Justin Ihnken - CEO & Co-Founder of Enorra_: Overcoming Criticism, Building Networks, and Being Resourceful

Justin Ihnken  00:00

I'm a big believer in the theory that your five best employees will hire your next 50, and those next 50 are direct copies of the person that you hired. And if you hired an expert who knows exactly what they're doing, you're going to get 50 more experts that know exactly what they're doing. I'm a huge believer in hiring the expertise first.

Callan Harrington  00:20

You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flash Growth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Justin Ihnken. Justin is the co-founder and CEO of Enorra. Enorra is revolutionizing finance by developing SaaS tools that eliminate complexity and accelerate data-driven decisions using machine learning and AI. Their mission is to enhance competitiveness in financial trade, focusing on data analytics, marketplace solutions, and ESG banking. Prior to co-founding Enorra, Justin co-founded Quantum Labs, a contract laboratory focused on providing chemical and biological analysis as well as contract research, development, and regulatory compliance applications to pharmaceutical companies. If there's one thing that becomes apparent very quickly, it's that Justin is passionate about entrepreneurship. We talked about the hurdles Justin had to overcome before starting his own business, and how he used being resourceful as a superpower to scale his business. We also talked about how he got up to speed quickly in an industry that he both didn't know anything about or had any contacts in, and I thought it was an excellent roadmap for anyone that's entering a new market. Now, the part of the conversation that I love the most was talking about when to hire experienced people into your business. This is always a big debate, and I loved hearing Justin's take on this. I will tell you that it has definitely had an impact on how I'm thinking about approaching this within my own business. So with that, let's get to the show. Justin, I'm excited to jump into this, and I've got about a million questions I'm looking forward to asking you, but where I would have kicked us off is: Tell me about how you became an entrepreneur.

Justin Ihnken  02:34

Callan, thank you so much for having me on today. I became an entrepreneur after having worked a few years in finance. When I first started a company, I went from the industry that I was working in to a totally new industry. And I had been asking some advisors and some subject matter experts a lot about it. And, you know, if I'm being totally granular around pharmaceutical lab testing—pharmaceutical lab testing is a world of its own—and you're talking to someone who has barely passed chemistry and ran completely in the opposite direction from anything and everything with regard to biology and pharmaceuticals. But I went on to start a pharmaceutical company, and I became an entrepreneur when I tried to ask people if this is a good idea or a bad idea. When everybody tells you, "Oh, that's such a great idea," you start to lose sight of, like, "Okay, I got this. I got this. This is great." And then you end up sitting back, and you end up saying, "Okay, well, maybe I just am born to be an entrepreneur." And you realize that, okay, maybe I should really try to put myself out there. So you start scheduling meetings with people you don't know. And I remember, I walked into a meeting with two people, actually in particular, and the first one said to me, "So why are you going to go into the pharmaceutical space?" And I gave all the reasons, right? The whole pitch. And they said, "If I can give you one word of advice, it’s don’t. You have no idea what you're doing. You guys are going to fail miserably, and this is a bad idea." And I said, "Oh, wow. All right, well, I guess I should stop." But at that point, I had another interview scheduled later that day, and I sat down with the second person. This is two in the same day, after going weeks and months of everyone working with us and telling us, "Okay, you guys are on a great journey. I'm so supportive, I'll be here cheering you on." So I had another meeting with someone, and they said, "You're gonna get eaten alive. Don’t do it." And I thought to myself, "This is not going to happen. We shouldn’t do this." But the moment you become an entrepreneur is when someone says, "Don’t do something," and you end up doing it anyway. And I think the interesting takeaway is actually that becoming an entrepreneur is not necessarily an act, a process, a job, or a hire. It's actually a way of thinking, because one of the key attributes of an entrepreneur is actually taking rejection and taking very harsh criticism. But, you know, the irony in the story, and the reason why I tell it, is because fast forward about four years, having raised about $30 million in funding, having hired a team of over 50 and built a 20,000 square foot state-of-the-art laboratory facility, those two individuals that told me, "You have no idea what you're doing, don’t do it," I highly advise against it. One of them went on to become my Chief Quality Officer, and the other went on to become the Chairman of the company. And to this day, I credit a lot of our success to those people. But they bought into the company because of the dedication and passion and the pushback and the resistance to failure, and I think that’s what defines an entrepreneur. So when you say, you know, how do you become one? It’s like, well, you can’t really become one. You have to take it from a perspective of saying, "What are the attributes of an entrepreneur?" That’s kind of what shaped my story—those two individuals.

Callan Harrington  05:35

I love that story because I’ve done the opposite one time. It was after a company had wound down, and it kind of ended up being actually one of the perfect times to explore. And we were looking at creating this financial planning app, and there had been a lot on the investing side, but not as much had been done on the financial planning app side. And I was talking with different people, and there were a couple of people in particular who were like, "You’re way too late to doing this. All it's going to take is one of these big companies to come in here and wipe you out. I just wouldn’t do it." And I took that advice, and I regret doing that, because there were so many people on the opposite side that were cheering me on, and that category ended up being a very big category with new entrants. So I love the advice that you gave, because the advice that I give people now is, even if it sounds like it’s a difficult challenge and things like that, here are some of the challenges that I think you’re going to go through, but that does not mean you shouldn’t do it. You’re the only one that can decide whether or not you should or should not.

Justin Ihnken  06:33

Well, of course, right? And I think the people that give you the most—I want to say constructive criticism, but actually the most feedback—I mean, I think anyone that’s ever started a company or raised capital, the ones that actually advise you to not do those things or go in a different direction or really push back on you, the words of wisdom generally come from those people the most because they’re actually not afraid to offend you. And because they’re not afraid to offend you, they’re willing to give you actually honest feedback. And looking back at it now, it was extremely risky. Like, what we were doing was incredibly difficult. The pharmaceutical industry is extremely competitive, and we definitely surrounded ourselves with really, really great people. But, you know, looking back at it now, it was super risky, and those people were definitely right. And I think anybody that doesn’t have that mindset of, you know, you can’t really take no for an answer. You have to go through really hell and high water to get to where you’re going. Those are the people that really you lean on and say, "Hey, I know that you told me this is going to not work, but now I’m this far in. Should we have another conversation?" Generally, those people end up buying back in. They say, "Wow, I’m impressed." 

Callan Harrington  07:34

One of the areas that I’ve just been really excited to dive into is you mentioned you were in finance, and as I understand that you were in trading, and you’re doing this in New York, and then you made this big move to Denmark, and then you founded a company in Denmark. Walk us through that.

Justin Ihnken  07:49

Yes, I’ll give you a little bit about myself. I am born and raised in the New York City area, specifically New Jersey. Northern New Jersey is where I grew up. I went to school right outside New York City. I spent the first about six years of my career working in New York. I went to school for finance and mathematics. I was cut out to be an interest rate derivative trader and a bond trader of fixed income. And an interest rate derivative trader was exactly what I went on to do. I worked in fixed income as a bond trader, moving on to the brokerage side of things, moving ultimately on to the hedge fund world. And in 2018 I relocated to Denmark, where I worked for a company called Maersk, a large shipping company that I think some, if not most, have heard of. However, I didn't work in shipping. I sat on their treasury desk, so I spent about two and a half years. And it was a funny turn of events, because they said, "Well, you don't speak Danish." And I said, "No, I don't." They said, "Well, you don't really know shipping." I said, "No, no, I don't know shipping either." They said, "Well, the thing is, Justin, we’re going to put you in charge of the debt portfolio." And at that point, Maersk was carrying about 10 and a half billion dollars worth of debt, US dollars. They said, "But you know what? The funny thing is, you’re an American, so it's so great you’re here because you must know US interest rates better than any of us." And I said, "I don't think it works like that, either." And long story short, I had a very, very successful career at Maersk, and I had some incredible friends, and I’d say about 80% of them went on to be friends and family investors in my ventures and my startups. But I remember I quit my job on the first day of my new promotion. I had gotten promoted, I moved up, and I think my boss looked at me and said, "What do you mean? You're leaving?" I said, "I'm leaving. I'm gonna go start a pharmaceutical company." So I did what everyone thought to do, and that was to leave the finance industry. And I think I look back and I spent a lot of time in the finance industry, moving from New York City to then to Copenhagen, and I moved there with my now fiancée, and in that regard, I said, "You know, I need to do something different. I want to do something that I can actually sink my hands into." And having only gotten into bigger and bigger and bigger numbers—and I'm sure other finance professionals, life industry goers can agree—the bigger the numbers get, the more kind of numb you get to them. You get to this point where you have more friends on Bloomberg than you have in real life. I’m here financing things that I don’t even know what they are. So I think I felt almost like I’m not doing what I could be doing to the extent that I’m capable of. So I quit my job, and, yeah, like I said, I did what made the most sense, and I started a pharmaceutical company, and it was, believe it or not, much harder than I assumed it would be.

Callan Harrington  10:13

I’ve got a question on that. How did you get this thing up to speed? How did you even get up to speed on this industry? Why pharmaceuticals? 

Justin Ihnken  10:23

When I started the company, I had a co-founder, and he came from investment banking as well, and we started the company, kind of saying, "We have no idea what we’re doing." And having those conversations originally, someone said to us, "Well, you know, maybe you guys will just barely make it, because you guys are like children. You have no idea what you’re doing. You have no idea what any of these things mean. Maybe that elementary way of thinking will get you by, and no one will take you seriously long enough to create a position for yourself." And I kind of rest my laurels on that, in a way, because it kind of worked in all reality. I think what we realized really, Callan, is that we had no industry experience, and we went, we said, "Okay, well, we have to kind of check our pride at the door and say, you know, we need people that understand this, and we have to find the people that really understand this industry, this vertical, this niche of pharmaceutical lab testing services." And for those that don’t understand, 90% of a drug is developed by the pharmaceutical company themselves, whereas about 10% of it or so ends up getting farmed out to these niche laboratories for a few different reasons. One is pharmaceutical compliance testing, right? Making sure that label matches the drug itself. Drug development services are really niche services, or just, quite frankly, regulatory compliance testing, so just ensuring that batch after batch after batch they’re just meeting the same quality constraints. So doing that, you realize that there’s a huge open niche, but it was really asking for help, being vulnerable, asking questions, and being open. And that was one of the things that I credit our success to, is that, you know, we kind of went into it with a very, very elementary way of thinking.

Callan Harrington  11:55

How did you build that network within the industry? Was that just through cold outreach on LinkedIn? Cold outreach through emails? How did you gain that knowledge and build that network?

Justin Ihnken  12:05

Basically, we approached it head on. Walked in the front door, like, "Okay, someone is going to tell me how this works." So we started reaching out to people at universities. We started reaching out to people in government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs that deal with the drug trade. You know, "How does this work?" Really started just, like, reading, like, "What is a pharmaceutical laboratory?" I’d been in one laboratory, and it was in seventh grade, and I dissected a frog. That is all I’d ever seen in a laboratory, and now I have to build one. And in that way of thinking, you’re like, "I should probably see what laboratories look like." And then you start reaching out to people. You start contacting people. So LinkedIn was a good portion of it. You find very creative ways. Oh, man. You start calling out the laboratories, pretending that you’re a pharmaceutical manufacturer, asking them if they could do certain types of testing, or asking them if they do variations of certain types of testing. And you end up just listing out these abbreviations of testing methods and processes that you don’t even know what they mean. And eventually labs say, "No, no, no, we can’t do that, but we could do this." You say, "I’m really sorry, Callan, but you don’t mind. Maybe I’m not so familiar with how that one works?" And then they start kind of just telling you how this process works. And you know what level of quality they have to adhere to. And, you know, you start listing, "Oh, we have to meet FDA requirements. And do you guys offer FDA requirements?" And, "No, we offer EU GMP requirements, and that’s the level of quality." You know, "Forgive me. As you can tell by my accent, I’m American. I just moved to Europe. How does this EU GMP thing work?" And they just start telling you, and they’re equally as passionate about the industry as you are to learn about it. So it’s like a match made. You end up spending an hour and a half on the phone with the salesperson from a laboratory.

Callan Harrington  13:36

It is amazing how much you can learn from secret shopping. Just in general...

Justin Ihnken  13:41

You have to find a way in, and there’s always going to be a way in, and that’s kind of imperative to starting a startup. You have to be scrappy. You have to be resourceful.

Callan Harrington  13:47

Do you have any other examples of some of those scrappy, resourceful types of things that you did, whether it was from a hiring perspective, sales perspective, whatever that might be? I’m just super curious.

Justin Ihnken  13:56

Yeah, I got a ton of them. There’s so many ways of being resourceful. And there’s probably an example I can give for everyone. I mean, think about just HR—human resources, right? When you go to hire someone, you need to attract talent. And I think there’s kind of this unspoken assumption that company cars are meant for the elite of the elite hires, like the C-suite executives. They are the ones that get company cars, and they get really nice cars. And you realize, like, "Okay, so you’re telling me, if I need to attract this person to come work for me, and they are a C-level executive working in a pharmaceutical company making $200,000 a year..." You say, "Okay, I can’t compete with that, but I can pay them $150,000, maybe $140,000, but at that point you say, 'Okay, well, I can’t really give you this salary you’re looking for, XYZ candidate. However, what I can give you is this salary plus a company car.' And I’m gonna give you a really nice car. A really nice car, $1,000 a month all in. I’m gonna pay for your gas. I’m gonna pay for your tolls. I’m gonna pay for new tires, insurance, and the lease payment." And they’re like, "You’d really do that for me?" And you’re like, "Yeah, your salary just went up by $12,000 a year," and it’s just so well received. The net benefit seems like they’re making a million dollars a year because you get them this brand new car. And no big-box employer, no big pharma company, no bank is ever like, "Hey, I’m gonna take you window shopping. You’re gonna pick out whatever car you want." And you’re like, "You’re a scientist. You’re not gonna go get a Ferrari. I know this, but what you will do is get a fully loaded Volvo wagon." And you’re like, "No offense. The car’s still like $80,000, but you’re like, 'I can lease this car, yeah,' and fundamentally, it’s gonna be cheaper to get her, him, whoever they are, a brand new car, than it is to pay them an extra $50,000 a year." And I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but, like, that’s been like an HR hack. I mean, it’s everything, right? You know, I always negotiate. When I think about the process of buying something, it’s like, well, if you want something really badly, but you know you can’t afford it, you have to negotiate. There’s no other way. You become resourceful. This is something that I think is so missed amongst entrepreneurs, and something that is such a core, core, core element of success is finding your internal champion on the side of a service provider, an investor, a customer. When you have that—I call them an internal champion—it’s that person that’s gonna then drive your entire progression through the ranks to end up creating value for you. And I think that’s something that most entrepreneurs really need to find. When you can find them, they’re like an extension of your business, because they’re gonna actually play the role of hero for you when you don’t have the resources to hire the salesperson or the service provider, who’s an IT consultant, or you don’t have resources to hire a full-time IT manager, an IT specialist, they’re the ones that are going to be like, "You know what? Give me a call if you have anything. I won’t bill you for it." That’s super valuable. You have to be scrappy. You have to do that. Resourcefulness is imperative.

Callan Harrington  17:00

I think that’s such great advice. You can’t predict, especially in a service business, like, when are things going to go great and when are things not going to go great? It’s so, so, so difficult to predict. For you guys, what was the turning point?

Justin Ihnken  17:14

There’s definitely a turning point. So we started the company. The headquarters was placed about two hours away from where I was living, from my home. You’ve got to be on site. If you’re building something physically, the founders need to be present. It’s just the way it is. I remember vividly a turning point when we had just raised capital. And I’ll park that thought there and kind of paint a picture. We were bootstrapping the business. We had raised some friends and family money, and there was a six-month period where we were on site every day, traveling. My co-founder and I traveled two hours one way for, I’d say, the first two months, three months, because we decided on a location where we’re going to be. We were meeting with engineers every day, and at some point, we were booking so many meetings that we couldn’t actually find enough time to go all the way back home, sleep, and then go all the way back to the site in the morning. So what we did is we rented an office that was attached to the site that we were building on, and we secretly didn’t tell any employees, but we had them put a shower in one of the closets, and we were using one of the conference rooms as a bedroom. And I say this because resourcefulness is saying, "Well, I can actually avoid the cost of travel, the time it takes to travel, just the overall bandwidth," then we raised capital. And we kind of said, "So do we keep sleeping in the conference room?" Because I didn’t, and it was like this turning point, like, well, maybe we should just get a small flat in the city, and we could just walk to work. I was like, "All right, cool. Let’s do that." And I think that was a turning point. It felt like, "Okay, now this is real." This had become a viable business, and that was a big turning point for me. And I think that every entrepreneur can relate to those turning points.

Callan Harrington  18:57

This might be a spicy hot take here. At a founder dinner that we hosted a couple of weeks back, this was the hottest debate—all tech companies, various stages, from pre-seed to Series B, Series C—and for the founders that were in the later stages, and they were giving advice on the question of, should you build your company from the beginning remotely, or should you build it on-site, in-office? And overwhelmingly, the later-stage founders said, "If I could do it all over again, I would do it in person, and I would ride that as much as I absolutely possibly could." Yeah, now so many of them are like, you know, "It’s post-COVID. I can’t unwind this because so many people are remote right now." I’d love to get your opinion on that.

Justin Ihnken  19:42

Well, I think it’s tough. I think with regard to location for starting a company, I think my answer still stays pretty fixed in that the way that you build a company is really on more than anything—at least as I see it—culture. As an employee, you’re only going to be as bought in as the founders are. You’re only gonna be as enthusiastic about the business as your founders or your leaders or your executives are. And I think we live in a world now where people can and are very often very disconnected or disjointed from whether it’s your development staff or whether it’s your sales team. Like, there’s something to be said about a founder just having a beer on a Friday afternoon with the sales team after they wind down for the day. Like, that says so much about the founder. It says so much about it. And you see that as direct ROI from those employees, because they’re the ones that are checking their email on the weekends, because they see that you send out emails on the weekends. Monday morning, when they come in, it’s a direct correlation of their buy-in. And I think, you know, early on, if you don’t have the resources to drive forward that growth by almost example-led buy-in, it’s difficult. It’s really difficult. So I’ll always say, from everything I’ve experienced and gone through, having been an entrepreneur for the last, you know, five or so years now, it’s if I could do it all over again, I’d do it the same way I did. It’s: Be on-site, be present. Be aware of what’s going on, because employees at an early-stage company, through and through, will always ask, "So hey, have you talked to Justin? Hey, have you talked to so-and-so?" And if they say, "No," it’s almost like, so does anyone know what you’re doing? Because it’s almost you have to be over-emphatic about what it is you’re doing, what you’re working on, how it’s going—obviously, with a degree of reason. Obviously, you’re not going to let your lower-level employees in on funding meetings. But at some point, right, you have to take the perspective of like, you know, they want to know what’s going on to feel like they’re a part of this. And I think that’s super important.

Callan Harrington  21:36

It’s something I’ve personally kind of debated as we’re looking to expand. And the challenge that I have is, how do you get specialized talent, or do you develop that internally? Because there’s some areas where it’s almost like to get that unique experience, you have to go remote a lot of times. I’ve trained this from scratch, but it’s something that’s been on my mind personally. 

Justin Ihnken  21:56

I have cautiously relocated a few folks when I’ve come across someone who is a phenomenal candidate that I don’t believe our success is as possible without them, and then it is with them. Then I will often debate the relocation package. Look, if you move across the world or across the country for a job, it’s all you think about. It’s the reason why you’re there. You wake up every morning saying, "I moved to location X." And then the following words are, "This company." If you could find your employees that are in your city, right here, right now, wake up every morning saying, "I live here for this company," they’re so valuable to the company. So you’re getting such a buy-in that you can’t get locally. So sometimes the relocation works, but it is difficult, right? Hiring is super hard, and I’m a pretty big believer in pretty tough hiring processes. I’ve been burned too many times by hiring the wrong people, and it ends up really coming back to bite you, because, you know, look, you hire someone that you really like, you hire someone you think would be a good fit, you hire someone that in the moment, but they don’t end up fitting out in the long run. But that’s to say, like, there is a time and a place in a startup’s existence where certain types of profiles of humans are needed along the way. And this sounds very narcissistic, but it’s like there are people that are very good at developing, incredibly good at developing. That person, fundamentally, is not wired to commercialize. They just don’t understand it. It’s a different language to them, and vice versa, right? So it’s very hard to find those well-rounded, all-around-they’re-good-at-everything profiles, because being good at everything means kind of being okay at a lot of things, right? But, yeah, it’s tough.

Callan Harrington  23:30

You have all those generalists in the beginning, and then as you grow and scale, you have that need for deeper specialists. So on that note, you guys grew, you scaled this. You exited the company. When you exited the company, what was that like for you personally?

Justin Ihnken  23:45

You’re really, really hitting a heartstring here. Picture this. I’m sitting on the floor. My box of things are packed, and there are a bunch of tears shed. It’s like, it’s your child, it’s everything you have. It’s everything you put your blood, sweat, and tears into. And, you know, yeah, sitting on the floor and crying. It’s like, man, like everything you ever do, every waking moment you’re thinking about this thing, and then you have to hand it off and hope that the person you hand it off to does right by it and right by these employees that you convinced to quit their jobs and come work for you. I had one or two employees, you know, single mothers with four kids, who are like, "This is a huge risk for me, but I believe in this." And you’re like, "I will not let you down." You’re like, "Well, see you guys later." And it’s scary. It’s super scary, right? So it was tough. It was super tough. And again, I’m not one to really do things like half and half. So actually, I stepped off the board completely. I’m still one of the largest vested shareholders. Now the private equity fund stepped in. I definitely look back at that and say, well, on behalf of this company, I don’t have what it takes to get it to the next level. And I think that’s kind of a reflection that I’ve spoken to a lot of people about and said, "What do I do here?" It’s like a founder syndrome, where they don’t want to let go, but sometimes letting go is the best opportunity for the company to really fly. And it was a healthy exercise. It helped me really appreciate all the hard work that had gone on and all of the incredible work that all the people that we’ve hired and still work there do. So in that regard, it was, it was really tough.

Callan Harrington  25:11

Yeah, it’s interesting. Because, like, that’s one of the more common answers that comes up. We all think of the journey of like, okay, I want to get to an exit. The exit is like the crowning achievement. Yeah. And once you’re at the exit, it’s...so many don’t really realize what that’s actually going to feel like.

Justin Ihnken  25:26

Yeah, you feel lost a little bit. You’re like, "I’m going to retire. This is terrible. I don’t want to do this." I think I spent about six weeks saying, "Nope, I can’t do nothing. This is terrible. I have to do something." I was fortunate enough to join my next project, which I’m part of now.

Callan Harrington  25:43

So let’s talk about that. So you went from a services business to a SaaS business. Yeah. What have been the biggest surprises that have hit you in the difference between the two businesses?

Justin Ihnken  25:52

Oh, man. So first off, software is a lot more fun than pharmaceuticals. It’s a lot more fast-moving. There are way fewer regulations. The age demographic tends to be a little bit more rowdy, as opposed to the average age in pharmaceuticals. When you start getting to these expertise levels, it can be, you know, mid-50s. And I was 26 when I started the company. But now being part of something that’s definitely a way younger crowd, younger group, everyone kind of wants to stick around the office and hang out and, you know, enjoys playing ping pong and enjoys having fun, and they don’t want to go out together and have fun together. So I think that’s kind of cool, but I think it’s been a surprise around how fast you can move. That’s been something I struggled with for a while in the last company. But, you know, from a SaaS perspective, it’s a different business model, going from a very much services and less recurring revenue, less fast-moving pace company. It’s definitely different. I’m back in the FinTech space, so it does hit home, and there are a lot of parallels with my former career in finance and working as a trader.

Callan Harrington  26:53

Having gone through this process before, is there anything that you’re doing much, much, much earlier when you’re starting this company as a result of what you learned at the first one? Maybe something you wish you would have done earlier in the first one that you’re making sure that you do in this one.

Justin Ihnken  27:08

Yeah, I think this is an all-around answer that everyone always gives. And hire your expertise now. Hire your most important humans now. Get them in now because you, as the entrepreneur, the founder, are generally the most educated in one vertical, and you know nothing about all of the other verticals. Or you know a little bit about all of the verticals, right? You either are a subject matter expert, you know a lot about one thing, and then you know hardly anything about everything else, or you know a little bit—enough to be dangerous—about everything, but you’re not an expert at anything. And I think one of the misconceptions is actually, "Let me try and figure it all out myself, over and over and over again. I’m going to just pound the pavement. I’m going to figure this all out. I’m going to find the answers. I’m going to uncover, I’m going to turn over every rock to figure out how to do this," when, in reality, why don’t you just find someone that’s done this? Why don’t you bring in the person that he or she or they know exactly what to do, how to do it, and better yet, the return on investment of having that person join ends up actually being way more than what you think, because they’re answering questions that you didn’t even know to ask. And I think that’s this misconception. It’s like, "Well, I don’t need to hire this person yet." It’s like, "Well, I’m a big believer in the theory that your five best employees will hire your next 50, and those next 50 are direct copies of the person that you hired. And if you hired an expert who knows exactly what they’re doing, you’re going to get 50 more experts that know exactly what they’re doing." And I’m a huge believer in hiring the expertise first, and that’s what I did here. I brought in a finance director who runs part of the entire finance business that we have. I brought in a Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Operations Officer, that really run each of their individual businesses. And we recently went through an acquisition early in the year, so it’s afforded me a lot more time to go through the integrations of that business and now hand some of that over to the finance director. And that, to me, has been a learning that was well-received because I spent eight months trying to figure it all out myself.

Callan Harrington  29:13

So if I’m playing that back a little bit here, what I’m hearing you say is that—so let’s use the pharmaceutical example—you mentioned you didn’t have pharmaceutical experience. And would that be hiring senior-level people from the industry first, or just somebody that can come in at a very senior level that knows how to run the operation?

Justin Ihnken  29:32

Once you get a handle on how the org structure works and how this beast kind of operates, then you identify those humans, that individual profile that you’re going to then say, "Look, I need you to take a chance on me, and I have a great equity package for you. I’m going to give you everything I can." But that person leaves their role at a very, very, very well-known pharmaceutical company, and having done this for 15 years. COVID is going to step into these shoes and say, "Get out of my way. I got this." And then they just steamroll everything that needs to get done. And if I look back on it now, hiring those people earlier would have probably allowed us to commercialize almost a year sooner, because you don’t know you’re making the wrong decision until you’ve made it, and you don’t know to ask the right questions until you gave the wrong answer. And at that point, those individuals fundamentally changed the trajectory of the company, and you start growing at exponential rates. Because when you start having those questions asked sooner and right after questions asked, it’s given the right answer, you just start moving faster and faster and faster, and those people end up taking on more responsibility. But then again, they start doing things that you didn’t even ask them to do, because they’re like, "Well, of course you have to do X, Y, and Z." I don’t know if it’s Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who said, "You know, I’m not hiring people so I could tell them what to do. I’m going to hire them so they could tell me what to do." And I can’t find a better example than from the pharmaceutical business or any business that you don’t know inside and out that you need to be able to step aside, put your pride aside, and say, "Look, you run this. This is your business. I trust you." Obviously, you go through a very robust recruiting process and a lot of career profiling and personality profiling to make sure they are the right fit. As an entrepreneur or founder, you have to be good at citing talent and ultimately capitalizing on resources. So if you could see that someone is going to be a good fit, sometimes it’s great to step in front of that before they even know that they’ll be a good fit, and say, "Hey, I would love for you to step into this role, because I believe it’s a great fit for you." Like my finance director now, he’ll go on to be our CFO. Give me these incredible people. And I knew, as soon as I knew the role was going to come out, I started seven months prior, having conversations with them and saying, "Hey, I think you should step down from your high-profile job to come do this because of what it’s going to become in the future, but I know you’re already going to be a good fit for the future role and the present role." So I think in that case, you really have to identify talent early.

Callan Harrington  31:57

He’s got my wheels turning, personally, because this is a debate that I personally have because I came from the SaaS. My whole career has been in SaaS, a little bit in services, but very little. And now I have a consulting company, and I’ve been debating, do I bring on a junior hire as we continue to grow this, or do I try to bring somebody that has been in a consulting company, knows the consulting process, from the delivery to the project management to tracking hours and all those different things? I’ve leaned on the side of the junior people, but what I’m hearing you say is try to get that senior person with industry experience as soon as possible, 100%.

Justin Ihnken  32:37

And I’ll tell you why. You’re not just hiring them. They are accepting your challenge. You are not just saying, "Oh, here you go. Here’s a role," and they’re going to be a soldier. No, they’re saying, "Bring it on. Let me add this. I want to fight this challenge. I’m going to win." That person is never going to be your junior. That person is going to be your front-of-the-line, best fighter. And it’s not just you saying, "Hey, can you come help me?" It’s them saying, "Get out of the way. I’m going to help you." And that’s this mindset where it’s a two-way conversation with a junior employee. It’s very much like, "Hey, I need this. I need this. I need this, and this done." But when you soon realize that, like, okay, that person is forever going to report to you. That person is forever going to ask you, "Hey, Callan, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? How should I go about doing these things?" And until that person really gets submerged in their role and responsibility, they’re always going to be doing work on your behalf. But when you hire the senior profile, and you provide a mandate, you provide clear KPIs and management instructions to that person and say, "These are your objectives. Do you think you’re capable of meeting these or exceeding these objectives?" They’re either going to say yes or no, and if you find the right profile, that person is going to say, "Come on. Let me go. Let me run, coach. Put me in. I got this." And that person, if the hiring process is done correctly, will be not just a one plus one equals two, but a one plus one equals 10 in the relationship with regard to the growth of your company.

Callan Harrington  34:11

Is this a co-founder, or is this an executive that you’re just giving?

Justin Ihnken  34:15

You can give them a GM role, you can give them a VP role, you can give them a director-level role, but it ends up being that you get an exponential return on your investment. If you pay someone 80K to be a junior, but you pay 160K a year to be a director, that’s not going to be that one does twice as much value as the other. The senior role is going to put out 5X value because they know exactly what they’re doing. And then when they begin to get enough momentum, you give them the mandate to go hire their own junior, and now you have a whole team that’s running itself. This is like the whole ecosystem of building out scalable organizations. You can only do so much for so long before you’re spread too thin, and the work you’re putting forward is just subpar. And I think that’s something that I’ve told so many friends of mine who have companies that say, you know, "I’m doing 8 million, 10 million a year in rev, and we’re bringing on new clients and stuff. But it’s like, it’s becoming so heavy," and like, "You need to hire a CEO." They’re like, "What? I am the CEO." And I was like, "Yeah, but you’re also the creative director, you’re also the visionary, and you’re also driving forward everything that is your company. Why don’t you bring a CEO that can run the day-to-day business, be responsible for taking communication with your marketing team, your sales team, making sure that the product is developing at the rate and meeting the product roadmap, and you can continue to be the visionary. You can continue to add the value to those key accounts, those key clients that you’re working with. But then you also create this separate arm of business development, because you can develop your business like you’ve always been, but now you have someone that’s running everything behind the scenes." I mean, with the right mandates, I would always hire the senior. Always.

Callan Harrington  35:54

Well, that gives me a ton to think about personally. So I love it. I think it’s a very good perspective. So I guess to ask you the question, you’re back, you’re doing this again. How have you needed to evolve personally to be the right CEO for this company?

Justin Ihnken  36:09

You lose track of how fast you move. And what I mean by that is, companies move so quickly, but founders always complain that we’re not going fast enough. And I think when you have this mindset as an entrepreneur, you always want to keep going and going. I think you only have so many decisions that you can make every single day that contribute to the value creation, right? So when I think about what I’m doing differently now than I did, it’s there’s no decision that gets made in this company that is going to sink the ship that doesn’t come across my desk. The decisions that are made in this company that could potentially kill it if they’re made incorrectly are going to come across my desk. All the mandates have been given. The commercial heads know what they need to do. The directors’ roles know what they need to do. The product team knows what they need to do. There are individual people running that. They all provide very regular and frequent updates on how we’re doing, timelines, KPIs. There is no decision that can be made without me involved that could potentially sink the ship because it has to be made by me. And for that way of thinking, it’s like, well, you kind of step back a little bit. You say, "Look, let the teams run themselves. They got this. You put these people in that team." So I think one of the things I was really involved in a lot with in former startups is like, having a finger on the pulse all the time. And I think that that’s great to a certain extent, because you could start to erode the trust level that you have between you and your employees, because they think, like, "Why is he here?" Not that I don’t want him here, but it’s like, "Does he not trust me? Am I not doing a good job?" And you’re like, every now and then, it’s nice to have a CEO in a product meeting, and everyone kind of sits up straight and says, "Oh, wow, what is Justin doing here?" But it’s that level of inspiring confidence and inspiring, you know, trust that you have with people. To give your answer in a well-rounded but exhaustive response is that I think I’m kind of taking a little bit more of a back seat by putting the right people in place and taking a little bit, like, "Don’t be such a backseat driver when you put someone else in the driver’s seat to drive that part of the business forward." I think that’s probably one of them. Focus a little bit more on, like, work-life balance and being present in my personal life a bit more, because when you’re always plugged into the business, you forget how fast you are moving. And in that sense, it can sometimes be a little deflating that you think you’re not moving faster when in reality you are. Your reality. You’re only looking at you. And I think that that’s a…yeah, it’s not a great mind state to be in.

Callan Harrington  38:27

Which is so, so, so, so difficult to do. So with that, Justin, you know, last question I got for you is, if you could have a conversation with your younger self—age totally up to you—what would that conversation be? What advice would you give them?

Justin Ihnken  38:42

Just sell. Just do it. You’re never going to be ready. It’s never going to be perfect. Just go. And I mean, you’re at a point where, like, you’re never going to be in a position where it’s exactly the way you want it, and you’re always going to iterate. So the company that you have today is going to be nothing like it is a year from now. Just go. No decision and no action is the worst decision or the worst action, because taking a decision can sometimes lead to an outcome you didn’t expect that actually turns out better. I would say to my younger self, just take a decision. There’s no decision you’re making that’s going to sink the ship, and so long as those decisions are pushed, take the decisions now that don’t run the risk of letting all the cards fall, because right, there’s so much that’s always on the line. There’s so many things that you think are so important and so material and so explicitly mandatory that in a year from now, you’re like, "Wow, I took that so seriously." And I think it’s also a mindset of like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? Do you become an entrepreneur because you want to spend more time doing personal life and personal things? Like, well, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. If you’re doing this because you’re absolutely passionate about doing something, you can wake up every day and say, "I love what I do, but also I’m not doing it for the money." If I was doing it for the money, man, I want to say to my corporate job 100%, I can look back and say that now. But currently, you would tell younger me like, don’t take things so seriously. No decision is a bad decision, and taking no decision at all is the worst decision. I think too many people worry about, "I don’t know if I could start a company. I don’t know if I could do that. It’s too much risk. It’s too scary." In five years from now, you look back and say, "Wow, what if I did do that? What if I did have the ability to create something?" So I think oftentimes people misunderstand what risk is. Entrepreneurs and founders of companies, all we do every day is analyze risk. I mean, I don’t think it’s risky being an entrepreneur. I think it’s risky quitting my job. The only thing I’m risking is a salary. But if you have savings, or you have the ability to say, "Look, I can work on something," what’s the risk? You planned this, you saved your money, you literally supported yourself to get to a certain point. If you can’t do that, then yes, of course it’s a risk. You can’t just quit your job, quit your job cold turkey, but take the risks. Go for it. Like, there’s nothing worse that you can do than not giving yourself the opportunity to succeed.

Callan Harrington  41:11

You know, you brought up the decision-making, and I think that’s so, so true, and something that I definitely made the mistake of. And Jeff Bezos calls it the two-way doors and the one-way doors. Yeah. A two-way door is one where you can come back from, and those decisions make quickly. The one-way door, those ones that you can’t come back from, once you go down there, take some time, think that one through more before you make that decision. But the speed of which the company will go will go as fast as the decision-making is able to happen. So I love that advice. I think that’s excellent.

Justin Ihnken  41:41

There’s so many moving pieces in the puzzle that you’re never going to get them all right. You’re never going to just stumble upon a breakthrough. We used to always say, yeah, everything good happens on Fridays, because Monday through Thursday is shit. And that’s kind of it, right? Like you have the highest of highs, you have the lowest of lows. But there’s a reason why you do what you do, and there’s a reason why you’re kind of getting up, and there’s going to be super lows, but the highs are that adrenaline rush. And I think that other entrepreneurs can assimilate with that, but the young entrepreneur of the world that’s listening to this, it’s like, there’s really no bad decision, and the only risk that you’re taking is a life full of regret, and I can tell you that I had no business, no business, going into the pharmaceutical industry. I had no business leaving my corporate job, and it was the greatest decision I ever made. It was life-changing. I’m not the smartest guy. I’m not coming up with breakthrough ideas, but when you can see that there’s an opportunity. I mean, don’t deny yourself the opportunity to give it a good shot. No doesn’t mean no. It just means not now, and find another way to say yes. That’s just like all you can really lean on sometimes, and eventually you will have your breakthroughs. Just keep going, put your head down, go. You got this. I was listening to podcasts. They said, you know, 0.7% of startups in America are funded or VC backed, and there are over a million newly registered companies made in America every year. So to put it in perspective, how many of those companies start with no capital? They start bootstrapped, they start on the weekends, they start with their friends, they start working late hours because they have a normal full-time job. I mean, if that can happen, then you can do it. Everyone can do it. Anybody can start a company.

Callan Harrington  43:28

100%. Justin, this has been a blast, man. I loved hearing these in-depth stories and how that impacted you. Man, thanks for coming on today.

Justin Ihnken  43:38

I love this. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. I’m a big fan of the show, so can’t wait to continue being an avid listener.

Callan Harrington  43:44

I love it. I appreciate that. I hope you enjoyed Justin and I's conversation. I love talking through Justin's approach to hiring experienced people early, and how he was also resourceful in creating a package to get them in the door. If you want to learn more about Justin, you could find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you could find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I’ll see you next week.