 hours, 30 hours a month, whatever it is, a virtual assistant, but through their specific system and they have a certain way that they do everything, but it's funny, it took her a year and a half before she got this and that's a long time for someone to be chugging away, hoping that you're pivoting in the right direction. What's the timeframe that you see for people trying to do this, whether they've started up and are coming to you, like how many years?

Freddie: Believe it or not, three years.

Jaime: See? Good, thank you! People need to hear that, because they're like "Oh, it's been six months, how come I'm not successful yet?" and I hate that.

Freddie: No, no - for you to get traction, real traction, you're talking three years. Anyone will tell you that. Anyone who really knows about technology will tell you three years.

Jaime: That's a lot of time and a lot of work that goes into it before you can try to figure that stuff out.

Freddie: Exactly, so it's for the committed. To be successful doesn't happen overnight so if three years is too long to wait to understand your business then you're in the wrong business.

Jaime: Thank you, thank you! I know we have to start wrapping up in just a second. I ask the same last question and I remember I told you about it last time when we chatted but you probably don't remember it so I'll give you a second to think about it but it's what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Freddie: One action?

Jaime: One action. I know, 've put you on the spot.

Freddie: One action towards reaching their goal? I will say two things - represent your product, they have to represent their product, and the second thing is that networking is key. Networking is key. So those are the actions you really need. Represent your product because you just have to understand your product in and out and therefore you are your product. Sometimes you meet someone and he tells you he's got a great product or solution, you ask him what it's about and he spends five minutes telling you about it. The best products, the best solutions, can be explained in 20 seconds flat because simplicity is always the best - keep it simple and stupid, KISS.

Jaime: Definitely, perfect. And networking is really, really huge too, which a lot of people won't put their time into because they won't get their ROI but you're saying that's a huge piece?

Freddie: Yeah, come on. You're in business there, I'm sure you understand the value of networking. It's a global village now - if you can reach out to someone in the Philippines tomorrow through a network, if you can reach out to somebody in America, if you can reach out to somebody in Africa, because products are global now, people don't create products just for one demographic. You could be sitting in Atlanta, Georgia and create a product that is for Africans or for Asians and there you're talking millions and billions of people so why would you not network? It's so important now because not only does networking allow you to get your product to market a lot quicker and allow you to be able to look towards certain demographics that are not normally available to us but it also allows you to get a network of people that, hopefully, will invest in you - because when you're raising capital people don't realize that, raising $1 million for instance, nobody will give you $1,000 without you coming to the table, saying "I've already got $300. I've already got $150. I've already got $200." They call that follow on investment because they'll say "Who have you got investing $200? Who have you got investing $200?" and it's "Oh, I've got four, five people in my network already investing $200, we're looking to raise X amount." They will consider that a step in the right direction as a commitment. We're sheep at the end of the day - people don't want to be the only one investing. So it is very important to reach out to your network because your network can help you in fundraising, not only actually raising the physical capital from them but also giving the impression that your product is good because they have committed X amount to the business and therefore you can then reach out to look at a lot of these crowdfunding platforms. Some of them won't allow you to join unless you've already raised X amount - if you're looking for $1 million they won't let you come on unless you've raised 25% of that already and there's a reason for that and your network will make things like that a lot easier, or even make it easier to create the illusion that you already have that commitment, which a lot of founders do - they create the illusion to get the other investors in.

Jaime: Okay, so normally I don?t ask another question but now I have to ask ? how do they do that?

Freddie: I think the phrase was coined by the Americans, which is fake it until you make it, right?

Jaime: It's so funny though, because we need proof - people need proof in order to come on to a concept. Not that you want to fake the proof but are there ways around it. Like if you get four people to say "Okay, if all of these people say yes then you'll say yes," and you say the same thing to all of them and then they all say "Yes" and you've got them all.

Freddie: That's exactly it. The method is fake it until you make it.

Jaime: I love how important that is. It takes a long time, three years, fake it until you make it, just keep moving forward anyway and have that commitment and that makes a huge difference. I really appreciate this, Freddie. Thanks so much for coming on. Where can we find out more about you and if somebody wants to connect with you how do they go about doing that?

Freddie: They can connect with me through my company e-mail. It's admin@rosemontgroup.net. Ideas area always welcome - we get them all the time, we look at them, we will communicate with as many founders or startups as possible and hopefully take it to the next level. Like I said, we're committed to investing in 20 over the next 18 months or so, so hopefully we'll get a lot of enquiries and from there we'll be able to disrupt as much as possible.

Jaime: Be prepared - two other people have made this offer to pitch ideas and they got a little bombarded by my wonderful Eventual Millionaires, so just a warning! If you do end up investing in someone, make sure that you come back and tell us that it came from us and we'll do a little case study or highlight on that for sure.

Freddie: Definitely, we'll do that. Otherwise I might see you at SXSW with one of our other startups that we're involved with.

Jaime: Yes, a thousand times yes!

Freddie: They're speaking at a tech conference there so we might be there.

Jaime: Beautiful. I can't wait. Awesome, we'll take a picture together and post it on Facebook so everyone can take it too. We're real people live together. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Freddie. I really appreciate it.

Freddie: You're welcome, Jaime.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: business funding, business startup, Decision Making, Failure, Fear, Freddie Achom, Idea Validation, Investment, investor, millionaire interview, Startup, Strategic Decision

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Goals, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Starting A Business

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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