The Soup is Getting Cold with Mark Lachance - Blitzscaling Expert - Issue 9
How to stack the odds of success in your favour with the author of The Lucky Formula
Mark Lachance is a Canadian serial entrepreneur and investor with a deep understanding of blitzscaling companies. Mark is the CEO and lead investor of Maxy Media Inc., one of the largest TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and Google Display Network performance marketing agencies in the world. He is the author of The Lucky Formula.
Why Read: Mark’s story is in many ways the ‘classic’ entrepreneur’s journey filled with ups and downs. The personal toll of entrepreneurship is increasingly documented with numerous businesspeople highlighting the ‘loneliness at the top’ and the challenges of building businesses on your relationships and mental health. What Mark shows us though is that one of the hidden secrets of business: consistency and resilience. How to take the inevitable setbacks and knocks in your stride, and also how to stack the odds in your favour so that whatever business you are in, you are more likely to succeed.
Tell us about your book?
The book is called The Lucky Formula and it's how to stack the odds in your favour, and cash in on success. That’s the premise of the book - action equals luck.
The book starts out with a crushing defeat I had.
In 2006 I had an exit from one of my companies, and I had a sizable exit at the time. I was sitting on several million dollars. And in my mind, my next one was going to be the BIG one, right.
I was pitched the opportunity to invest in a project. I basically made some large real estate investments. The book talks about it in detail about how I kind of went into it blindfolded; sort of airy, greedy, you know, looking at the dollar signs and not looking at all the other negative signs. I got crushed and I lost everything.
I was actually in London at the time, and I was literally throwing paper aeroplanes back and forth with a Sotheby's representatives.
And my project went under and there was about $100,000 in fees and that was it. Those were my last pennies. I was bankrupt. I had to dig my way out. The book talks about that.
What did you learn from that bankruptcy experience?
I learned how to be consistent, because if you're not consistent, you get this down and up and down, so I learned over time consistency - and consistency is key.
I also learnt how your mindset, through personal development like meditation, helps you focus and helps you keep calm and in times of distress helps you understand that you are a great person, or you are a fearless leader; you are an amazing individual.
Focusing your brain on how great a person you are or acknowledging the great things you've done in the past, sort of refocuses your brain on your targets for your future.
And then, action is also about how you leverage your skill sets.
And those skills helped you understand how to grow businesses?
To grow a large company, you have got to stay in your lane and do what you do best, because then you're going to thrive. So that's part of action, and then leveraging other people to do what they do best, because if they're doing what they do best, then you know your company is going to run like a well-oiled machine.
I understand how to how to put the right people in the right spaces; I can dominate any industry, because I understand that if you get the best people in their lanes and you put them in the right place, then the company will thrive regardless of if I'm an expert or not.
You put all of those formulas or factors into play, and then you're stacking the odds in your favour and then things just happen.
Where do you start?
So how do you do it? You do it little-by-little, you do it step-by-step.
You do it one by one. And over time, little-by-little becomes more and more. You start small and you build new. So it starts with mastering your internal self, and then adding external elements.
You talk about Extreme Ownership in the book?
That’s from a book by Jocko Willink Navy Seal called Extreme Ownership.
So if you if you're practising ‘extreme ownership’ in your business you understand that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. And so, internally in our company, for example, we've gone from pretty much zero to 100. Literally two years ago we had three employees and now we're over 100 okay, right; our next target is to be 500.
We're putting people in place that understand that extreme ownership is key - so it's always the leader’s fault, never the team's fault.
So you look for those types of personality when you interview?
Well for our first round of Blitzscaling, we hired the smartest people possible. We have a huge advantage in Montreal, where Maxy Media is based, for that.
There's two huge anglophone English-only Universities here. Students come from all over the world. But the kids that are graduating don't have a prayer of getting a job at big corporations because in their infinite wisdom the Quebec government won't allow it. They need you to speak French. These kids don't speak French.
So we're taking advantage of that opportunity because we have hired the smartest people – some with MBAs - for salaries that you know you would probably pay in London three times the price for.
So in the beginning we looked for the smartest person possible with a positive attitude - somebody that we felt that could develop into a leader.
How do you how do you feel the entrepreneurial landscape has changed in the last 15 years or so?
I have to say there's more opportunity today, I believe. You don't need a big budget, like you used to, to get started. Let's say you're an intelligent, hardworking, go getter. I think you can make things happen pretty easily and pretty quickly, in my view.
Whereas, let's say I wanted to be in the payments industry in the mid 1990s. It took a heck of a lot more money and more legwork and more sweat, I would say, to get a thing off the ground.
Whereas today, there's so many opportunities to go out and generate leads and you get people to work on commission versus paying salaries and I think it's an easier opportunity today to be an entrepreneur than it was 20-30 years ago.
So what, what advice would you give to anybody that was thinking of taking the plunge?
A British gentleman Richard Koch wrote a great book called The Star Principle and I would say go work for a company that is an amazing business.
I would say find the star businesses and get the book. A star business is basically defined as a business that's growing by 30% a year. Find the star business in the industry you want to be in and work for it. Learn everything you can imagine off them.
Businesses that grow that quickly give everyone more opportunities – you could be running divisions or more very quickly, while people that work in other corporations would be just sweeping the floors. So finding the star business is the point.
Failure is a huge part of building a company and you're gonna make mistakes you're going to step on landmines, but as long as you win 51% of the time you'll be able to succeed.
It was a pleasure to appear on Sue Dyer's Lead with Trust podcast recently talking about growing up in West Wales and my career arc from journalism, PR, content marketing, and adtech, as well as scaling digital businesses. Check it now on Apple or Spotify.
You can read The Soup is Getting Cold interview with Sue, here.
About The Soup is Getting Cold
A monthly newsletter featuring exclusive interviews with experts in business, media, marketing and the creative industries, written and published by me, Dale Lovell, each month.
I conceived and launched this newsletter as a fun project in the depths of the UK winter lockdown 2020/21.
In less than a generation the technology we use on a daily basis has transformed our lives. Our working lives are now largely unrecognisable from what they were a generation ago.
And these changes ring ever more true for those working in the creative, publishing and marketing industries: those employed in production, advertising, marketing and media – working at the sharp edge of change, launching and grappling with innovative technology and continued, relentless disruption.
To work in these industries in the 21st century is to be disruptor and disrupted; to be constantly challenged while constantly challenging. I want to highlight that through these interviews.
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