I didn't wait till I was done to start spending time with my children.

[03:18]

"So, one of the decisions that I made early on was I had we started our family young and like you now I know you take your girls with you on several of your trips. I made it a point to take my kids with me on several of my business trips."

[06:50]

"We have formal family meetings now, at least once a year, sometimes twice, where we talk about the things that we value, the integrity, the being humble, sharing good ideas, and we make sure that those become paramount in our own family."

[15:05]

"It would have been a you know much better return and much better leverage return, but when we finally sold the business our minority investors, those two got a 28 X on their investment."

Full transcript

Um I'm excited to have uh Todd here with us today from Ridgeline Capital Group. I'm just going to introduce him real quick and we're going to go through some fireside chat questions. Um the fun of being able to do this is that I enjoy getting to know Todd more. Um so I just ask questions that I I'm obviously curious about and I think all of you will learn a lot about as well.

A little bit on Todd is that he was the co-founder of Express Locations and T-Mobile retailer. He grew it from 0 to 150-plus locations with 1,400 employees, $600 in revenue, and they were the second largest T-Mobile retailer before they sold the business in 2017. Before that, he was a co-founder in Cellular One, uh Western Cellular, as well as one other um cellular platform company that ended up getting bought out. Um he also personally has traveled over 2.5 million miles with Delta.

He's been to all 50 states. He's been to 67 countries. Um some of his favorite books include The Psychology of Money, uh The Good Life, and a book called From Strength to Strength. Um he is focused on health. He has a concierge doctor he sees. Um he likes the book called Outlive by Peter Attia, which has been recommended to me by at least 30 people.

Uh and also the podcast called the Huberman Lab, which I know many of you are familiar with already. Um he is now the head of his own single family office, which he runs with his with his family on the team called Ridgeline Capital Group, a single family office. And we're excited to have you here today, Todd. Would you add anything else about your bio?

Thanks, Richard. Pleasure to be here. Uh no, I think that pretty much hits it. I had the good fortune of being involved in the wireless business from the very beginning, from the mid-80s. And and because of the some key people that I met during that time, I had the confidence to work on the corporate side for about 20 years and then in my mid-40s decided to do it myself.

And that's when I struck out to become an entrepreneur for the first time. Okay, great. Um, out of all the people that we've interviewed it's I I like to talk about whether you worked smart or worked hard or was it both. Can you comment on that? Like how much of your success was self-improvement uh or just working 18 hours a day?

Can you comment on that, Trent? Yeah, I I'm quick to say I'm not the smartest guy in the room for sure. Uh I I'm I'm educated at a state university, Utah State University, uh in Logan, Utah. Uh great great school and great place to get an education, but that's not necessarily Harvard Business School or anything like that.

But what I found was that working smart for me meant surrounding myself with great people. Uh my early decisions to uh the people that I hired on my team, the people that I worked for, who were very successful entrepreneurs in the wireless business, taught me a lot. So, I became more of a smart worker uh from that standpoint, not from the book smarts. And then really it took a uh a decision to sacrifice.

You talked about travel. Obviously, one of the things that you sacrifice when you you build a business. In our case, we built it over about eight years and we did it in 10 states. We had the 1400 employees you talked about. Took a lot of travel. So, one of the decisions that I made early on was uh I had we started our family young and uh like you now I know you you take your your girls with you on several of your trips.

I made it a point to take my kids with me on several of my business trips. Uh we have five children, which now has turned into 17 grandchildren, which is amazing. And we love this stage in life, but it was really a foundational piece of decision for us uh early on to include them in what we were doing. Okay, great.

So, I think you know, many people here in the team have heard oh you know, you have to build a good team And I say, okay, well, I'm trying to do that. What what's counterintuitive about you building your great team? Cuz most people here haven't scaled to 150 locations or 600 million in revenues. What's like a counter counterintuitive thing about building a team that maybe you could share with everybody?

I noted one of the things that Dan talked about was this, you know, the emphasis on simplicity. And we just knew I knew that my first decision when I started my business was to hire and to to find my two best partners that I could find. And I found guys who had financial skills I didn't have and operating skills that I didn't have. And the three of us made a great combination to be successful.

So, maybe not counterintuitive, but it was more so the decision to focus on the the skills and the the strengths that we had individually and that those would be complementary to each other. And one of the things that I I made a decision early on that even though I controlled the majority of the business, and it was, you know, my idea to start the business, I let them acquire some of the equity if they wanted to. They could when they came into the business, they could kind of buy into some equity. I'd give them sweat equity.

But I gave rather than me controlling all the decisions, uh I gave equal decision-making power to the all three of us. So, that it wasn't necessarily me running the the uh the boat all the time. Uh that that the three of us, even though they had much less part of the business, had equal share in the say. Okay.

Great. And then, um with your family and your kids now helping run the family office, what are the three to five kind of mental models or strategies or things that you really try to drill into them so that they do a great job and they learn from everything you've learned? Well, you know, this I really relate the success that I've had in my business based on relationships. And so, the first thing we did when we started our family office up was I talked to my two older sons, who are now in their late 30s, and said, that best thing we can do is continue the relationships, you know, that I've established and you're going to have an in in their world relationships that will lead to off-market deals in our case, right?

The The The deals that are shopped to a lot of people, we don't necessarily find those interesting. The deals that are off-market in private conversations with other small family offices, uh those become very interesting. So, number one, we focused on relationships. Secondly, uh we really take a uh a win-win attitude. We're not out for the the maximum return.

We're not out to make this the uh you know, the the most incredible investing family office. We're out to have a great experience and have above-average returns. Uh the quality of life is really important for for me and now for my sons and for our family. A- And then lastly, I would say that one of the first things we did is we set up a family mission, vision, and values, just like I did in my own business.

Uh our family will run the same way. We have values that we want to instill with everybody. We have formal family meetings now, at least once a year, sometimes twice, where we talk about the things that we value, the the integrity, the being humble, uh sharing good ideas, and we make sure that those become paramount in our own family. Awesome, great.

Um what if you were sitting here 20 years ago listening to a fireside chat from somebody else? What do you wish someone would have told you that would have saved you millions of dollars or hundreds of hours of time? Well, a couple things. First one is uh I've been through in my business career now four big downturns in the economy.

Many of you share the same experience. Business happens in cycles. And if you recognize that, it's going to come back. It It seems at the time it's going to be like, how's it going to come back from the pandemic, right? I mean, we we looked at what was happening around us and thought, when we when will we ever meet in a group like this?

We thought that would never happen again. '87 market crash, 2001.com bubble, uh the the great recession 2007-8-9. That's when I started my business, by the way, and when you started this business in 2007. Uh when there's things there's downturns, there's always so far, always recovery. And so, we identified at the time nobody wanted to be a a T-Mobile distributor at that time because it was tough.

And we said, "I think we have the skills to do this. We have the finances to to make this happen." So, we got in at a time that no one wanted to get in when T-Mobile, by the way, was the fourth of four national uh wireless companies. Fast forward to today, guess who has the largest market cap in the United States?

T-Mobile. $190 billion market cap, Verizon $160 billion, and AT&T $120 billion. So, we were fortunate to come in at a time in a business cycle that we rode that wave. So, I would talk about um I'd like to know about the confidence that if I get into something and and it looks tough, it's it's going to come back.

And then secondly, I would say something I would love to have known a long time ago is to be careful with debt. Be careful with debt. Leverage is good, but I think there's Was it Charlie Munger who said that the uh the person who has the the best recovery the the quickest recovery from a heart open heart surgery is the person who didn't need it in the first place. And and that's because in in your case in a business debt, if you're in good shape, we decided that we never wanted debt.

And so, we ran our business with zero debt. Now, what's that's un traditional, but we decided that debt was going to be something that we'd have to answer to somebody else, we decided to answer to ourselves and decided that was not our answer. Yeah, interesting. We had a healthcare group speak on stage two events ago. They scaled from zero to 35 locations, zero debt, and they had the same mindset that they could raise capital equity, but they didn't want somebody foreclosing on their business potentially.

So, interesting. Okay, next next question here. So, what was the turning point in ramping up your stores when you had the the aha moment where everything started to go in five or 10 times as quickly? Was there a change in trajectory once you started doing something different or thinking a certain way? We had we we signed on with T-Mobile in 2009.

And for the first couple of years, it was it was tough, right? It was a lot of We we decided geographically to start in Arizona and eventually moved our way to several western states. But the aha moment for us was in 2012 when T-Mobile hired a new CEO. Guy named John Legere. If you've ever had a chance to see him in action, he brought forward what was called the Un-carrier.

He didn't want to be like a traditional carrier like Verizon AT&T. He decided to to kind of poke fun at the big carriers, actually to call the CEOs' names, which I wouldn't necessarily recommend, but he he was really kind of creating this uneasiness around what you should be as a carrier. And customers love that. So, for us, because we had gotten We got to 100 stores by 2012.

And so, by the time we did it quick, and by the time that to the Un-carrier strategy started rolling out, we were prepared and ready to take on this massive influx of customers to T-Mobile. And they acquired Sprint, and you know, all this momentum that that happened there, we were in good shape because we made the decisions early on to go fast and go hard as fast as we could. Got it. So, I know that the founders of Home Depot, when they started out before they had one location, their goal is to have a thousand locations.

And they almost didn't ever get the first one off the ground. So, part of my question is how did you go so fast opening up a hundred stores in three years? And from the very beginning, was it your goal to grow to five hundred million plus in revenue or to open a thousand or open a hundred stores, etc. Or what was that mindset going into it cuz I'm I'm finding over and over again the people that make it as a pro athlete or make it to become a billionaire or centimillionaire, it wasn't an accident.

Uh you know, it's like they in their head they had this vision and they drove that vision forward. So, I was curious, you know, what your mindset was going in and how did you go from zero to a hundred in three years? Yeah, great question. Our goal was to We figured that we'd left corporate jobs that were good jobs to do this.

We were all in the wireless space. I was with a company called VoiceStream. Actually, VoiceStream was a predecessor to T-Mobile. And when I started there, there was ten employees. When I left there, there was about seventeen thousand employees. That company today is T-Mobile.

Uh Deutsche Telekom acquired T-Mobile several years ago and changed the name to T-Mobile. So, what what we what we decided to do was to uh take that early momentum and make that as you know, as beneficial to us as possible by allowing the T-Mobile strategy to be you know, what carried us through you know, to to grow that large. We set out to to open seventy-five stores. That was our goal.

We said out and said, "We want to open seventy-five stores cuz that would replace the income that we had before and build some equity." What we found is that the opportunities quickly presented themselves in new states that we weren't aware of. T-Mobile loved us because we were growing fast. They wanted to grow their distribution. And so from 75 we quickly realized we need to reset that to 200.

We got to 150 and the decision at that point to sell the business was based on T-Mobile then making a decision to open this up to way too many people in our opinion. Too many distributors that used to have a radius that would be protected, they decided to to make that much smaller. And when they made that decision we said, "Now's the time to do it." So and and the largest distributor was anxious.

They had debt. They were willing to to go with a private equity partner. And so we made one phone call. A couple months later we had a deal done and and the rest is history. Awesome. So you already said that you didn't use debt.

So I'm guessing that as you structured these deals you raised equity, but opening up that many stores so quickly every 3 years, I'm guessing you had relatively large investor backers who would back you at 10 or 20 stores at a time or you got a couple big investors and they funded a huge percentage of these stores. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, because at VoiceStream we were a public company and I was there at the time. We were self-funded.

I was funding the operations at the time. I did decide in 2009 that there were a couple of interested parties who wanted to be minority investors with us. And so I I opened it up to a couple people who were you know minority, but we were really self-funded. We had that good fortune having been through a couple of IPOs both at Western Wireless and VoiceStream Wireless that created our own self-funding.

So that's why it was probably unusual in the sense of not using traditional bank debt or something else to to grow. We could have done that. It would have been a you know much better return and much better leverage return, but our when we finally sold the business our minority investors, those two got a 28 X on their investment. So they were happy.

They were happy. Yeah, I'm guessing so. So many people here in the room would love to grow something to a hundred million in revenue or six hundred million in revenue. So, that's pretty amazing. Um you know, when you were younger in college, out of college, when you were at the early wireless companies, um did you always have really big ambitious goals for yourself or is it more of like a step ladder and you got to the next plateau?

You like the next plateau or were your whole life were you saying I'm going to be top point one percent and you're going to work till you get there cuz now you're there and I'm sure some people are curious like if that was something you always aimed for. It really wasn't honestly. I mean, I grew up in a small farming community in southern Idaho. Uh Paul, Idaho is where I'm from.

It's about 900 people. Went to high school there. And went to as I mentioned Utah State University. What I believed I was good at was networking and finding and what if I I found a good idea, I was lucky enough to get into the mobile industry into team mobile into the wireless industry as it started. But what I was good at was working hard once I got there.

And so, I really didn't have the ambitions to be an entrepreneur. In fact, I I worked as I mentioned for 20 years on the corporate side. With VoiceStream, we went nationally. We we built stores in all 50 states and I was head of the I was the VP of retail at that point of national retail. We had about a thousand stores.

And so, that I thought was going to be my career. But it wasn't until I started we signed a lot of checks for dealers, distributors at the time and they were large checks and I kept saying to them a couple of my friends, we could do this. We we could do this. It was scary to leave the confines of corporate.

And so, eventually we said uh let's give it a try. Got it. And I'm guessing that most of your stores were like in the medical space called like de novos like you built them from the ground up or did you acquire stores to get to your hundred stores in three years? The first nine stores we had we acquired.

Uh we then acquired a a bit later three others, but all the rest were out of ground. Right. Yeah, and we had initially a couple of mall kiosks and a couple small ones just to get us started, but we eventually went away from that and all to inline uh brick and mortar stores. Great. Okay. Um so, what's a mistake or move that slows people down or an ankle anchor that people drag behind them that by telling them to get rid of, perhaps they could grow five times faster by by listening to you here today?

Couple things come to mind, Richard. First is uh I've never been afraid to make a decision quick because if it's not the right decision, I I just adjust. I I move from that. What what has I think getting us getting people in trouble more often is delaying the decision or just not making the decision because that that's your decision.

You you you're not doing something about it. So, we were quick to make decisions and then also quick to adjust if we needed to. So, that'd be number one. And and the second thing uh that comes to mind is we I think we made mistakes early on on just settling when we were hiring people. We had to hire a lot of people.

We would settle because they were there, they were available. When we realized, no, we're we're we're better off to take a little more time when it comes to hiring people to make sure, especially in our our senior and our key leadership in the business, uh let's make sure that we have the best people possible cuz I look back at my own career and said the reason why I had the good fortune and and learn from some really smart people. Uh I worked for a guy early on who when he sold the business became a billionaire, John Stanton. He's now the uh the owner of the Seattle Mariners.

Uh he's on the board at Microsoft. He's on the board at Costco. And I I had the good fortune of being in meetings with him for several years, learning, watching. And so, the same thing in our own business, we started applying the fact that we want to get the best possible people who could learn from us. We had some experience to share and then to keep that that legacy going.

Great. So, the biggest net worth person that we've done the most number of deals with, uh, 19 transactions with, you know, it took us 6 years to get to know them, to get our first deal done. Um, and you know, we've known each other for, I don't know, 4 to 7 years. I'd have to look at our email string and see and got to meet in person a few times.

Um, and just getting to know each other better. And so, I'm just wondering for people here in the room who want to conduct a joint venture or close a deal with somebody who is a centimillionaire or someone who's had your level of success, any strategies, suggestions, tips on how to, you know, get a response in a crowded email inbox or how to get your attention when you have to be very careful with where you spend your time, you're trying to groom your family, run your family office. Any suggestions for people in the room, uh, whether they're a peer and they're new to being at that level of success or there's someone here raising capital or looking for a capital partner? Well, I would say be patient.

Uh, the the best deals that I've done now as a family office, probably some of the best employees that I had, my business partners, I knew them for 10 years before I decided to say, "Hey, let's do this together." I could trust them, I knew them. And even in our family office when we stood that up in in 2017, we didn't immediately go out and make a lot of decisions around investing. We got to know people.

So, we we had patience. It was it was very tempting with a lot of capital on the sidelines to put it to work right away, but we were wise to move slowly and and methodically into making sure that we were doing the right thing, diversifying, uh, creating cash flow for us today, things that, you know, when you when you sell your business, your cash flow's gone. And so, we wanted to emphasize that sustaining power. And so, patience, I think, is is the key to uh our success.

That's great. Yeah, I was I was having dinner at the $500 million net worth family, and he said, "It sounds kind of depressing, but the people who've gotten our best deals done we've known for a decade." Um and that's like almost exactly what you just said, which is funny. So, obviously, it doesn't take 10 years to get deals done with any family office, but I think it's important to note, which we do at some of our other events, that one investor putting in 40 million or 10 million, that's equal to 40 people or 400 people investing 100k each.

So, you might have to plant seeds that take a year or two or three or five or 10 to sprout, but it could be worth 400 other little plants that sprout from like an angel investor or a little high net worth investor, etc. So, I appreciate you sharing that comment. Anything else that I should have asked you or that you wanted to share uh today that you wanted to get across to the audience? Well, the thing, Richard, that uh I admire about you is that you uh started with your family making that a priority.

It's It's the journey. It's not the destination. For For me, it was very much that case. I I'm at a point in life now where I'm focusing more on my health and other things, but uh I've traveled for, you know, actively for years. You know, I didn't wait until I was done to start traveling. Uh I didn't wait till I was done to start spending time with my children or grandchildren.

Uh it's the journey. It's the journey that was much more important to me than the destination. Uh you know, this ended up being far better than we ever dreamed. It was far far better. And so, I'm glad I didn't waste time along the way waiting for, you know, the ultimate payoff. That wasn't what it was all about.

Right. Awesome. Yeah, we like to talk about having the most fun year of your life every year, and you can't have that if you have bad partners or bad business model, uh bad funders, too much debt that stresses you out every moment of your life, etc. So, it's not just about the travel. It's also like you can't have the most fun year of your life if you're putting up with business decisions you should be cutting off and really focusing on what's working, obviously.

So, uh appreciate that, Todd. I appreciate you being here and uh thanks for all the insights. I enjoyed that. I hope some of the audience members did as well. Let's give them a big round of applause. Thank you.

Thank you.