Starting a Multi-Million Dollar Business Without any Industry Experience (and after Many Failed Businesses!) with Dennis Brown

CEO of Logistic Dynamics – Dennis Brown

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Dennis had started many businesses before but none of them seemed to really work out. Finally he jumped in a “boring” industry even though he had no experience and became one of the fastest growing companies on the Inc 500! (#298!!)

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• Freight Broker Boot Camp

Check out LogisticDynamics.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Dennis Brown on the show. Dennis owns a cool company called Logistic Dynamics and it's a freight company and they've been listed in the Inc 5000 and have a whole bunch of awards, one of the fastest growing companies in Western New York and I am really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on.

DENNIS BROWN: Thanks, Jaime. I just wanted to say I really appreciate what you've done with The Eventual Millionaire. I stumbled acrossed it through a mutual friend we have and I've watched a lot of those videos. It's really great; it's a great site.

JAIME TARDY: I appreciate that and our mutual friend is Pat Flynn. I know a lot of people have come over from Pat's site so everybody loves Pat and I appreciate Pat, you mentioning me in anything that you ever do, because all your fans are amazing just like Dennis. Thank you so much. Let's sort of start with going back, we're you always an entrepreneur, as a kid? Did you always know that's what you were going to grow up into?

DENNIS BROWN: I don't think I ever thought of myself as an entrepreneur growing up although I did the whole mowing lawns and, you know, when you're a kid and making a little bit of money on the side because you needed the money or wanted the money for whatever you were doing, but I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur all through high school, all through college and then right out of college I got a job in sales, like a lot of people, trying to make some money and within about a year, year and a half I thought I had it all figured out and I figured I'd go out on my own and start a first business. That's when I kind of got that entrepreneurial bug was after college so I don't think I ever really thought of myself as an entrepreneur early on.

JAIME TARDY: What did you go to school for?

DENNIS BROWN: I have a pre-law degree. That's not very entrepreneurial. I didn't go for marketing, I didn't go for management, I didn't go for finance. I have a pre-law degree and a minor in philosophy. That's about as far from entrepreneurial as you can go.

JAIME TARDY: I have a minor in philosophy too that's really funny. Weird. Tell me about what made you decided to start going on your own. A lot of people in sales just stick with sales for a long period of time.

DENNIS BROWN: Like I said, I think what happened was I started doing pretty well at sales and I wasn't really expecting that to be honest with you. I was looking at it more of a stopgap to figure out what I was going to do next and I started doing really well. Like I said, I thought I had it all figured out and so I went off and started my first venture and learned very quickly that there's a lot more to it than just knowing how to sell. I stumbled along as an entrepreneur for years, different ventures, I'd make money, I'd lose a little bit of money, I'd make money, I'd lose a little bit of money and I was trying different things as I was trying to develop the craft or develop the experience that you need and I paid my dues so to speak. Finally I started getting into a couple of ventures that started yielding some significant fruit and thankfully here we are today.

JAIME TARDY: Let's dig into some of those because I love hearing the kind of works, kind of didn't work, kind of worked, kind of didn't work because that's where a lot of people are right now. In the first five years, it can be a little bit crazy. Is there any way you can tell us about one or two examples of some of the things that you did?

DENNIS BROWN: I tried a lot of things. I remember one of the first things I tried to do was when 900 numbers were big and marketing 900 number services and we had moderate success but I didn't like the business. While we could make a little bit of money at it, I just didn't enjoy it and I realized that my passion fizzled out very quickly and it just wasn't going to work for me. I've done the real estate thing. I've bought and sold and flipped real estate so I've done some of that. I've also had I told you a little bit of my experience during the dotcom era. I cofounded a software company, technology company during the dotcom era where I got to experience some incredible things.

I learned a lot and then we started ten years ago, almost ten years ago I started Logistic Dynamics and we're what's called a third party logistics provider. We manage freight for other companies. I like to tell people my elevator pitch is this: we're like a trucking company that doesn't own trucks. That always leads to another question and they ask, "Well what do you mean?" I say, "Well we have contracts with over 30,000 different trucking companies and what we do is we manage freight for people that produce or distribute product whether it be the computer that you are using right now or the mouse or the desk you're sitting at or the chair. It all had to go on a truck at some point during the supply chain." We're involved in a lot of that.

JAIME TARDY: Why do we need you? Why can't the trucking companies figure this out?

DENNIS BROWN: That's a great question. That's the second question I get from everybody.

JAIME TARDY: I'm glad I'm following the spiel that everybody does.

DENNIS BROWN: Yes, you are following right along. It's perfect, as scripted in my mind. Basically the way it works in logistics is this: the average trucking company in the United States, about 85 percent of the trucking companies out there own less than 6 trucks. Their capacity is very small. Their capacity to be able to service customers is very small. What we do is we contract with providers all over the country in North America, U.S., Mexico, Canada and we leverage our volume and relationships to be able to service a much bigger scope plus, because of our volume, we're able to negotiate discounted rates with those providers and therein lays our margin without having to cost the customer more.

JAIME TARDY: Nice.

DENNIS BROWN: So we can offer a competitive price without having to, in a larger capacity, because of our relationships with all the carriers.

JAIME TARDY: It's kind of like an insurance agent that does multiple different insurance companies so that way they can really find out the best price and then they get paid from the margins. That makes perfect sense.

DENNIS BROWN: Kind of, we are a broker. We're called the freight brokerage so in a way it is like that, it is very similar. A third party logistics freight brokerage; those are the types of services that we offer so there is some similarity there.

JAIME TARDY: How did you, number one, did you have any experience in logistics? How did you know that this was sort of the thing that you knew was going to be successful or maybe you didn't know?

DENNIS BROWN: It's a funny story because I absolutely had no experience in logistics, no experience in trucking. The extent of my experience in trucking was driving down the road and seeing these rigs drive down the road and the noise and the mess and the traffic and all that. That was my experience with trucking prior to investigating and getting involved in the logistics industry. I knew absolutely nothing about it but I was introduced to it by a friend who oddly enough we were out golfing one day and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my career and he knew I wasn't going to go get a job. That just wasn't my MO.

He said to me, he said, "Have you ever head of a freight brokerage?" I said, "A what? A freight what?" He said, "A freight brokerage. I had a client that has done really well. I've seen him grow from 1 or 2 guys in his basement to 50 guys in an office and they're doing extremely well." He goes, "You know, you really ought to take a look at it." He goes, "I don't know anything about it but you ought to take a look at it." I filed it in my mental rolodex and next thing you know I was doing a little bit of research and I really started immersing myself in the industry and I spent a lot of time researching it and next thing you knew it was me and the phone and we were up and operational and things were rolling.

JAIME TARDY: I need to dig into that too. First, what did you think because you've gone through a lot of different, saying yes to different ventures, right? If you've tried all these things, you've said yes to quite a few different things, what was different? This one became a success. What was different with this one comparatively to the other ones?

DENNIS BROWN: I think what happened, the reason why LDI has been successful is a lot of it has to do with the dues that I've paid during those other ventures, the life lessons and the lessons I've learned on how to evaluate an opportunity and how to start off on the right foot and how to grow an organization because, like I said, when I got out of college and got my first sales job and decided I was going to become an entrepreneur, I thought I had it all figured out. That was the key but yet then I realized I hadn't even scratched the surface on what it took to build a successful business.

I think what I did in logistics and what made me realize that it was a good place for me to go was three major factors. Number one, I was coming off of that experience in technology that was an incredible learning experience and the logistics industry is one of those late adopters of technology. I saw an opportunity to leverage some of my experience and my background and what I learned there in the logistics industry because ten years ago, in particular, there wasn't a lot of innovation going on. That was one of the major platforms that I wanted to use as a building block for the business.

The second big thing was that the freight industry, the logistics industry is very fragmented. There are 15,000 freight brokers, licensed freight brokers in the United States so it's very competitive but the reality is that more than half of them do less than $5 million in sales so they are small. So I saw a very fragmented market and they weren't able to service the customers at the same level that I thought we would be able to do if we were able to get some scale and utilize this technology advantage we have. I think those are the main reasons that interested me.

The third thing was it's a huge market. There's a ton of business out there. You don't realize it. After this phone call, you might be driving down the road and the next thing you know you'll see a truck getting loaded or you'll see a truck driving down the road and you'll realize you'll say wow everything that you touch, eat, consume, look at, it all goes on a truck at some point so there's a massive amount of business out there so I thought it was a very big market and it was a market that's not going to go away. It's not a trendy market. Let's face it, trucking and logistics is not sexy by any stretch. I came from the technology industry that was very trendy and cool and fast paced and went into the logistics business but I don't regret it at all because it has been an incredible experience for us.

JAIME TARDY: See that's exactly what I was going to say. Trucking isn't exactly sexy and that's what I think is real interesting is learning your story is it's not about trucking. Actually you talked about doing 900 numbers and sort of lost passion with that. How did you not lose passion with this? It's not like cutting edge crazy cool stuff.

DENNIS BROWN: You know, it is cutting edge for us because what we do is we invest a lot of time and energy into technology. Like I said, our platform is utilizing technology to try to provide some innovation and to kind of change the way business has always been done. That's a lot of what we're doing. We have our development staff. We developed all our own software and systems. That keeps me very engaged. The second thing that's really cool is that we have an interesting business model. We have a business model that's similar to franchising in a way where rather than going out and having a big call center with 300 people in it that are all W2 hourly salary commission type employees, what we do is we partner with very experienced logistics professionals, people who have 15 or 20 years, and what we do is we partner with them. They become an agency of ours and then we operate on a revenue share.

What also keeps me very engaged is I get to work with entrepreneurs all the time. I know you mentioned as a part of your business you work entrepreneurs and doing their coaching and what not. What's really funny is because that's a lot of what we do. The advantage we have is that whenever they benefit, whenever any of that coaching or revenue or profit comes out of that process, we share in that revenue because we're on a revenue share with them. We provide all the back office and they provide all the funnel. It's a great marriage.

JAIME TARDY: That's crazy. You are making logistics actually sound sexy. You're making it sound really cool.

DENNIS BROWN: It's really funny because logistics is this really fancy word and everybody thinks it's like a science and it's really funny because I tell everybody I'm like it's really not that cool. If you saw what happened behind the scenes, everything is held together with twine and bubblegum. It's a very dynamic market and it's very fast paced behind the scenes although it's not very sexy on the front end.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me a little bit about, like you said, what you learned over all those other ventures was just a learning experience so that way it could really set you up for this. Give me some tips and advice because you said, "You know, I was much better at starting things. I was much better at evaluating." We sort of talked a little bit about evaluating but how did you start this off on the right foot?

DENNIS BROWN: You know, I'll tell you one of the things that I learned throughout those experiences prior to LDI that I applied here was to understand and accept the fact that you don't know everything and that you have to be willing to invest your time and energy to learn and sometimes that requires hiring people that are smarter than you and have that experience and consulting with them. People hire you now for your consulting because you have learned things along the way and what I did early on at LDI literally before we ever started operations was I hired a guy who had 20, 30 year veteran of the industry. I flew him into Buffalo and he spent a week with me all day long like it was a full-time job.

I had already developed a business plan. I had already done my own research but what I wanted him to do was poke holes in the plan and I wanted him to share everything with me that I didn't know that I was going to run into in the next six months after starting this venture. It was very expensive. It cost me $10,000 to do that, just to have him come in for a week but it was the best money we ever spent. I would say that was probably one of the things that I wouldn't have done ten years prior or five years prior because I probably would have thought I'll figure it out along the way.

That experience and that knowledge and not only that but the confidence that I got from that third party validation of saying hey you're on track maybe you just want to tweak this a little bit was incredibly empowering when we started to sell.

JAIME TARDY: That's what I was going to ask about.

DENNIS BROWN: Go ahead, I'm sorry.

JAIME TARDY: No, I was just going to say like I would love to know how you set up your business plan and then also what he actually poked holes in, like what were you missing in it? If you can remember, I know it was ten years ago.

DENNIS BROWN: It was ten years ago. I don't think there was a lot missing. I think that when we brought him in, he was expecting somebody who wasn't quite as experienced as an entrepreneur. I think he was expecting somebody who just kind of came out, had this idea that they were going to start a freight brokerage and I think maybe that was from his past experience with some of his clients that he had done business with, but I think we got more validation on the fact that we were going in the right direction.

I'm a big guy, you always seek for perfection but you have to come to the realization that perfection is unattainable. You have to just move forward and let things evolve. Risk is a part of business, it's a part of life and don't try, while you have to mitigate it, you can't get rid of it and the only way to move forward and to have any sort of success is just to take action and just go forward.

JAIME TARDY: What was your first six months like of trying to figure this out, never doing anything logistics before and just trying to figure it out as you go?

DENNIS BROWN: The first thing we did was we had to get licensed and bonded. We had to go through all the formalities and all the legalities which happened very quickly. Then knowing that technology was going to be a big part of our business, we established that basic platform. We developed what's called a GMS or a transportation management software, our 1.0 version of what we call LDI Freight. Then it was time to get to work. We got on the phones and started networking and making phone calls to manufacturers and distributors and producers, people that we knew, people that we didn't know, anybody that would talk to us in regards to their logistics and trucking needs and when we started out, it was me and a phone and I hired a couple of people to help me do operations and that's how we started.

I remember, I still have the first check that we ever received from our first client. I remember when we first started our goal was to do one load a day where we were doing one transaction a day and I had set a goal for the first year. We were going to do a million dollars in sale. Fortunately enough we exceeded that our first year. Our first year was a lot of fun.

It was great because you got that early dynamic of a new business opportunity, very excited and what I tried to do and what's great about our business is we get to carry that same dynamic along because we're doing with new entrepreneurs and individuals that are entrepreneurial all the time. I wouldn't be good, I'm not one of those guys that would be good in a big company. I can't be a corporate guy. It would never work for me. I like that real entrepreneurial feel and that's why this business has kept me really engaged.

JAIME TARDY: How did you actually do this? You hired people, did you have capital to start with because I remember chatting with you before and you came from sort of a failed venture. How did that work?

DENNIS BROWN: It was a semi-failed venture. We made some money along the way. Unfortunately we couldn't fulfill the business plan because financing dried because of the whole dotcom burst and 9/11 and everything that surrounded that but, you know, we made a little bit of money along the way and what I did was, I may not have told you how I learned about freight brokering and that I even heard about it was I was golfing with a friend of mine and after I did some due diligence, we came back together, me and his brothers, and they helped finance the business. They became partners in LDI and they're still involved in the business today.

One of those guys is the CFO of my company and the other two are on the board. They own another very successful technology company that they've done very, very well with. We did finance it. We had to have a little bit of money to get it started and that was part of why when we hired that consultant to come on board, we had to be very strategic, because we had a limited amount of capital that we wanted to invest before we started seeing some return on our investment and then once you see the return then you obviously want to add capital as quick as you can to try and ramp it up.

JAIME TARDY: What was that relationship like? Were you already friends with him beforehand?

DENNIS BROWN: Yes, we went to college together. We had went to college at University of Buffalo. I had met him probably my sophomore or junior year of college. I had met his brothers. His brothers, right out of college, they had all started a technology company and they had done very, very well. We stayed in touch all along the way because we lived in the same area and we had become good friends. We had that preexisting relationship so that worked out really well and knowing that technology was going to be a big part of the business model, it was a great marriage. That's really what a partnership is, it's a marriage.

JAIME TARDY: That's what I was going to say. How has it worked out? I mean you knew you liked him, you were already friends. As soon as money and business starts getting involved, I've heard some horror stories. How did it work for you? Especially did you have partners in the past and this was just another doing it again?

DENNIS BROWN: I've had some partners in the past in other businesses and some were good, some were bad. But ultimately, you know, what we've done here at LDI, the partnership has been incredible. We have a very synergistic relationship. They trust me, I've earned their trust and they do their part, I do my part. Here's the thing, you have to understand. In a partnership, you are not always going to agree and so as long as you can have a healthy debate and at some point take action on whatever comes from that, that's the best you're going to get and you keep going. I feel very strongly, my partners, we've been friends for a very long time. We've been partners for almost ten years and it has been a great experience for us.

JAIME TARDY: That's amazing. That's good to hear a good story out of it. Do you have any tips on choosing a partner, especially since you've gone through and chosen some that maybe haven't worked out well?

DENNIS BROWN: Choosing a partner. I would say what you want to do, what's worked out really well for me is that one of the partners that came onboard, one of the investors who came onboard early on had a very good financial background and he is now my CFO. We work really well together because his skill set complements mine. He's very good at the finance side. So one of the things I would say that you would want to look at when choosing a partner would be somebody that complements you, not necessarily mirrors you. So if you're both very good at sales and marketing, you're probably going to butt heads because you're going to vary in your approach and your opinion, but if you have somebody who is very good at sales and marketing and another guy who is very good at finance, now you can, as long as everybody does their job, you can trust the other one to complement what you're doing.

I don't like the finance side of the business. I don't like counting the money. I don't like doing the financials. I get the financials once a month, I look at them for ten minutes, if I have questions I ask him, if I don't we move on. I let him worry about the day-to-day finances. It has worked out great.

JAIME TARDY: It's so nice to have somebody that does that for you too that cares about it so that way you don't have to.

DENNIS BROWN: Yes, he has a vested interest because obviously he is one of the owners of the business. He's not just a hired hand or an employee that, of course, may care about it but being an owner, you care about it in a totally different way.

JAIME TARDY: Did you go into this knowing that you wanted to start with a partner, that you had to start with a partner? I know a lot of people, when they first start, are like I'm going to do this on my own, I'm going to figure this out, I want the full 100 percent for me instead of having to share. Was that even an option for you?

DENNIS BROWN: It wasn't really an option. It was an option but the reality is I knew the capital that we were going to need to pour into this business was going to be fairly intensive to start and then even more intensive over time because it's a cash flow business. Ninety-nine percent of our business is on terms to our customers so we don't get prepay. Being able to do that financial management, we were going to have to have good financial resources and fortunately the relationships that I've struck up and the partnerships I have in the business itself, we've got a good financial backing, let's put it that way.

JAIME TARDY: How much does your company make now, like a year?

DENNIS BROWN: 2012 we did $40 million in business. We ramped up. It's been a really cool ride. Our first year in business my goal was to do a million and we did that and then our second year our goal was to do $3 million and we did that and then our third year we made $6 million and then $12 million and that's when we got a lot of PR from Inc Magazine, from the Inc 500 when we were No. 298 on the Inc 500 list, that was a lot of fun. Since then we just continue to work hard and try to innovate using our technology and we've developed this partnership business model and it's done really well. We've been fortunate.

JAIME TARDY: It sounds like it. Actually and I asked you a little bit about this before and I want to bring this up, because we started talking about oh my gosh it grew from $1 million to $3 million and oh my gosh it's wonderful and I'm on the Inc 500, it sounds so nice and easy, sounds easy; but I asked you before sort of about like the worst moment that you've had in your entrepreneurial career and I'd love to sort of bring that up because it's great to talk about the successes, but it's even better to talk about when you were really down and out. Tell me about one of the worst issues that you've had.

DENNIS BROWN: I think probably the most difficult time of my life that I went through in business was after starting that dotcom software company, that technology company. We founded that in 1998 and things were going extremely well. We had gotten some financing, we developed some great client relationships. We were on the verge of profitability and if you recall that era, there was nobody that was profitable. There was nobody that was even close to profitable and we were ramping up, we were working on scalability and then the market started to dip. Venture money and seed money and money started drying up and then 9/11 hit and everything just came to a screeching halt.

The story, as it goes, is probably about a week or two weeks before 9/11 we were due to have a significant round of financing that got delayed, for whatever reason, it happens periodically in financing and that turned out to be a permanent delay after 9/11. That was a very painful process. I spent the next six months trying to rekindle the business and trying to revamp it and finance it and flying across the country and trying to raise money. Then unfortunately we came to the realization that we just did not have the resources. It wasn't the right time to do it.

One of our problems was we were in the fortunate but unfortunate space of being ahead of the curve. Our technology that we had built our business upon was too far ahead of the curve and that's one of the lessons that I learned is that sometimes it's hard to be too far ahead of a curve. Sometimes being second isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as you can get aggressive doing it. That was probably the most difficult time in my life because I had put a lot of blood sweat and tears and capital into that and when I had to close that down, that was like my baby and it was a difficult time for me. That was probably the worst experience I've had in business.

JAIME TARDY: Can you tell me what that company did?

DENNIS BROWN: What we did was we had developed a proprietary software platform that allowed us to rapidly develop desktop applications. So internet enabled desktop applications. So something you might remember from a long time ago is I'll give you a perfect example is like, we didn't build this but this is an example, Webber Bug, where you would download it to your machine and it would run in the background and it was a software application. What we did is we had our own platform that allowed us to develop those types of applications very rapidly.

A lot of those applications back then were developed in C programming and it would take, say for example a project might take you 100 hours to develop, our platform would allow us to develop that same thing in less than half the time. What our goal was was to be able to put that platform and create a software development product that we would sell to developers and then they, like the macromedia, Adobe Flash, all those types of platforms that they would use to develop content and applications and that's what we were working on along the way.

Along the way we were doing custom software development using that platform. Our customers were like Coca Cola, Anheuser Busch, Island Def Jam records; I mean we did some really great projects where we would develop these types of desktop applications for them and a lot of them were branding related to the brand that they were doing. That was the technology that we had developed. We acquired a small company out of Alberta, Saskatchewan. We had relocated them here back down to Buffalo and they were kind of the core of our development team.

It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot. I don't regret going through it. It was a very painful part of my life and it was difficult. I remember coming out of that and saying to myself how am I going to replicate what we had there in regards to just the energy and the business opportunity. Once the dust settled a little bit, I realized that you got to take from it, try and pull those nuggets out that you learned. Take the things that you learned from it and just go forward. That's all you can do.

JAIME TARDY: How do you do that? I'm assuming you want to sort of curl up in the bed with the pillow over your head and not really think about anything. How do you make progress? Is it a time thing? Do you just have to wait a certain amount of time? Is there anything that you did that made it better?

DENNIS BROWN: I've heard some horror stories about people, you know, executives and entrepreneurs that came out of that era that weren't able to emerge. They had high flying businesses. You heard about some of the things that were going on back in those days and going public. You were paper millionaires overnight and then the realization, when that market crashed and everybody went down in flames, what I did was out of necessity obviously I had to make money like everybody else.

Initially I said how am I going to pay my bills? How am I going to cover? What skills do I have? What ability do I have? What have I learned over the last ten years that I can put to work to cover my basics because those things have to be paid? The lights have to get paid, the mortgage has to get paid, the car payment has to get paid. Otherwise, your whole world falls in around you and then that just adds to the problem. I did that initially so what I started to do is I started doing some consulting with my old clients that we had from that business, on the side. That paid the bills while I was figuring out what I was going to do next.

Really what I did was I said to myself, you know, I can't let this experience define me. Ultimately I've got to be able to move forward and I've had this goal for many years that I was going to start and build a successful business and I can either let this experience define me in a good way or define me in a bad way and fortunately I kept my head up and worked hard and put the plan together for LDI and we launched it and I can tell your right now, the fuel from that failure is what fueled me during the start up of LDI for a very long time because I was never going to let that happen again.

JAIME TARDY: And it worked out well so far for you, that's awesome.

DENNIS BROWN: So far it has been a great ride.

JAIME TARDY: What can you give us for advice like daily, if somebody is in that fear? If somebody started a business and it's not going well or if somebody started a business and it failed and they are trying to pick up those pieces, do you have any like daily advice to just keep moving forward?

DENNIS BROWN: You know, I see this a lot because I have people, I've been very fortunate and I have a lot of people that know that I have been an entrepreneur for whatever, almost 20 years, since I started my first venture and I had success and failure so I have a lot of people that will come to me and say, "How did you do this or what did you do here or how did you start your business?" I'll get a lot of those questions and then I'll start asking them questions. I'll say well why are you asking? What is it that you're trying to do and they'll say, "Well I've had this idea for awhile now on a product or a business or a this or a that."

I'll say, "Well how long have you had this idea?" "Well I've been thinking about it for a couple years now" and I'll say to myself, "A couple of years; what are you waiting for?" My advice on building a successful business really comes down to realizing that if you wait for all the planets to align before you pull the trigger, it's never going to work. There is going to be a certain amount of risk in anything you do so I think you have to realize you have to be calculated in the risks you take and you have to mitigate those risks the most you can but ultimately you have to be willing to take a little bit of risk.

Don't look at that risk as if you fail the world is going to come down crashing on you. Experience is gained through the failures that we have and that's how I tell everybody to approach it. You can't be afraid to fail. You have to be willing to hang it out there and not risk it all. I'm not telling you to go put your mortgage payment on the pass line in Vegas but, at the same time, be willing to risk maybe a little bit of embarrassment, a little bit of rejection. A little bit of loss of capital, because until you engage, until you get your head around the fact that not everything you do is going to succeed, if it was that easy everybody would do it, and just realize that it took me, you know, I started my first business in 1994.

I started LDI in late 2003 so I had ten years, right, ten years of success and failure and success and failure and ups and downs. I mean if you saw my W2 during those ten years, this is what it looks like. It looks like an EKG. I mean my income went from six figures down to below zero and that was because I was willing to risk, I took those risks, calculated risks and I always looked at it as a learning experience. If you can come out of it stronger than when you went in and you keep going, you can persevere then you always have an opportunity to succeed.

JAIME TARDY: I love that and you can say that now having a $40 million company. I mean that's huge for people to go ten years is a long time to try and figure stuff out but you're like yeah, it's so much better once you figure it out because then you actually can succeed much better than before.

DENNIS BROWN: Yes, you know, I think I look back and it's really funny because, well I'll tell you a funny story; I'm a big believer in setting goals and putting milestones out there. When I first started LDI probably in the first quarter of 2004, when we first started operation and started moving freight and started generating some revenue, I sat down and I wrote a press release and the press release was a press release for the future. It was a future press release of how LDI was just ranked as one of the fastest growing companies on the Inc 500 fastest growing company list and I sat down and I remember very vividly sitting down at my computer, writing this press release and reading it and reading it and crafting it like it was going to be a real press release that I was going to be putting out the next day.

I sat there and I said, "Okay, I'm not going to focus on the money, I'm not going to focus on those pieces, but this is something that we're going to do and this is going to be something that I'm going to keep to myself, I'm not going to share so much with a bunch of people but at the same time, this is going to be one of those driving forces. We're going to do this." I filed it away and I saved it on my computer and I rarely look at it. I probably looked at it a few times periodically but it was engrained in my mind because I had spent so much time writing that press release and making it a realization in my mind because in order for me to write that press release I had to be in that moment like it had just happened.

I wrote that press release and one of the greatest, you know, we talked about one of the worst times in my life, one of the best times in my life was when, probably about four years later, I think it was in 2008, when we were contacted by Inc Magazine and they let us know that we had made the Inc 500. We were No. 298 on the fastest growing company list and I sat down at my computer and I pulled up the press release and it was awesome. It was a great moment and it was one of those things you just can't replicate because I think it was vindication for what had happened at that dotcom. It was a little bit out of our control and it was just a great moment.

JAIME TARDY: I have Goosebumps from that. That's awesome.

DENNIS BROWN: It didn't have anything to do with money, it really didn't. It really didn't have anything to do with having a million dollars in your checking account. It had nothing to do with money. It had to do with putting that out there, putting that goal out there, a future goal, a big goal. We weren't thinking small, at that point, obviously and then using that as one of those daily reminders. I'm a big guy on goal setting. For example, my goals, I'll give you a tip that somebody can do.

Every year I sit down, at the beginning of the year, and I put my big, big goals out there. I write them down and these aren't my projects or my things that I'm working on or things that I am just trying to get done. These are my big goals like annual revenue goals and profit goals. Then I also, on the non-business side, I put personal goals. Things like rekindle an old friendship that I haven't talked to in a long time. Go on two vacations with my family, big personal stuff. Last year it was finally get off my butt and have our basement remodeled.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, I know those goals!

DENNIS BROWN: Then what I do, it's a little different than with most people is that I create an Outlook event. It is the first event of every day and it pops up. Before I walk into the office, it's on my computer and when I walk in it's the first thing I have to look at so I force myself to look at that every day. Now do I sit there for five minutes and go crazy over it? No, but I sit there and I look at it and I peruse it really quick and then what I do is I use that as the foundation of what I am going to do that day and if it doesn't have to do with achieving one of those goals, I don't want to do it. Really I just don't want to do it. If it's not directly attributing to one of those goals, I probably shouldn't be doing it.

It's funny because I watched your interview with Tim Ferriss on The Four Hour Work Week and I had never read the book but since then I have bought the book. I'm about halfway through and It's a great book. It's a great read. I've always been an 80/20 guy and he put a totally different spin on it and it's really interesting. It's a great read. I've really enjoyed it.

JAIME TARDY: I love that you watched my videos. I think that's awesome and I love your tip. That ridiculous. I've heard many times in these interviews setting goals is really important but I haven't actually heard that tip of putting it in your calendar and having it pop up. I have people who are like we put it on sticky notes next to the thing, we do this. But you start to not pay attention to it anymore. But that, I have to hit close or I have to notice it and then stop. I think that's a really great tip.

DENNIS BROWN: It's like anything else. All you're trying to do, you know, subliminally every night, another tip that I have is every night before I go to bed I sit down and I write down things that are on my mind. I kind of do a brain dump, because otherwise I am not going to be able to sleep. I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to go down to my computer and I'm going to write something up and I don't want to do that because I want to get some sleep. So I do a brain dump every night onto a legal pad and then I bring that into the office with me.

I'm a big guy on trying to visualize what you're trying to achieve and writing these things down and for me, writing things down has been a really critical piece. I love technology but I still have a legal pad. I still write my to-do list down on a legal pad. I don't use technology. I use technology for a lot of things but certain things I just find that pad and paper are sometimes?

JAIME TARDY: I know, like I could have it all in my computer but I print it out and I write all over it. I need that for some reason and it's funny, it's funny how we actually still need that even though we have all the technology we'd ever need.

DENNIS BROWN: I think it's the writing component of it that writing it down somehow transfers into your mind better than typing does. I don't know if that's a proven fact but, for me, it just seems like writing is almost, when you're writing on the paper, it's almost like you're writing it in your brain and it just sticks better.

JAIME TARDY: I should look it up. I want to know the science behind it now and I can talk to you forever and I know we have to start wrapping up so I'm going to ask the last question that I always ask which is: what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million.

DENNIS BROWN: Having watched some of your past interviews, I know that that's a question so I've given it a little bit of thought.

JAIME TARDY: Good! Preparation, yes!

DENNIS BROWN: There's a saying that I heard years ago. I don't know where I heard it but I heard it a long time ago and it goes something like this: If you wait for all the lights to turn green before you head to work in the morning, you're always going to be late and the reason why I like that is because ultimately, if you're going to wait for all the moons and planets to be in perfect alignment before you start out your day or your venture or whatever your goal of trying to achieve your goal, you're always going to be late. I relate that back to what I see with people when they come to me and say they want to start a business.

Like that example I gave you earlier, they say well I've been thinking about this thing for about a year or two now and I'm saying to myself what could possible take you a year or two to figure out if you are going to do this or if it was worthwhile to do this. It's really that fear of failure so I would say you have to face your fear and you have to realize that the only thing that is going to overcome fear, the only way to overcome fear is not thinking about it and letting yourself get wrapped up in the whole paralysis by analysis. The only thing that gets you through fear is action.

Winning those small battles every day will build courage, it will build confidence and at that point, it's almost like it gets a life of its own. You start getting this confidence that you can do these things that you never thought you could do. It fuels itself and it's really a great feeling when you start to do it. It's like the first time you do anything or you overcome a fear. I have a friend who was petrified of trying. I mean totally not related to business. Petrified, I have known him for 20 years and for 15 of those years, you literally would have had to have drugged him, sedated him to get him on a plane. He was petrified to fly. I worked with him, as a friend, to try and get him over this fear because it was really limiting what he could do in his family, in his personal life and in business and he was a business guy.

Couldn't fly on business trips. Couldn't go on vacations with his family over a distance unless he was willing to drive and I remember this look on his face when he finally took his first flight and realized that all that fear that he had it was nothing. There was nothing there behind it other than his own himself blocking himself mentally and it was so freeing for him to be able to now have this whole new life and that confidence went into other areas of his life now. Now he's a business owner, does very, very well. He's actually one of my business partners, an agent of ours, an agent business partner, like I explained to you. He's contracted with us and he runs a $5.5 million business.

I think that those small successes will build confidence and build courage and the only way to do that is to be willing to fail and you just got to take action. You've got to go forward. Don't sit on your hands, don't sit on the sidelines because I can guarantee you one thing, you will never get anywhere doing that.

JAIME TARDY: You'll be stuck at all the red lights because nothing is going to turn green. I love that and I think everybody that's listening right now should probably look at one of those things that just scares the crap out of them, something, it doesn't have to be huge, it can be just something really small and do it, even if it's like karaoke, because I'm scared of karaoke so that's what I am thinking. But whatever it is, one of those things to just actually go ahead and do it. Oh man, now I'm going to have to do karaoke, crap!

DENNIS BROWN: That would make a great video by the way.

JAIME TARDY: Oh gosh, no. Pat Flynn absolutely adores karaoke and he was trying to get me to do in Vegas and in New York, when we were together. Yeah, we'll see. I hope nobody, we have too many smart phones, that's not good. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. I really appreciate everything you said. Where can we find out more, if there's people, you know, that may be in the logistics industry that might want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

DENNIS BROWN: I have two companies. I have Logistic Dynamics to that's my primary business. That's my third-party logistics companies. You could go to www.logisticdynamics.com or just search for Logistic Dynamics online, you'll find us. If you are an experienced logistics person looking for an opportunity, I would recommend them go there. I also have an online training business, because I've had so many people that have come to me and ask me can you teach me what you've done, can I become a broker. Could I become an agent? I have hundreds of people coming to me over the years and I always had to turn them away. I'd give them a piece of advice and then I'd have to turn them away because I couldn't spend the time because I had to run my primary business.

I didn't want to get tied down with this other venture and so what I did was a few years ago I started an online training program that allows people to take this piece of my brain that I've learned over the years and be exposed to it but it doesn't force me to be involved in all the mentoring and it allows them to learn at their own pace. That's a site that I developed; it's called Freight Broker Boot Camp. So if someone was interested and who wasn't in the industry and wanted to learn how to become a broker, they could go there and check out my blog and check out the other information and see if they are interested in learning that. That would be great.

JAIME TARDY: Everyone that surrounds themselves with Pat Flynn has to do stuff like that, right? They just totally have to. Thank you so much for coming on, Dennis. I truly appreciate it. Hopefully we can meet in person sometime and I hope you have a great day.

DENNIS BROWN: Thanks, Jaime.

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

Tags: brokerage, business failure, Business Growth, business startup, Dennis Brown, millionaire interview, real estate business, Startup

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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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