Adam House Sr., a seasoned entrepreneur with a diverse background as a former senior executive, professional basketball player, and team Co-Owner, adds a unique perspective to business advising. Over his 25-year career, he has not only started, scaled, and exited multiple companies across various industries but has also done so with a commitment to values such as faith, family, and personal interests. Despite the challenges of being a husband, father, and entrepreneur, he maintains his priorities of faith, family, and fitness. His professional journey has been a continuous cycle of learning and growth, and he is excited about sharing what has driven him forward.
In this episode, Steve and Adam discuss:
- Shifting Focus to Helping Others
- Building an Exit-Ready Business
- The Five Pillars of Business Advisory Services
- The Challenges of Coaching
- Learning from Failures
Key Takeaways:
- Learn from high value exits and apply their strategies to your business for ultimate success
- Discover the surprising benefits of failure and how it can lead to your greatest achievements
- Uncover the secrets to positioning your business for a lucrative exit that secures your financial future
- Unlock the essential pillars that will elevate your business advisory services to new heights of success
- Explore the power of taking imperfect action and how it can propel your entrepreneurial journey to new levels of achievement
“Find someone that's where you want to be and get them as a mentor, get them as a coach, get them as an advisor. Because there's patterns in business, there's pitfalls you can strategically avoid. So why not short-circuit the process?”
- Adam House Sr.
Connect with Adam House
Connect with Steve and Jason:
- LinkedIn: Jason or Steve
- Website Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
- Email: grow@rewireinc.com
Listen to the podcast here:
Adam House- Fear is the Edge of Opportunity
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Insight Interviews. I would love to say what episode this is, but I actually don't quite know. We're getting close to 200 episodes, and this might be that one. I don't know. We're looking good here at the beginning of the year, and so I'm really excited today. I've got a special guest that I'm excited to bring in and get to know, with you. He’s certainly’ s got a really cool resume and some various things that he's done, and so, hey, without any further ado, Insight Interview world, say hi to Adam House. Adam, say hi to our world here.
Hey, thanks for having me on the show. Honored to be here and hello to your audience, and congrats on almost 200 episodes, if you haven't hit it so far. That’s quite an accomplishment.
Yeah, we're all trying to be Joe Rogan, but somehow there's only one of those guys, I guess.
He's got a decade head start on you.
I know, but he's got 47 billion listeners and people on other planets and stuff. He's doing something right. So, anyway, we're happy with what we've got, and I'm certainly happy to have you as a guest, Adam, and I get to know you today with the guests, and typically, I just kind of like to have you, if you don't mind- actually, before I do this, here's a quick question for you. Before we get to know anything about you or why the heck you're on our show, tell me this. What are you grateful for?
I am grateful for my family. So, I've been married for 20 years. I don't know how my wife has done it. And I have four amazing boys, three teenagers and a ten-year-old. Anyone with teenagers, you think parenting is challenging when they're waking up in the middle of night crying when they're two years old, it's nothing compared to a teenager with a cell phone.
That's awesome. Any other gratitude’s? I mean, the family is wonderful. I'd love to hear about four boys. I gotta think that's a lot of activity, right?
It is, and they're all pretty high-level hockey players, so that's a seven day a week commitment. Very grateful for my faith. I've had a very strong faith over the last 20 years that's been a driver in my success and my family and business, and I'm grateful for failure because success in life is a terrible teacher. You learn the most from failing. And so, a lot of failures without giving up has led to a lot of success.-1.png?width=340&height=260&name=Untitled%20design%20(16)-1.png)
You know, I've heard certainly, I mean, there's been a lot of books, Richard Rohr wrote Falling Upward, John Maxwell wrote a book, right? What was it? Failing forward? I don't know that I've heard success is a terrible teacher. I love that. Before we even go into you, why would you say, and I don't disagree, but expand upon that a little bit.
Well, what do you really learn once you've achieved it? The actual endorphin release in the process is greater than the achievement. So having exited five businesses in five different industries over the last 25 years, for me, it was never about the millions of dollars, it was about the competition and the building of the team and winning and continuing to grow through that process. And as long as you're building value and casting vision, that's a great way to get a high value exit.
Yeah, dude, that's fantastic. Well, give us the, if you don't mind, again, I'm not as inclined to read your curriculum vitae, as much as I'd love to hear you. Hopefully it's not too uncomfortable but give us the thumbnail of Adam House. Like, why are we here? What's important to you? What are you excited about? A little bit about your background, if you don't mind. Maybe a couple, two- or three-minute background on you.
I'd love to do that, but the reason I'm here is not where I've been, it's where I'm going. And I really, over the last 25 years, been an entrepreneur, like I said, in five different businesses. I started my first business out of my apartment at 19 years old, dropped out of college my freshman year, literally with a couple hundred bucks, turned it into a multimillion dollar business. I was probably too dumb at the time or ignorant to know that it's a bad idea to try to start a business with $200, but somehow I made it happen. Learned a lot in that process. Then started a mobile technology company back in 2008. We sold to Akamai Technologies. I was 18 months idea to exit then. This is probably outside of my wife and four kids. my favorite part of really my life, I was able at 32 years old, my wife said, listen, you've been a CEO since you were 19, if you don't do something you love, you're going to regret it the rest of your life. So, I was like, all right, maybe I could make a minor league basketball team somewhere. I played in high school, played my freshman year of college, and she was like, yeah, whatever gets you out of the house, because I was driving her crazy. Just had a big multi-million dollar exit and waking up in the morning starting to delegate tasks to your wife, that's not really how it works. She's like, you need to get a job. I don't care if you become a barista at Starbucks, but you got to get out of here. So, I decided to hire a nutritionist- a skills coach, and trained for six months and ended up getting invited to a combine in Dayton, Ohio. There were 34, I'll call them kids, right? These are 21, 22-year-olds, kids coming out of college, D1 mid major, so really high-level basketball and in rolls this tech CEO that hasn't played organized basketball in a decade, and for some reason, the coach saw something in me that he loved and invited me to camp. Long story short, I ended up getting invited or making the Rochester New York Razor Sharks in the premier basketball league. So, if you think about Rochester, New. York, it's really dark in the winters. There's nothing to do, so they'd get 5000 people a game. And the best part about the story is some of the guys on the team were like, who is this guy with no basketball resume? What's he doing here? So, they looked me up on the internet and they were like, holy cow, coach, this guy's an entrepreneur, and look at all this money he's made. And so, the word gets to the owner, and he calls me and he's like, Adam, what are you doing all day? Practices from nine to 1030? I was like, well, I hang out with my wife and three boys. He's like, you can't be happy doing that. Get in the office. Come help me run the team. So, he made me CEO, co-owner, and I was playing for the basketball team. So really able to fulfill a lifelong dream of playing professional basketball and having my wife and three kids sit courtside and being part owner and CEO of the team. So, to fast forward that, I did that for a year, then started a healthcare analytics business. They recently went public last year. I became a partner in a sales training company for roofers for two years, helped them raise a couple of million dollars in capital, and then that was a two-year engagement. And my wife has always been, you can tell she's my biggest fan and cheerleader. She said, you have to get out and tell your story, and so, what I mentioned at the beginning, what I'm doing now is that I've started five businesses, I had a lot of multimillion dollar exits.
"I want to help and inspire other entrepreneurs to use my process to help them build a strong foundation and position their companies for a high value exit. So, I'm getting my story out there, using my background and my experience to help others achieve their goals and dreams."
Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. I certainly know it's not, maybe- I'm cracking up at the questions in my head because one of them is, hey, how'd you do that year you played on the team? How'd that go?
Well, I wouldn't say- I had to earn my minutes. It was funny in the interview with the coach when it was announced, he's like, he can't buy minutes for me. I don't care if he's the CEO owner. He's an old school Philly guy. He's like, I don't care. You got to earn your minutes and so I didn't play much at all in the first 10-11 games, but then did start to get in the games and make a small impact. But it was great. I loved it. I think my entrepreneurial background helped me be a good teammate in helping create culture and vision and be a leader without having to be the main guy, which was an adjustment for me also. Right? When you're the CEO, everyone's following you. Now I'm the guy, just the twelfth guy on the bench. Like, yeah, you're not the top guy here.
Wow. In that part of your life because I've got obviously, questions about where you're going. You certainly had a lot of energy around that and this idea that you're going to help other people create high value exits, which is awesome. What do you suppose in that particular part of your life when you were the twelfth guy on the bench, and I think I understood the background of you, you were a CEO, five businesses, you're a pretty successful guy, what did you learn about you when you were the twelfth guy on the bench? And that's a really interesting dynamic. And maybe through that season of your life, I'm just sort of curious, what were you learning about you?
Listen, I was a co-owner and CEO, so I could have easily tried to flex muscles and be like, I want to be on the court, but what it showed me is I'm not really about my name in lights, I'm about doing what has to be done and contributing in whatever way I can contribute. And that's how I was able to, as a 19-year-old, really start to build these businesses. I had passion, I had commitment, and I believed anything was possible, and so, it was more validation that I just really love to compete, love to win, and love being in a team environment.
And that concept, in that season of your life, did I hear you right? Like, that's sort of how it was even in these other businesses, the five prior businesses that you had got into and bought and sold when you were 19? You didn't want to see your name in lights when you were 19, you sort of figured that out early. Did I have that right?
It is, yeah. Well, you had to be when you start a business. You’re sales, you’re marketing, you’re finance, you’re operations, but no matter how big the company got, I was the first person in the office, typically, and the last one to leave. I knew every role in the company and didn't try to play them all. Obviously, the companies got so big, I couldn't, but I was really good at creating what I call bottom up buy in. So, a lot of leaders will try to force their agenda down. Now, obviously, you're the final decision makers, but whatever pieces of input that you agree with that you can get from someone else, that creates a more holistic buy in.
That's awesome. So, you talked about a system and a process. I mean, I'm trying to formulate this question in my head. Maybe you can help me ask this question. If you're that good at doing this, and you've done it five times and you've learned all this stuff, why not keep doing it? Why get out and help others do it? Why not do another one and do another one? Why do it like this?
Well, it's a great question, and it was a struggle initially because we started as a coaching business, business coaching, and whenever you start something, you really don't know what you're doing. I started to see, like, coaching became a skill gap analysis. Okay, you're a great visionary, but you're terrible at execution, or you're good at execution and a terrible visionary, and I started to realize that's not what I want to do. Skill gap analysis. And it's a part of what we do. What our advisory services focus on is really five pillars of how to build a strong foundation to make your business exit ready. And what that means is, I don't know if I had talked about earlier, but being exit ready and what that means is if someone was to come to the door of your business today and say, hey, I want to buy your company, are you ready for that? Do you have the right financial model? Do you have the right go-to market strategy? Do you have the right vision for accelerated growth? And over the last 25 years, being an entrepreneur, you hang out with lots of entrepreneurs, and I would always have people reach out to me for advice, but I have seen them leave millions of dollars on the table for not being exit ready. And it's not an overnight process. It's not like, hey, I want to sell my house, let me go put a sign in the yard. You have to remodel the basement, you got to remodel the kitchen and remodel the master bedroom. It's what I see kind of a twelve-to-18-month process in getting exit ready. But every mistake you make along the way, if you're getting paid on a multiple on the exit, you can do the math. It's going to cost you.
So, is that something without you giving away the farm, can you tell us about what the five pillars are? Obviously, you need to go into them with people, but can you talk to us about the five pillars
For sure. The first one we focus on is the corporate structure. So, if you've ever started a business, whether you're an LLC, do you have a partnership? And at the beginning you're passing out equity like breath mints. Like anyone that'll come in and work for less. Okay, sure. Here's equity. Well, what type of shares are those? What does your operating agreement look like? What valuation are those shares at? And that only matters when it really matters, which is going to be on some sort of liquidity event, whether it's investment or an exit, but it can just cause significant problems down the road. The second is going to be the right financial model. Just making sure you're obviously doing the earnings correctly. Just the structure. What are your capital needs, so you don’t run out of business, run out of cash, go to market strategy. So how are you going to get the product out there? A plan to accelerate growth. And then ultimately, once we get that growth going, we focus on efficiencies and. How to do more with less, whether it’s through technology or outsourcing, just to increase the bottom line.
So that I have the five right, because you stopped numbering in there for 1 second. Corporate structure, financial model, I know the last one is efficiencies three and four.
You have corporate structure, competitive advantage, how to do more with less, accelerate growth and your financial model.
Awesome. So, you're excited about bringing this concept and these pillars to market, helping others. And I think you had said, yeah, it was kind of difficult at first. I guess in some ways, if you bring this to market, you're still practicing your entrepreneurialism. You're just doing it in sort of a meta way, right? It's entrepreneurialism about entrepreneurialism.
It is. And what I was saying in the difficulty at first part is I was kind of being confused as an executive coach, but we're really at business advisory services, and so as a coach, the challenge was like we were talking before we came on air, is really getting the most out of other people, and there's great players that are terrible coaches, because at the end of the day, you're not the one on the field. And so, it was just new muscles for me to coach someone through a process rather than just taking the bull by the horns and making it happen. -1.png?width=340&height=260&name=Untitled%20design%20(17)-1.png)
Why do you suppose, and again, obviously, this is something that's interesting to me. Maybe it is to a lot of the listeners as well. This idea that there are great players, there are great tacticians, people on the field, again, that's kind of a sports metaphor, right? But we're talking business, too. There are great players who are terrible coaches. Adam, I have a question for you. Why? Why do you think that is?
I think it's because the expectations and level of excellence that they have for themselves, they're one out of a gazillion people in the history of, take Michael Jordan, for example. He would be a terrible basketball coach because his expectations of himself are so much higher that no one else could live up to him, right? And not say he couldn't coach, but I just think that kind of mindset would struggle. And I think it's like I said, the expectations that they have for themselves are so much higher that no one else could compete with them.
That's awesome. I love that. Any other reasons? That's one, that the whole expectation idea might make their communication style and how they relate with people impossible to live up to anything else. Any other reasons?
No, that one would just stick out to me. It was an adjustment that I had to make as a CEO. When I started the business, I was up at 05:00 a.m. and this is before. I never did a cold plunge; I never did a sauna.
"People are so obsessed with their morning routines now, and that's how you're going to make millions of dollars, but your morning routine is an hour and a half long. If you just worked for that hour and a half, you'd probably be further along faster. But I had to make an adjustment, like, people are not going to work as hard as me. I had to figure out what the right expectations were for the right role and lead accordingly."
That's awesome. I have often had your thought about the great players thought. I had wondered, this is not my curriculum, and this is not an honorance, right? This is a conjecture. The Michael Jordans of the world. I'm sure he's struggled too, but not like a lot of other people do. And so, we were watching super eight films of Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky when they were really little, and they were good. Did they understand what it meant to struggle? And so sometimes I think partly what makes a good coach is the ability to really understand failure and struggle, and sometimes, I'm not saying he didn't. but I don't know. He was good from a very early age, and so therefore, relating to people who actually need to struggle and fail is hard sometimes for those guys. But that's just throwing that out there.
Well, Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity basketball team, and he had an older brother that kicked his butt every day in one on one. And he said, if I could just beat my older brother, I can beat anyone in the world. So, he struggled significantly every day and then has the benefit of the God given perfect frame to be a basketball player, 48 inch vertical, and grew six inches his junior and senior year. So that obviously plays into the equation as well. But no matter how great you are, you struggle. Those guys fail every day. But this is kind of speaking to what you and your company does, no matter how great an athlete or businessperson is, everyone needs a coach. That's the one thing that the greatest athletes of all time have in common, is they had great coaching. Like, why would Tiger woods need a swing coach? Because they can see objectively the things that you're doing that you may be blind to. And so, when we were coaching, that's something I would tell people no matter how good of a CEO or entrepreneur you are, you need outside objective.
Well, because Adam, who's got a 360 on themselves?
Right, exactly.
And by the way, at best, even with good peripheral vision, what, 140 degrees? I don't know. I made that up. I wouldn't know. I don't know. Maybe even 180. But there's a whole side of this thing that people don't see, right? And I've been trying to make that point for many, many years. Like, yeah, obviously, you and I, we sell coaching because it's our job, right? But why do professional athletes do that? Tiger Woods doesn't know how to swing? And no, because he figures out, he can't have 360 on himself.
Right.
So that's really good. All right, I got really one more, maybe a couple more questions. I love this idea that failing teaches so much, and yet here you are with a pretty good system and a plan. What have been some of your failures that you've learned from? What are some of your juicy-I hate to ask you that. I hope that's not overly vulnerable for you, but what have you learned? Where have your failures been that you've learned from?
Just this morning or what?
Well, I guess in the context of your, hey, you're out talking about these businesses that you built, and certainly you've had a lot of success, and it's clear of that, along the way when you just think about, let's just talk vocationally. Yeah, you're right. I mean, any of us that have kids, where do you want to start with parenthood? If we were just talking vocationally and what you've done, where have you failed? Like, well, I really had to learn that lesson.
In business, I think I probably led too strongly early on, like it was my way or the highway kind of. And part of that is it was 25 years ago, and the world was just a different place, but I probably led just too militant, I would say, early on, but I did make that adjustment pretty quickly because I saw, like, yeah, you can get people to do things. Like, it's the difference between motivation and inspiration. You can come in and be the rah-rah guy and it lasts for however long, but if you can inspire people, man, they're off to the races and it's on their own. So, I think that would be probably the first mistake, just being honest, and I know anyone that's run a business, being afraid, it's real. You get in your own head; you start thinking about what if could go wrong. And of course, I'm a very positive guy, very competitive, I know all the right things to say, but there isn't anyone that doesn't wake up with some amount of fear, and where I was able to kind of bring that into check, so to speak, is realizing that without fear, there's no opportunity, right? Like, fear and opportunity coexist, so anytime I feel that it's like, wow, I'm on the verge of opportunity. So just flipping the script. Words matter. So, hey, this is an opportunity zone, it's a growth zone instead of a struggle zone, that's where the growth happens. So just not being fearful and looking at every situation of fear as a time for opportunity.
Man, you know, we could do a whole podcast on that, right? Just that.
For sure.
Because that's so pervasive out there. Because even you said it like all of us, right? You weren't just addressing a small handful of people. All of us. What I loved about what you said is it wasn't about not feeling fear. It seems to me, and again, we can have a debate if you want about this, but we're not going to eradicate fears in our life. We can re-understand them. And when you said, every time I have fear now, I start to look, I must be on the verge of some opportunity. Like, that's fantastic. How do we learn that? Listening to you say that, that's great, but how do we coach that? How do we teach that? How would you go about teaching?
Well, you just said the buzzword, which is coach. It's someone else that can help you process things. You have to have a sounding board of someone that's outside of the business that can help you work on the business and not in the day to day. So, coaching, it can be expensive, but you have to look at the opportunity cost. When we're inside our own head, that's our worst enemy, and just take someone to come back and say, well, really, Adam, you've done this for 25 years. You really don't think you could help other people do it? I was like, oh, I guess I can. It was that simple, but it can turn the page really quickly in your mind.
That's just fantastic. All right, well, I have one last question for you. Ready? It's what I call a meta question. It's a question about a question. You've done podcasts, you've got this really cool content and curriculum you're going out with, you're about to go help a ton of people, you probably already have and you're going to do more. What were you hoping I would ask you and what maybe were you excited about being asked that maybe I didn't ask?
Well, first of all, I think you've asked some great questions. So, I get on podcasts and usually just, hey, tell me your origin story. So, I've told that too many times. I liked how we started to talk about where I'm going. Nothing comes to mind that we didn't cover. It's been great to speak with you today and have the honor of being in front of your audience. I'm sure they're learning a lot from your content.
Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, they're learning a lot. I got ages of notes here. Sometimes I think, I don't know if anyone listens to this. We do, because we do all these analytics and we got quite a few downloads, which is cool. I got a lot out of it. Which is sometimes I wonder, I wonder if I do these for me? Is that wrong to do it like that? Anyway, thank you. I gleaned a lot from it. Again, love where you're going. The five pillars. I think it's fantastic. Love what you've learned in failure. If there were parting words, like you know you're teaching a college class, Adam, and this is the last thing the professor gets to say as you send the students off to go out and be entrepreneurs or whatever., what would be like that parting bit of, hey, if nothing else, this. Make sure this.
Probably say three things. Number one, start before you're ready. So, no matter how confident you are, you’re never 100%, so why not start at 50%? The second would be understanding the compound effect. So, success is not an epiphany. It's doing the small things every day over a long period of time to make a big impact. And the third would be to ask for a refund on your college tuition.
Okay, well, you're coming back because we're going to do a whole one on that. Oh, my.
I had to throw something in there. That's me. I got to say something that's going to push the envelope a little.
That got me, and I'm writing it down. In fact, I'm writing to my college right now. And I know you're partly kidding of that, but you're partly not, right? I mean, here you are, like, no, let's get into the world and do this. Anyway. I won't touch that one really, although, maybe when we log off here, you and I can have a deeper conversation. I think that's fantastic. I think that's great.
I can give you the real last one. There was a real third one, which was find someone that's where you want to be and get them as a mentor, get them as a coach, get them as advisor. Because there's patterns in business, there's pitfalls you can strategically avoid. So why not short circuit the process? Get someone that's where you want to go.
I love that. We'll make that one number three, but four has to be get a college refund because I love that. Adam, thank you so much for being part of the show. Super grateful to have you here. Again, I took a ton of notes, insights galore, everything from bottom up buy in, right? Which is really linked to one of your failures, right? You led too strongly and then you learned about bottom up buy in expectations being too high, losing fear. I mean, again, like I said, that's just some great insights there. And your three things at the end, start before you're ready, understanding the compound effect, and find someone, that seemed to be a little bit of a theme for us, like get someone outside of you. So, dude, really wonderful. I have no doubt that in this new endeavor you're going to have great success, and we're super happy to have had you on the show. And so, we'll certainly, in our show notes, make it incredibly easy to find you if people have further questions, because that's one of the things we always want to give access to. And so, if you have any further questions for Adam, you'll certainly know as a result of our show notes and other social stuff, how to get them. So, Adam, thank you again for today and we wish you the best going forward.
Appreciate it. Thank you again.
Have a good one. You guys, thanks so much. We'll see you next time here on the Insight Interviews.
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