How To Grow an Idea Into a Business With Mike Evans, Co-Founder of Grubhub and Founder of Fixer
Mike Evans is the Co-founder of Grubhub, which he started in his spare bedroom in 2002 and grew into the multi-billion-dollar online food delivery service that it is today. After going public as an IPO, Mike left the company in 2014. He then rode his bike across the US and began authoring Hangry: A Startup Journey, a memoir about founding Grubhub.
A few years after leaving Grubhub, Mike founded the Chicago-based company Fixer, an on-demand handyperson B-corp that trains its employees from scratch and responds to customer requests with skilled, friendly workers in less than an hour. His goal is to create a career path alternative to the “gig” economy and provide opportunities for young people to enter the building trades arena and establish sustainable careers.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Mike Evans explains where the idea for Grubhub started
How Grubhub helped keep restaurants in business during The Great Recession
The customer behavior shifts and other catalysts that helped drive Grubhub’s growth
How Mike managed Grubhub’s company culture as it experienced rapid growth
The technological hurdles Grubhub had to overcome throughout the years
Why Mike never worried too much about Grubhub’s competition
Mike talks about his decision to walk away from Grubhub
How Mike came up with the idea for Fixer
What inspired Mike to write a book?
What you’ll learn in this episode:
Have you ever wanted something, but what you needed didn’t exist? Could you grow a business out of fulfilling that need? Could it be the next biggest thing? So, what lessons can you learn from someone who’s been there, done that?
The food delivery giant Grubhub started as a delivery guide Mike Evans created in his spare bedroom after he struggled to find a restaurant that delivered pizza. Eventually, he turned his little delivery guide into the world’s premier online ordering platform. In doing so, he entered the level that an elite few entrepreneurs hit and took his startup from an idea all the way to an IPO. Mike figured it out as he went along, making many mistakes along the way. He incorporated ideas into the business to discover what worked and made adaptations to propel business growth. Taking an idea, creating a business out of it, and scaling that business to be a giant is not a clear, apparent straight line, but it can be done.
On this special edition of From Persona to Personal, Roger Hurni and co-host John Corcoran talk with Mike Evans, Co-founder of Grubhub and Founder of Fixer, about the many moving parts of building an idea into a business. Mike details his journey as the Co-founder of Grubhub, from why he started it to how it evolved to the many obstacles he faced along the way. He shares why he decided to walk away and ride his bike across the country, write a book, and then start something new.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
“Getting Personal About Pizza With Erik Frederick, CEO of UNO Restaurants”
“Success Is Just a Hint Away With Kara Goldin, Founder of Hint Inc.”
This episode’s sponsor:
Today’s episode is brought to you by Off Madison Ave. At Off Madison Ave, we create meaningful moments of brand trust and influence how people interact and engage with brands.
There is a science behind tapping into your audiences’ desires and motivation. After all, if you’re not changing your audiences’ behaviors, you can’t truly unlock all of your brand’s potential.
The proven models and methods of Behavior Design is the strategic foundation for your brands’ success.
Episode Transcript
John Corcoran 0:00
Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I'm a co host of today's episode. I will introduce our co-hosts in a second. This episode is actually gonna be pushed out across two different podcasts with a little different format here today. My podcast is called Smart Business Revolution. For the past 12 years I've featured smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs of companies and organizations ranging from Netflix to Kinkos, Redfin, Quicken. YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, and many more. And I also have with me, Roger Hurni. Roger, take it away.
Roger Hurni 0:30
Oh, thank you very much, John. I'm Roger Hurni. I host the show called From Persona to Personal and that show focuses on leaders, mostly in the food and beverage space, and it focuses on consumer behavior and how those shifts in behavior lead to different levels of personalization. I've had guests such as Kara Goldin, Founder of Hint Water, and Eric Frederick, who's the CEO of Pizzeria Uno.
John Corcoran 0:53
All right, let's introduce today's guest, we have Mike Evans. He founded Grubhub in his spare bedroom and grew it into a multibillion-dollar online food delivery colossus, which is a household name today. He left Grubhub after the IPO, literally rode off into the sunset, and rode his bike all the way across the United States. And his book now is called Hangry: A Startup Journey. More recently, he founded fixer.com, which is on demand handy person B Corp that trains its employees from scratch. This episode, of course, is brought to you by Rise25, where we help b2b businesses get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done-for-you podcasts and content marketing. And you can learn more about us at Rise25.com. And also brought to you by Off Madison Ave, Roger’s company, which uses behavioral science to create meaningful moments of brand trust, which influences how people interact and engage with companies. And their behavioral approach taps into audience's motivation and prompts them to shift behavior. Learn more at offmadisonave.com. All right, so Mike, off to you. I want to focus on the early days of Grubhub 2002, you started because you had a simple pain, you wanted to order a pizza, and you weren't able to, of course, this was a long, you know, internet years, a lot of time ago. But take us back to that kind of lightning aha moment you’re a programmer so you knew how to develop this yourself, tell us about what that original challenge was?
Mike Evans 2:17
Yeah so like you said, back in 2002, I wanted a pizza, and getting a pizza was hard. I live in a city that there's tons of restaurants that deliver and I had, you know, maybe three or four menus in a little drawer that people had dropped off on my doorstep. And if you can imagine the time, it was really hard to find information for restaurants online, you could sort of find out which ones existed, but you couldn't find which restaurants delivered to you. And so the very first idea was, I just wanted to find out which restaurants delivered to my address. And so I built a neighborhood guide on that. And then my business partner sold the first restaurant. And then shortly after that, I quit my job and and, and started selling restaurants on this like delivery guide concept. It wasn't even there was no online ordering. It was just an information website to start.
John Corcoran 3:05
Yeah, so and one of the interesting points that you did early on, because it was a marketplace, which is such a big challenge, you have to build the supply and the demand. And it's kind of a unique challenge for a business that is a marketplace. You had to get all the content on there, you had to get the menus on there, eventually had to get the restaurants to agree to go through your platform, but you had a little hack, you went through and you got you literally went out and got menus and put them onto the website.
Mike Evans 3:35
Yeah, like, so these kinds of businesses, they used to be called two-sided network businesses. And more recently, they've been called marketplace businesses. The idea behind them is that you have a set of people on one side, in this case, restaurants, and the more you have, the more beneficial it is to diners. And the more diners you have, the more beneficial it is to restaurants and you need both for it to work and they suffer from this problem called the chicken and the egg problem, do you get the diners first or the restaurants. And whenever I talk to anybody who's trying to do a marketplace, I always say you have to figure out a way to cheat one side of the marketplace, you have to cheat you have to create value for one group before you create value for the other group. And so what, what I did is I went and picked up all of the menus, the physical paper menus, scanned them, and put them up on the website so that all the menus for a restaurant you could find all the delivery menu restaurant delivery restaurant menus on the, on the website was created value for the diners that were coming to the website before I had actually signed up anyone to do, to do advertising on the website.
Roger Hurni 4:31
In consumer behavior, people don't realize that consumer behavior is somewhat instinctive and they don't know necessarily have the entire language but what you did is that fundamental process in shifting consumer behavior, if you can make something easier, people will gravitate toward it. So you, you you've solved that half that equation of making it easier to find what restaurants delivered to you, here's the menus from the actual restaurants. What shifted to the other side of the equation that you're talking about? You solve that problem. And you got everything online? How do you solve for the, the other audience and getting restaurants to really buy-in from a delivery perspective?
Mike Evans 5:14
Yeah. So fast forward like two years in that, and I, it's no longer distance delivery guide, it's an online ordering platform. And like you said, on the consumer side, you know, I had so many people say to me, well, what's the big deal, you could just call on the phone, and it is a big deal, there's a ton of friction and calling a restaurant on the phone, we want to use our phones, our smartphones as remote controls for our lives. And so when we removed the friction from, from having to call the put on hold, and all that, it was 10 times better than, than the previous experience, even though it doesn't seem like it's that hard to do a phone call. And so people went from ordering, once a month, maybe, maybe twice a month to twice a week. So we had a huge increase in frequency from people started using a website. And that change behavior, drove massive new customers with massive numbers of new customers to restaurants, and that was the sell to restaurants, we'd go to restaurants, and we'd say, hey, we take on all the risk. We don't make a dime unless you make $1. Sign up with us, and we'll get you tons and tons of orders. And, you know, it works. So it still took convincing, it still took a sales team, and conversations with lots of small business owners. But if you fast forward to like 2008, you know, during the house that 2007 2008 during the housing crisis, you know, we we had what we were calling at the time, the Great Recession, and lots of restaurants went out of business in a normal year. It's like 30%. But this was like way north of that. And we were keeping our restaurants in business through a recession with our product. And so it worked. It worked for the restaurants, we drove tons of new business to them.
Roger Hurni 6:48
It definitely worked during that time period. And it seemed and I know you were, you were probably out of it during the teens, I think you since 2011. I think you've been gone?
Mike Evans 6:59
No, I was there at the IPO through the through, through the IPO 2014.
Roger Hurni 7:04
Yeah, so but the bid the pandemic became this other catalyst because I don't think there's anybody on the planet, particularly in the United States that has not least done a sum equivalent of a Grubhub order.
Mike Evans 7:17
Yeah, I mean, there was a few different moments along the course of running the business that were catalysts. You know, one was certainly, certainly the, during the housing crisis, you know, one of the things, one of the things that happens a lot of startups on a business, and so we were able to spend on marketing very cheaply to get the name out about Grubhub. And we weren't hurt ourselves by that particular moment. And then another one, which was just prior to that was, we had one of the first 100 iPhone apps in the App Store. And so, you know, you can imagine what an accelerant that was being really early on being in the app store. And there was a couple other apps that came around the same time, but they didn't have 20,000 restaurants sign up like we had. And so there were a few accelerants along the way. And you know, it's really hard to time those most of the time you just kind of have a tiger by the tail, and you just hang on as, as just try to like, make sure to capture whatever that, whatever that tailwind is, sometimes you do alright, sometimes you miss it.
John Corcoran 8:12
Did you have the business model figured out from the beginning? It must have evolved and changed over time. If in the early days, you didn't even have the restaurant signed up, I don't know, if you were like getting, you know, advertising revenue at that point, but did you have to kind of iterate and figure out what the business model would be as you went along? Or did you kind of have it clear in mind that the where the money was going to come from,
Mike Evans 8:35
I had no idea what I was I threw stuff on the wall and I saw what worked and I adapted and I changed and I and I made a lot of mistakes. I mean, I that path from you know, one restaurant, the first restaurant to 70,000 restaurants was not like a clear, obvious straight line. It was like a drunken ramble. And, and, you know, originally with the transition from the advertising platform, where we were just, you know, just doing exposure and just selling advertising packages to restaurants to online ordering. In the middle of that we, I created a system to phone order can track phone orders, so people would call the restaurant. But it would go and actually go to a special number we had on the on the, on the website. And then now we get forwarded on to the restaurant. And the restaurants loved it at the time. Fast forward to, to 10 to 15 years later, when people almost always exclusively use online ordering, restaurants hate that phone system. But so so not only did it change over time, but some things that were valuable in the beginning became really, really a problem later on.
Roger Hurni 9:40
You know, Mike, I would I'd actually like to shift and go a little internal because that, that kind of growth is, is rare. I know they talked about the whole unicorn thing and I've been involved in a couple, like Doubletree hotels and Petsmart from its inception. The culture is really important, and you may not know what you're doing. You're figuring things out along the way. But there is a culture there. And as you grow, that culture shifts and changes. How did you, how did you manage that? So that you could keep the energy that you had in the beginning, all the way through 70,000 restaurants?
Mike Evans 10:16
Yeah, I think, I think one of the things to understand about culture is that it can't be static, it's always changing. And if you're not intentional about the way it's changing, then it's changing, without you paying attention to it for the worse. And so you know, what, one of the things that we did is, we got everybody together. And we all decided what our values were going to be, we all decided, like, like, who we were going to be as a company and what we valued from, a from a moral perspective, right, the, the core values of the company, I didn't just make them up. And then by fiat, say, these are the things we value, it was a group effort. And so then everybody owned it going forward. And culture gets more diffuse as a company grows. And as you pass 150 or 200, people, it gets really, really hard for everybody know each other. And so there's the sort of cultural touch points that you decide as a team, they become incredibly important. And so we ended up hiring a bunch of foodies, like, there's a lot of people who were conservative, so a lot of startups to choose from, we attracted people who were really into food, right? And that helped a lot, because that's what we did, right? And, and over time, you know, we reinforced those ideas by putting them, we wrote them down everywhere, they were on the start of almost every, almost every presentation we did we put them on the walls, we talked about them, we hired with them. But we also had this understanding that we didn't want carbon copies of ourselves, we wanted people to challenge our culture and help it grow at the same time. And that helps, it helps us be a cohesive team for a decade, you know, as we grew through 500 people and even 1000 people at the organization, it helped a lot. Obviously, it wasn't as strong as 1,000 people than it was 150. But those initial efforts carried through for a lot longer than you might think they would.
John Corcoran 12:03
I want to ask you, Mike, about some of the technological or logistical hurdles that you face along the way. I interviewed the, one of the co-founders of Open Table, which I think started around 1999 course online reservation system
Mike Evans 12:15
Was that Chuck Templeton, or is that another?
John Corcoran 12:18
I forget what his name was. It wasn't Chuck Templeton, though. One of, the it was one of the I think there are three co-founders, that one, but there was one of their challenges was that back in the day back then, you know, reservations were held in a book, paper and ink book that was on a hosted stand that didn't have a computer on it and didn't have an internet line and there wasn't Wi-Fi. And so they actually went around San Francisco with computers on the back of a moped and dropping them off and running internet lines, like talk about the crazy logistical challenge in order to just even make their solution possible. For you, the iPhone came along, you know, after your inception, but were some of the bigger logistical or tat, you know, technological hurdles that you had to overcome over the years there.
Mike Evans 13:06
Yeah, I mean, the most obvious one is like, how do you get an online order to a restaurant that doesn't have a computer? That's, that's a challenge.
John Corcoran 13:13
And you started faxes in faxes, right?
Mike Evans 13:17
Yeah, a fax machine. So we so the system I built like, it would fax an order to the restaurant. And then on the bottom of the page, and it's important that it was on the bottom of the page, there's a code. And so then a phone call would follow the fax and would say, hey, type the confirmation code, if the whole fax didn't print, they didn't have the code. So they could so we try and fax again, right? Which was great. Except in certain situations, there was like this one fax machine that just would only print half the page. And so we just kept re-faxing the orders, like hundreds of times while I was on the camping trip. So that restaurant was not pleased with that. Right? Yeah, to say the least, that kind of stuff. I mean, you know that, that will we're just gonna use the fax machines then eventually ended up with some of our salespeople, were doing tech support, you know, some of our best salespeople, they would go into a restaurant that would that a previous salesperson hadn't been able to sell. And they'd be like, Hey, how can I come back and like install a phone line, and I'll buy a fax machine for you, like, they would bill it to Grub Hub. And then like, we'll just give you a fax machine. And all we need is to use this phone line that you have over here that you're using for one of your phones, and they would literally just do the tech support installation. And that's how they like this one particular person. I think the reason he got such good commissions is he was willing to go after hours and just install fax machines. And it's to some degree, it does take that approach when you're, when you're trying to build something from nothing. You kind of have to just do whatever it takes to remove the barriers to growing the business.
John Corcoran 14:49
Yeah. I want to get to Fixer, but which is your current company. But before we get to that, I want to ask a bit about competition. This became just a crazy competitive space. You know, Uber Eats and Groupon got on the space, all these different big companies got into this space, there must have been moments where you're like, Oh crap, this is it. Like the equivalent of like Microsoft, Microsoft moving into your space. Were there moments like that for you where you're just like, Alright, that's it, we're done.
Mike Evans 15:18
I think it's really important to not overreact. It's competition for entrepreneurs there, there's already this anxiety, it's anxiety, terror, that the 800-pound gorilla is going to come in, and just like, take over your business, and it just doesn't happen, right? If you're building a product, that's great for your customers, then you have to pay attention to what your competition is doing. Because if they, if they build a better mousetrap, you have to copy it. Alright. And so ideally, you're in a position where you're constantly, you know, I, I talked before about this idea, I didn't know what I was doing. But really a culture of experimentation and trying things and being willing to quit the things that aren't working. And to double down on the things that are that like that is actually a really good competitive differentiator a lot more than any individual thing. And so, most people don't know this, because they're, it's ancient history. But there was over 100, online ordering companies that came and went, you know, prior to the IPO and quick order and order up and just 100 of the Groupon and LivingSocial. And they all get into Amazon got into competing with us for a moment,
John Corcoran 16:23
Talk about heart attack.
Mike Evans 16:26
Yeah, I mean, almost. But then it's like, you know what, this is the one thing we do, and we're good at it. So, anybody who's trying a bunch of things, we're going to beat them, right? And that's why I actually wasn't even worried about Uber Eats. Now. DoorDash was a different story they came on, but that was after really after I left. And so yeah, the competition did, did become an issue. But as long as you're differentiated, and as long as you've got the best product for your customers, competition is not necessarily something you have to worry about. And then there was another, there was two other companies Campus Food and Seamless, who we merged with. And so we grew as a result of competition because we were willing to go and have these conversations and make the tough decisions to bring the companies together. And so it can be a benefit as well.
Roger Hurni 17:09
You know, when we, when I've worked with companies that talk about mitigating their competition through just being different, and being better, this is where like my podcast, From Persona to Personal starts to launch on, it gets into that level of personalization, when you can make your product better. And someone can recognize through that experience, that you understand who I am and what my needs are, and you're able to solve those for me. That's where you can really keep competition at bay, no matter how much they try to copy you. Did you have those kinds of conversations with how, how can we bring people in? I know you're not a marketing person, per se. But did you really have any kind of conversations around personalizing the experience and getting that, that individual to really recognize how much we understood them?
Mike Evans 18:07
You know, the, the most of the conversations around competition, were around the idea of me, telling people to calm down.
Roger Hurni 18:16
Fair enough
Mike Evans 18:17
It was, you know what, it's fine. There's going to be competition, what, what should our response be? Are we going to just be anxious about it? Are we going to act on it? And so let's decide how we're going to act. And then once we do that, let's not think about it anymore. Let's not dwell on it. And it's it, it was easy for me to say because we beat all the competition, right? By the time we got to the IPO, we were by far the largest, largest organization doing online ordering. And so, you know, there's, yes, you differentiate the different, but different differentiation for startups and for businesses is about what do we do that's gonna be hard for somebody else to copy not impossible. And then by the time they copy it, how do we make sure we're two steps further down the road? Like you can never stop innovating, when you're, when you're in a huge space like that, and it's a huge startup space.
Roger Hurni 19:09
Well, I mean, competition is also a validation of the market. When you're doing something new, like you're doing competition just says, Okay, this, this proves that there's a market out there and an opportunity for growth, and you can win. Nobody else has to lose in order for you to win. There's a lot of fish out there.
Mike Evans 19:28
Yeah, I agree with that. The, there's, there's a whole sort of track of like, business advice that sort of follows military lines, and there's this idea of winning or beating the enemy and it's I don't, I don't agree like, what one of the things that happened as a result of these online ordering. Companies that, that came into existence is the number of times people ordered delivery increased by 7 or 8x in the United States. So like, it wasn't just about market share it was about actually creating a market and multiple companies actually can be more effective at doing that. In fact, one of the things that really made it a lot easier to sell restaurants was when Groupon started competing. When Groupon came into existence, and they just started hammering the phones and calling every small business that existed, they opened up the possibility of calling restaurants and selling them over the phone instead of having to walk in the door. And so the competition actually helped us in terms of accelerating our sales.
John Corcoran 20:30
I want to get to walking away after the IPO. So you, you kind of achieved the entrepreneurial Nirvana, your company grows is successful, goes public, and then at some point, you decided, this isn't for me, I want to walk away. What was that decision process like?
Mike Evans 20:52
Yeah, I did. I rode off into the sunset, it was great. Everyone should do it. And, and, you know, I've had people say things like, Oh, were you tired? Or like, you know, did you, did you get enough wealth that you didn't have to work anymore? Like, you know, what, like, what was it that that? Why did you leave? And I think it's a really important point to say that, like, the energy we put our things towards, and the effort that we put, put our, put our life, our lives towards our time on this earth towards, you need a reason to stay at things, not a reason to leave. And so for me, you know, I really wanted to build a business that helped independent restaurants thrive, especially against chains. And as the company went through its transition to becoming public, it became clear that that was not the path that, the most of the people in the company wanted to go go. They wanted, they wanted to get as much scale as possible. And they had other goals than what mine was, which was really sticking to the independent restaurants. And so once those goals diverged, I thought, well, this isn't really one where I want to be putting my energy. So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go do something else. Also, I've always wanted to either do like the Appalachian Trail or a long bike ride. And it turns out that I had back and shoulder issues and a long bike ride is a lot easier to do than a big, long backpacking trip. And so I, I quit, and like rode off into the sunset, it was great to have three months to just decompress, think about what I had accomplished, and think about what I was going to do next.
Roger Hurni 22:16
That's the you know, that's, that's the shit. That's great advice. And I don't think people recognize in your answer, that it's not that you actually walked away, you walked towards something else. And, and that's really what you want. You want to put yourself in that position, everybody wants to be in that position, not to walk away from something, but to have the opportunity to walk towards something new.
Mike Evans 22:40
Yeah, I talked about this in the book about the you know, when if you walk away from something, and you're not headed, you don't have any goal in mind, that's, that's a lot of times that's giving up. But when you, when you're walking, when you leave something to go do something else, I call that quitting. But like, in a good way, like it's a good thing, you know, being, having a dual commitment to work really hard, the things that we choose to put our energy towards, but then also, to quit the things that aren't working. It's incredibly freeing, it allows us to, to be experimental and allows us to take risks, because we know we're not going to get stuck somewhere just by inertia.
John Corcoran 23:17
Yeah. And obviously, you started another company. So on that journey across country, you probably were thinking about your future. At what point did you decide that I'm going to do something else? And I'm fascinated to know, how you decided on, it would be Fixer, which is a very, you know, a marketplace business also, but a different format, the way you structured it.
Mike Evans 23:38
Yeah, it's Yeah, so I, you know, I wrote across the United States on the, on the adventure cycling Association's Transam, using their maps to take that path across, across the United States. And, and it gave me a lot of time to think, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't necessarily like thinking, what am I going to do next. But, you know, as I went through small town, America, and as I went through, you know, individual, rural and suburban towns, you know, I just saw like, a lot of vibrancy in those places that had a lot of independent, like, independent. We owned small businesses, you know, the things that weren't big chains, basically. And I was like, like, there's something about this, there's something about the individual’s ability to like, create an economic power that like creates vibrancy in the economy. And so as I was thinking about, like, what I wanted to do next, I wanted to create a company that actually created economic mobility for people and like, was helpful in the communities that we that we operated in, but then also turned a profit. So I didn't want to create a nonprofit or a not-for-profit organization. I think they're great. It's not my jam. It's not what I do. Your business is a huge leverage for social change, whether you want them to be or not. And so being intentional about it is really important. So I created it. So what I ended up so that was all of that reflection came on the bike trip. And then what I ended up doing with that is I ended up creating this company called Fixer, which is an on-demand handyperson service. So you can use your phone as a remote control for your life in most areas. And so now you can use it to get somebody to come to your home, it's a couple of clicks, you scheduled somebody, we show up on time, we do great work, we clean up after ourselves. But the difference between this and most marketplaces is that we actually employ all the workers their full-time employees with benefits, and we train them from scratch. So we built a whole training program, we built curriculum, we train people how to be handy people, and we created an entry path into the trades that's gender inclusive, and really easy to access. And so that's what we've created. And so we're creating this great economic mobility for individuals who want to enter the trades as a career. And they don't you they don't have to go to trade school for two years. They don't have to have an uncle that taught them you know, it's like, they apply to the training program, and we accept them. And then they start, start making money. It's a great for everyone, right? So that's the business I created this time. I expect it to be, I expected to end up being larger than Grubhub is.
Roger Hurni 26:04
So that was really my follow-up question because you with Grubhub, you had a place that you wanted to go for all these independent restaurants you've got there. And then you saw oh, here's this other opportunity. It was, it was right across America. What does “done” for you look like with Fixer?
Mike Evans 26:26
So the point at which I feel like I'll be able to be like this is it, this is the legacy I wanted to build. It's when we have 40-50,000 tradespeople working at the company, and 10 to 15,000 of them every year go on to more lucrative trades like being electricians, or plumbers, or Masons or roofers, or whatever the case is, you know, this is like a stepping stone to get into the trades. And then we hire it and train another 10 to 15,000 people to like, come into the trades and stay with us for a few years. And it's a bit of a revolving door, but like in a positive way, we're creating this entry path. But then, but then, you know, what comes out of it is just enough people to do the work because the supply of skilled trades, people in the United States is simply insufficient relative to the demand, and the problem is getting worse. And so this is what I want to create, by the way, that is a highly profitable activity that I just described. I'm not it's it is both good for the communities we serve. But it also generates a lot of a lot of dollars for the owners of the company. By the way, all of the employees are part-owners of the company. So there's equity for every, every tradesperson that's in the company. And so they, it's beneficial to them to. And so that like that's what I'm trying to create, I'm not I made enough money to be comfortable. This is about like, what do you do with it? Like, okay, that's great, I can't take it with me. I'm gonna live another 40-50 years, and what am I going to do but make the world a better place while I'm here, right? And so that's what I'm trying to accomplish. I don't know that I'll ever actually retire, I'll probably just keep going until, until I can't anymore. But that's, that's this is the plan is to do it with this business. Right now.
John Corcoran 28:02
I'm fascinated by entrepreneurs who start in a later company that's kind of in many ways a reaction to the previous company. So give you an example, a friend of mine, Adam, z bar is one of the co-founders of Sun basket, also in the food space. They do organic meal delivery. And you think about all the different challenges that it had logistics, perishable food, you know, tech problems, all that kind of stuff. And then his next company was completely digital online money, payments across borders, like and I thought it was so fun to make fun of them. Because it's like so different. And it just overcomes all those challenges. So for you, as you're thinking of structuring this, you've got all the employees training, you didn't have to do that you could have done independent contractors. What were some ways in which you decided deliberately to structure this as a business that was different from the previous one?
Mike Evans 28:48
Yeah, I think I think what I learned in the first one was, you know, how to do marketing, how to how to run a large organization and how to do financing. There's like a bunch of things that I was able to take with me, but then with this business, you know, there are marketplaces that exist in the trade space, Thumbtack, Angie's List, HomeAdvisor, Yelp, you know, they all help with these kinds of things. But if there aren't enough tradespeople to actually do the work, then then I couldn't have created a business that was just contractors like, there, I had to somehow train people from scratch. And so what I really did is I was, I was taking the social benefit that created the first company and then trying to double down on that concept, make a business even more socially beneficial. But then I picked like the hardest business model, I probably could have thought of, like W2 employees were at risk if they're idle, like in terms of their we pay them regardless of whether or not we have the jobs. And so we're at risk, we have to keep them busy, it's our job to be effective with our marketing tactics, and that risk is not on the tradespeople, and there's the technology and there's the, we had to become educators, which was the thing I'd never had done before but,
John Corcoran 29:56
I thought it’s not as simple as just a meal, right? Yeah, educate people.
Mike Evans 30:00
Yeah, but I also had an advantage because I built this business before I had the capital from the previous exit. I knew investors already. And so, you know, to my mind, I was like, great, I want to dive in on a really hard business that's like operationally, operationally just really challenging. Because if we can figure it out, then we're so differentiated than it from everyone else in the market that takes years or decades for somebody to catch up to us. And I have the advantage of, I can do the hard thing because I've done I've done a hard thing already. And I have the resources and the people to do it. So to some degree, it was like, challenge accepted. But what's the next thing like what's the harder thing I can do that's even more impactful?
John Corcoran 30:37
Cut to 15 minutes later? What did I do?
Mike Evans 30:40
Yeah, what's that line from Arrested Development? I've made a terrible mistake. No, I have felt like that. But only like one day out of five. The other four…
John Corcoran 30:48
Yes. Sometimes no big deal. Yeah.
Roger Hurni 30:54
Yeah, you know, the, when you get into a pattern of thinking, it becomes easier to think through problems, you've, you've now had two opportunities to invent improve broken customer experiences. And it may not be you but do you see other areas out there that need that level of attention? Whether you're involved or not?
Mike Evans 31:20
Yeah, airlines and health care. I mean, you know, with airlines, you can blame anything on security or safety. And therefore you don't have to drive a good customer experience, which I think is a, which is a chicken way out, like I like Virgin, Virgin Airlines is trying to do this, where they where they try to create a good customer experience, in spite of the security or safety challenges in the industry. And then anything related to health care. You know, when when you go into an office, it's very clear that the most important thing is the doctor's time, not yours, and you're not a customer, you're, you're simply you're you just have to be thankful that you can pay a fortune for a bad experience. And you have to, you don't have any other choice.
Roger Hurni 31:59
Well, hopefully, hopefully, there's some other, you know, rich gazillionaires out there who recognize that problem as you do and can pick up the baton since you're already working on Fixer.
Mike Evans 32:10
Yeah, healthcare, like I don't know, too hard. I'm sorry. I don't know how hard like I can, I can try and reboot trade education in the United States in a gender-inclusive way. But health care, that's a beast, I don't even want to touch with a 10 foot pole. Like I had no idea how you would go about solving those problems.
John Corcoran 32:26
Yeah, absolutely. I want to move on. Before we run out of time to Hangry the book, tell us about what inspired you to put all your time into writing a book while building a startup.
Mike Evans 32:37
Yeah, like I said, maybe it's a terrible mistake, but actually, I really loved it. Yeah, the whole point of the book is this that, that being intentional about, about one's personal definition of success is incredibly important, because we affect those people that are around us in lots of ways. And if you're in a startup, that is successful you affects you can affect a whole perfectible society. And, and so I sort of explore what it's like to emotionally go through what, what it is like to just start something because I wanted a pizza and then suddenly to be, you know, be driving 60-70% of the business for 60,000-70,000 restaurants in the United States. And what the responsibility that comes with that, and how that changes a person personally. And so my hope with the book is that 10 people will change their minds about “Am I going to try and be thoughtful and intentional and proactive about the impact that I'm creating as I go through my work life”, whether that starting a startup or being a doctor, or whatever the case is, if I can influence 10 people to like be intentional about that, then the book will be a success. And so that's why I wrote it.
John Corcoran 33:49
Great, great. And then the also the kind of the, the mission for you is kind of inspire people to have that courage to walk away, even if people say you're crazy. But if you decide that it's just not your passion is not for you anymore, to be willing to go do something new, right?
Mike Evans 34:11
Absolutely. I think inertia, inertia, and fear of rejection, keep us from a lot of really great stuff that will both make us happy and make the world around us a better place. And so I'm very, I'm very pro, like, quit the thing that isn't working and go try something new, even if it's risky. I mean, that obviously I can say that because it worked out for me. But like, but when I, when I did quit my job like I was I had a check for 140 bucks from that first restaurant when I quit, when I quit my job and it when it certainly paid off. Right and so I I think I think the idea of like being risk-tolerant, as we think about like what it is we could do with our lives leads towards a lot of satisfaction and happiness.
John Corcoran 34:59
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, I think it was amazing what you built, I delivered ribs in college, in high school and college, going around delivering ribs and parking, double parking and running inside and all that kind of stuff. And to think back that you made this phenomenal business, in an area that just, you know, at the time seemed so disorganized, like take these different restaurants and patch them together is truly amazing. Roger has a great question. Roger, I want you to ask it.
Roger Hurni 35:28
Well the, I end my podcast with an advice question because people give advice all the time. You've given amazing advice during this conversation, that whether people realize it or not, there are great lessons there. Everyone's always telling me to give advice, give advice. I always ask what's the worst advice you've ever gotten? Because that's a learning opportunity as well.
Mike Evans 35:54
Yeah, I've gotten a lot of bad advice, a lot of bad advice. And, and I literally and I literally say this in the book, that it is really important when you get bad advice to say thank you to not correct the person who's giving you bad advice. Because for me, a lot of times I would be in the sort of powerful position of the power dynamic and, and someone is, is taking a risk and stepping outside of their comfort zone to tell me something that they think will be helpful to me. And whether they're right or wrong, the appropriate response for me is, is gratitude and, and to experience that with a like level of grace, instead of being a cranky asshole. Which is, which is kind of what I can be a lot of times and so, and so I don't, because of that framework, I literally can't give you a piece of bad advice because I appreciate the effort in which it was given to me. And so my piece of, my piece of positive advice is don't jump down the throat of people who give you advice. Even if it's, even if it's wrong, especially if it's wrong, you just say thank you. Right so anyway, that's my opinion on, on advice, and I try not to give too much myself although I literally wrote a book so I'm guessing it’s like.
Roger Hurni 37:13
That was nicely played. You turned a “What's the worst advice” into good advice again.
Mike Evans 37:19
It's like that question in an interview like “What's your, what's your, the worst quality about yourself?” You're supposed to answer positively instead. But I really mean this, I didn't prep that, that response to that question.
John Corcoran 37:32
Well, the book is Hangry: A Startup Journey, fixer.com is the company. Anywhere else people should go to learn more about you Mike or connect with you or get check out the book?
Mike Evans 37:42
Yeah, I would say a great place to get the book is just on Audible. I did the, I actually recorded the, the audiobook of it. And then if you're interested in this bike ride thing, check out Adventure Cycling, The Adventure Cycling Association. That's the other thing I would say is, is if you have any inkling to sort of go on an adventure like that, there’s the place to start.
John Corcoran 38:01
I know Roger and I will definitely be checking that out. So thanks for putting in that plug Mikey, Mike, thank you so much.
Mike Evans 38:04
Thanks for having me.
Outro 38:50
Thanks for listening to From Persona to Personal, the podcast that takes a closer look into how organizations personalize their marketing. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.
