Shakin' Hands
Welcome to 'Shakin' Hands,' the podcast where entrepreneurship meets fascinating stories from the most intriguing minds today. From proven business practices to groundbreaking ideas that challenge the status quo, Shakin' Hands' is not just about the handshake that seals a deal but about the shared experiences and values that unite us all. Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner, or someone who loves a good story about overcoming odds, Shakin' Hands' promises to deliver compelling content that shakes up the conventional and celebrates the extraordinary.
Tune in to Shakin' Hands' where leaders, thinkers, and doers come to share, inspire, and, most importantly, connect. Let's shake hands with the world, one story at a time.
Host: Jack Moran
Powered by DreamSpear
Shakin' Hands
Ep. 49 | How This Company Is Changing Fundraising - Sam Staley
In this episode of Shakin' Hands, Jack Moran talks with serial entrepreneur and Event.Gives CEO, Sam Staley, about turning a school auction challenge into a full-scale fundraising platform. They discuss scaling software businesses, strategic partnerships, and how to build companies with an exit in mind. Staley shares insights from pioneering the first metropolitan-scale WiFi network and the importance of persistence in entrepreneurship. They also dive into the balance between product development and sales, leveraging competitors for growth and the mindset needed to turn ideas into thriving businesses.
Thanks for listening
Host: Jack Moran
Powered by: DreamSpear
Want to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs and growth-minded leaders? Join our Dreamspear community on Skool at skool.com/dreamspear or learn more at dreamspear.com. Whether you're building a business, leveling up your mindset, or looking for real conversations, we're here to grow with you.
Follow Shakin' Hands Podcast
Website
Instagram
YouTube
Dreamspear
Website
Instagram
SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!
Welcome to Shakin’ Hands, where we provide the platform for entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their stories in order to hopefully influence others to get out of the rat race and chase their own dreams. If you have any recommendations for guests or questions that you want to be asked, please don't hesitate to reach out. Anyways, if you enjoy the podcast, please like, comment, subscribe and share in order to keep the podcast growing. Otherwise, I'm your host, Jack Moran and this is Shakin’ Hands. If you're looking for business mentorship, I have a place where you can get feedback on your unique personal development and business growth challenges. Over the last year, I've brought together a group of impact driven thought leaders where we meet every single day to discuss psychology, communication, mindset, and business case studies. We have people who have made millions of dollars, lost millions of dollars, Harvard MBAs and new entrepreneurs like you and I. Entrepreneurship can be lonely. So if you're looking for a support system, please follow the link in the description below for some more information. What are you doing? Costa Rica? I actually had 500 software developers down there. Really? Yeah, I mean, a lot of folks. That's sick. Yeah. Well, I didn't know that was I. It was the largest program around the people. Yeah. At in the country at the time. Really? Yeah. Microsoft came in there right towards. You know, before I moved back and they were a little bigger. But yeah, it was, it was a ver Costa Rica pretty big. Pretty big size. You still go back and forth. I mean we went back last year. Not for word just to you know, it's still a great place to go. Yeah. But I mean, I would come back and forth. I had a two year old down there at the time. Went to this little Montessori school is super nice. And he just was right there. He his his school was all Spanish, so he could understand everything. And he was just right there to to being fully, you know, bilingual, you know, right before we move that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Has no Spanish. I've been trying to get more people to come down to Latin America. Like. I think it's like crazy investment opportunity. Oh, yeah. I like Panama because it's on the US dollar. I don't think it's been discovered as much yet either. You know, there's still some some stuff there, but always Panama or Latin, Latin America as well. In Panama particularly, I think Costa Rica is pretty discovered. Yeah. But when I, when we were living down there, this was some time ago, I always just describe it. It was, you know, the pace is slower, which was nice. Right. And you I would say if you need a hammer, you go to the hammer store, you need a nail, you go to the nail store. There's no Lowe's right. Yeah. No, they're all in different places. So it just slowed everything down. Yeah. It's definitely there's a different pace. Yeah. With your service, with your like restaurants. Everything. But I always say like, moving from the US to Panama was less of a cultural shock than moving from Panama back to the US. Yeah, it was interesting. Every time we would come back while living there, we kept the house here and we would come back to, you know, to see family or whatever, and it just felt like we were just in this lush Taj Mahal. And we we had a nice place down there and all, but it was just, I don't know, it's different feel, you know, there, you know, you could just run the Lowe's, you could run to eat and everything was right there and easy accessible. Whereas down there you know, everything was kind of a day trip in like the there's less like of a like capitalist pace there. Yeah. And so like people are just like more chill. Yeah. Because there's not much as, as much of a rat race. And then because of that you get like a lot more creativity. I found like good music. Oh, Taco or all of that's a great side. The flip side of that is, as you know, nothing gets done what exactly we had. So we, you know, had software developers down there and we did, design and development and we had some big clients. And I remember this was our Sony was a client, and this was our first onboarding product for Sony. And we had a, you know, we would we would put teams together, you know, 8 or 9 people on a product, team. And I remember we had our first deliverable with Sony, and I'm going to the team, you know, it's coming up on Monday and I'm like, hey, are we looking good or are we going to hit that delivery day is the first one. You know, we really got to show up well for these guys. And they're like Pura Vida. I'm like, no, Pura Vida, are we going to hit this deadline? We got to see. Did it take a. Yeah. So you kind of had to tighten them up a little bit for work. What are you doing now? I spend most of my time on a company called event Dot gives. We are a events management platform primarily for fundraising events. We're basically Eventbrite for fundraising. So we're the ticketing platform. Our software is checking you in. We're facilitating silent auctions, live auctions, raffles, donations. Just anything around fundraising for events. We do that. What's specifically about the platform is different and specific to what is specific to, fundraising. Well, I mean, Eventbrite, right. You know, that's something most people have heard of. They'll sell you a ticket, you go to a concert and have a good time, and, you know, you forgot about Eventbrite. We're keeping a relationship with that ticket purchaser past the door. So, you know, a typical event that we're helping is a fundraising gala. So you're going to buy your your table, your or your ticket. You're going to show up. We're we are the platform you're placing bids on on silent auction items, or you're donating. Oh, okay. You're our platforms where you're checking out and paying for all that stuff. So it's kind of all all encompassing. And then of course where post event, you know, sending out thank you letters and hey, we didn't quite reach our goal. Click here and donate another 200 bucks or whatever it is. So is that for kind of circle around fundraising and relationships with constituents who kind of makes those type events, how long have you been doing that for? I like to say five years, but they remind me we're coming up on 9 or 10. So I think 2015 is when we, we really, you know, did our our, you know, started doing events. It in kind of scale. How did you get into like this venture? I wasn't going to do it at all. I'm a software guy. My background largely is software. My wife was on the auction committee at our kids school. They were going to sell us out a little bit or at the time, and I saw one of their meetings and she, you know, they had stacks of clipboards and papers and just all these broken processes that, you know, I couldn't look at without one to fix. And selfishly, I just didn't want to keep write my name on the paper all night and checking it. And so I just said, hey, we've got phones. Can we just make a little text bot? We can text our bids in and make it simple. They let me do that. That's awesome. That was it. I just wanted it for that one event and it doubled what they had ever raised. So it was kind of this eye opener of this world of fundraising events and, you know, I kind of said, let me kind of understand this world and see if there's, you know, something fun to play in here with a company. So then what was the next step after that, like identifying this opportunity? Yeah. I mean, they wanted to use it again. Of course it went well. So you know, a few months later they had another event coming up and wanted to use it. And I remembered standing in line for an hour to pay. And so I said, if you want to use it again, you gotta let me check out. And so now it was there's a landing page where you land and click pay and all the stuff you do. And then from there it was that was it. It was like, let me understand this world of fundraising. And what I found was solutions. In it were companies that would send eight people in red shirts to turn key, run your event for you, which was very expensive in that scalable. So my entrepreneur mindset, I can introduce a self sign up self-managed platform into the space and do really well. And that's what we did. So how do you start like taking this product that you kind of developed by accident or just for fun for your own use into something that was scalable and, could be distributed? Yeah. I mean, I subscribe to something I call selling the ghost. So it's just that it's it's finding people who have a need and saying, we'll provide that need if you buy it. And as soon as they say, yeah, we'll buy it. You know, you got to be you got to be able to fill, to build that thing. So it was just that we just kept solving problems within this world. So, you know, we made it easier to place bids. Then, because now we're texting, we could send out bid notifications to get you back engaged. Right. We fixed checkout, made that easier. And then we found out waiting in line to get into these events. If you're waiting in line 30 minutes. An hour? That's a problem. You're not happy. So we we said, let's let's sell tickets. Now, we can control check in. And we just kept solving problems. And until we were an enterprise platform in space. What are you guys planning on doing with the company? Like what are your goals for growth? I always thought, in most things I do, you know, as an entrepreneur, you kind of go, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to go kind of throw two years at this thing and exit it. That was that was always the plan. So we're a little past two years in, but that's always the thing. Everything's for sale. Right. But I do think as a company, this one, event gives particularly, we are kind of at a point where we've got a very mature product. You know, we're expanding our offering into, okay, we do events in our sleep. We do them really well. Let's, our clients need, CRM, so they need to manage relationships with their customers. Let let's build let's expand our offering and cover those features. Peer to peer fundraise thing. In this world, if you see people that say, hey, I'm running A5K, go to my page and donate the money goes to American Heart. We were launching tools like that, but we've got a mature product and now we're looking for partnering opportunities to, you know, for people that can expand our reach through marketing, sale, that sort of thing. So as far as, like, you know, the CRM service, for instance, do you subscribe more to the model to do it in-house or to like have some affiliate program where you guys are just like, you know, giving the business to someone else that integrates with your platform and instead of like you guys handling the CRM, but like, yeah, that's a good question. I, I've just had a lot of these conversations recently. You know, where we're talking with like, blackballed is someone who's in town and is large in the fundraising world. So we're in their partner program and do a lot of things. But they're a good example of to, to say they've got a very large megaphone. Right. They've got 40,000 clients. Hopefully that numbers. Right. If they're listening, I don't want to put or sell them. They have a very large customer group though, right. And we aren't is large, but our superpower is improving processes and building software. And so that's where we can say we've seen all the CRMs out there, we can build a better one. And then maybe partner with, like auctioneers. In the world of fundraising, there's auctioneers. Oftentimes they'll have 100 to 200 events that they work every year as the auctioneer. So we can partner with them to say, here's a white labeled, event management solution. You sell. Right. And so, I like for us to take on the heavy lift of the product side and then look for opportunities for, you know, people to white label it or sell it source. And that was like distribution channels instead of on them. Yeah. Million end users finding one strategic partner with a million end users. I mean it's even within competitors, right? We we just did a a big round of reaching out to our competitors, direct competitors and saying, hey, we see a gap in your offering. We're really good at that. I know we're competitors, but here's a section of the market you can't even service. Why don't you dump them on us and we'll we'll pay you a basically a sales relationship back. And so there's win wins even with competitors. I feel like how do you navigate those conversations and like set the tone that you're not going to step on their toes and get a deal done with someone who is? I think it's just relationships like anything else, you know, like kind of getting a relationship with their founders or whoever the case may be is with their founders. And just being frank, I'm always really frank, you know, just let's put it all on the table. And if there's a win here, let's recognize it. And if there's not, let's let's go find one somewhere else. What do you think is like the secret sauce to developing good long term relationships? I don't know if I'm good at that because I, I'm there. I'm not the only person I ask. I always laugh, you know, I've got I've got of course I've got friends, and so great friends. But I always laugh and say, I love Uber drivers because I can take an Uber ride, have a great conversation with this guy, and like, ask what's his background? I mean, we hit it off really well, but I don't have to worry about, oh man, now that we hit it off, I gotta, like, make sure I keep up the relationship and go have a beer with them every week or every month. Right. It's a perfect relationship to, I don't know if I'm the best for that. I like to kind of put my head down into product and build things. So you're more back end. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm great forward facing and I enjoy being out there, but we all have our preference. Yeah. My favorite is to just kind of like nerd out and build a really cool product that no one's seen yet. Yeah. That's awesome. It's a little bit, you know, different than myself, but I need those like operate on people within my own company because I'm just like chaos out front, right? You know, shoot and shit as I, you know, get into the room and then leaving the mess behind. So, you know, it's really important. You know, both both positions go hand in hand and can't operate without the other. But there's definitely some, tension between the two positions as well. You were talking about before, like how a lot of times you enter a company with the goal of exiting. I think that's like something that including myself, people are really interested in, you know, how you exit a company, how do you, like, build a company with the goal of exiting? And, you know, how do you set yourself up for success and not get stuck with the golden handcuffs, you know? Yeah. Down to I think that, you know, you can be intentional. I think there's always there always needs to be serendipity involved somewhere. Right? Then, you know, some call that luck, whatever you want to call it. But I think for me, anyway, it's it's having exit opportunities already defined before you even start. Right. Knowing if I build this product. Here are other companies, other entities, other somethings in the world that will benefit from it at scale. And I think if you identify those even from the beginning, now you're building feature sets into your product towards that end goal. Have you actually companies before? Yes. What are the I don't want to say variables, but yeah, I guess variables that that purchaser is looking for within the company, those intrinsic values of the company that make it sellable. Yeah. I mean I'm totally shoot from the hip with this. And this is how this is my made up version of that. It I think there's a couple of ways, you know, I think users are always keying. Right. If you've got 3 million users, that's valuable. You know, if you say, here's here's 3 million users that use our product base, and if I can sell this product with those users to you and you can immediately hand them your product, I think that's that's an easy win, right? Right. Otherwise, I think you're looking at, you know, is there a product like a CRM, that can sell into their own customer base events, features? You know, I think that's another thing to say. Here's a product that's complementing to yours that you can immediately sell to your own customer base. I think those are the two easiest things I point at in supply. It is pretty important, right? Like there could be the biggest opportunity in the world, but I feel like a lot of these deals get screwed up just through integration. Totally. And I think there's all often times I this happens to me a lot because I, I see very clearly, hey, I've built this. It's a perfect path for you. And it might very well be, but then they have a lot more risk averse kind of structure on their side, right, to say, well, you're not wrong, but we've got a focus on this. And our next three quarters are this and you've got it. You know timing also matters right. And like the executives can get the vision. But then adoption throughout the entire company is a whole nother thing. Yeah. You might run into a product manager who feels like, well, I was going to build that next quarter, or I thought ours was pretty good. And now you're stepping on their toes. So there's a lot of kind of things you got to manage. So what was like the kind of the introduction into your entrepreneurial journey like my first company. So I was, I was a psychology major because I was interested in going to law school. Nice. I got into law school, and at the same time got a job offer, in finance. And so I took that my plan in my head was, this will be kind of cool. I'll, you know, I'll take a year off school, take a little break. How old are you at this point? I was right at college. Okay. So how old is that? 22. 23? Yeah, something like that. And so I took this job in finance with the idea that I'll come back, you know, in a year and do my law school. But I enjoyed it and got kind of into the groove of having a job, make a little money. Never went back to law school. And so I got into finance, which led me to, I eventually worked at UBS, which I don't know, it's UBS Financial Services, Union Bank, Switzerland, and I was a financial advisor, basically stockbroker, you know, however you want to call it. And I got into that because I was interested in numbers and portfolios and understanding that world. And I wanted to build the best portfolio ever. Right. That was my goal. And for clients, of course. And what I learned, this was one of my first lessons, I think, in business was whether you're a stockbroker, a doctor, a librarian, whatever it is, you're first in sales. You got to sell yourself. You know, I had to sell myself to clients in order to get to the part I enjoyed, which is building their portfolios. And so while I was good at that, I enjoyed it. It wasn't what I wanted to do. And so that's a long lead in to one afternoon. I was going to see a client, and I had forgotten some of their paperwork, and I didn't want to be late. So I found myself, and I'm about to date myself. This was in like 0405. This was kind of before, you know, the internet was really broad. You know, speeds are slow. We certainly didn't have internet on our phones. And or if we did, it was like unusable. And so I was pulling up to neighborhoods trying to get close enough to home so I could get a little bit of Wi-Fi signal bleeding out to get to my email and download these documents. And I remember thinking, being so frustrated, like, why am I having to, like, find Wi-Fi? Why isn't it just everywhere? Right? So that's easy to use. And that afternoon, I started doing some research when I got back to the office and I found out that as a product that didn't exist in the world, but technology existed, that it could. And I quit my job that week now, and started, a wireless company. And we built the first metropolitan scale Wi-Fi network in the country. Well, and we manufactured our own equipment. I bought literally bought. Well, daughter bought a little single board computers and, radios to, to embed in them and antennas. And we put it all in this hurricane Nema proof hurricane box. And we just started leasing space on cell towers, rooftops, light poles anywhere we could, and built this mesh network and deployed that first network. Wow. That was my first step into entrepreneurism. I guess if you do it well, you're making it sound easier than it. Probably it was not. It was not at all. What was that like initial transition going from this like corporate stable job to like jumping into this like massive endeavor? Yeah. I mean, what kind of struggles you dealt with. Yeah. I mean, you're jumping off the roof and there's no net, and you, you got to build the net on the way down. Yeah, right. Or splat. You got to learn to fly. Yeah. And so and by the way, I'm still building on that. You know, I don't know if it's still free falling. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, it. I loved it because it was like, every day. It was like I just hit another brick wall. I just hit another hurdle. How am I going to solve this? And you know that, you know, I'm a survivor. It's just like, keep going. Just keep going. Keep going. And that was fun for me. That's what I like to do is like, figure out how do I. I saw the next problem and it was okay. We figured out, you know, we've got a a solution that can do this. How do we get it on light poles. So we had to figure out, you know, what's the enclosure look like. How do we get it there? And then where are you going to get light poles from? It was easy to lease space on cell towers, but. So we kind of forged relationships with city to say, you know, give us access to your light poles in return for free access on the network. Those sorts of things. So it was just, for me, a lot of fun solving that, but at the same time, very difficult because I wanted to go really fast. And you're surrounded by, you know, certainly in cities and governments, people who don't like to go so fast. Yeah, yeah. What was it like navigating that? Like municipal realm. Not fun again. Relationships, right. It was all about, you know, finding the right person to have the right relationship with. And that's I think I attribute that ability. I went to the Citadel, and I found myself in the commandant's office quite often. And I learned to stay out of trouble. It wasn't getting building a relationship with the commandant. For me, anyway, I built a relationship with his secretary because I learned nothing gets to him, but through her. And she became my filter. I kept a client on her desk every week, and, you know, brought her the apple and all the things. And she's the only reason I graduated. You're keeping her bombs. Great. Yeah, exactly. So I kind of learned through that. It's fine. You know, the right person isn't necessarily always the mayor. It's. Yeah, it's someone else. Maybe that is actually, you know, hitting the buttons, pulling the levers. Finding that person, having that relationship, I think is key so early in that entrepreneurial journey and like through that process, like, what were some of those lessons? Are those hard to swallow pills that you took on that you know, you still carry to this day that are important to your success? Yeah, I think, you know, for me, you know, I often I can build and see a vision pretty quickly for things. And I get frustrated when other people don't share that vision. And it's not you know, it's not that I have the best vision or purpose is just that I can see one. Right? Yeah. And it's always frustrating when you can't get alignment on the other side or quickly enough to, to kind of execute what you want to do. And I think that's, you know, a little bit of maybe a neurotic and a little bit of truth in there too, that, you know, it's it goes back to sales, you know, you can have a great vision, but if you can't sell it to people around you to get buy in, you're not going to go anywhere. So what are the keys to having that influence over your constituents and making them see that vision and making them inspired so that they're moving in a direction and building momentum towards that end goal? Yeah, I think I think being frank is is always been there's always work for me. You know, let me just put all my cards on the table. I'm not going to try to to hide something from you to use it later. I'm just gonna put it here. Now. I think you get to the end of conversations quicker. Yeah. I think yes is phenomenal. No is okay. Maybes the worst, right? You never want to get stuck at maybe, so the quicker you get to a no is, the faster you get to your next question. And maybe eventually. Yes. Right, right. So I think that's super key. And I think confidence if, if you aren't confident in your vision, no one else will be and you've got exude that, you've got to know you can get there and I think people will sense it and they'll want to follow you. I think that's key. What habits do you instill in your own life that allow you to be successful? I think never stopping. You know, oftentimes everyone wants to ride. I think everybody has different thresholds. Fortunately for me, mine's really, really high. I wish it were lower sometimes that I would start stuff sooner. But yeah, I think for me, it's just that you keep going until you get to an outcome. Yeah. Relentlessness. Yeah, yeah, it can be difficult in the face of adversity, but that's what, separates the boys from the men. Right? Yeah. You. Well, you never are done until you quit, right? Yeah. If you never quit, you're still going. And what motivates you outside of financial gain to continue down this path? I think if I mean, of course, we all, you know, want want to have money to, to, to fund our lifestyles. But for me it is still the fun of doing it. You know, I look at entrepreneurism, starting companies as a playground and it's it's great fun to come up with new ideas or see something you envision come to life. That's what does it for me, I think. What's your definition of success, I think and that's tough because right now I'm actually trying to exit, thing. And the definition would be that hitting that number, but there's so much more to and seeing a product you completely made up in your mind in the hands of someone else getting value from it. You know, that's really that success, I think. Absolutely. Yeah. It's that more that intrinsic motivation than the extrinsic. The extrinsic is nice, but it's not doesn't have that long term fulfillment. Yeah. I think one of my favorite books is the Dao of Pooh, like Winnie the Pooh. And what I took from it's a great book, if you should read it. What I take from it is, you know, I'm going to screw up the line. But, you know, throughout the book, you know, it follows Winnie the Pooh and it's it's the Dao is philosophy book. But you know, what I took from it is, you know, there's going to be lots of moments and, well, there's a few moments in life where you kind of hit that thing, you cross that finish line, you have a big win and it feels really good and you celebrate it. You're you're going to have some of those in life. You're going to probably have more times where you failed and didn't quite get there. And that both of those together are going to make up maybe 20% of your life. The other 80% is all the time in between. And that's where you got to kind of find value and, and get your life force from, because that's where you're going to spend most of your days. That's great advice. Yeah. My final question is, what is one thing that you know now that you wish you knew when you first embarked on this entrepreneurial journey? Oh, man, you get, you hit me that hard. That's tough. I think surround yourself with good people that are going to help push you forward and not drag you backwards. I think that that that will serve you well. Yeah. Awesome advice. I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah. I didn't even know I, I don't know how it started. That's, So it's funny, we this is something we learned like halfway, you know, probably six months in doing the podcast that we used to, I would run, like, an intro. I'd be like, you know, this is shaking hair, blah, blah, blah. Like, this is our guests, you know, whoever and you would see this, like we'd be having a great conversation before the podcast would start and then you would see this mask go on the person as soon as I would lead with the intro. Yeah. So Sam and I, like, strategize, like, let's not tell the person that we're starting. Just get the conversation going and then it transitions and you get more of an authentic conversation. Yeah. If, people are interested in reaching out to you, they want to, you know, chat or they're interested in their services. Interested in your products. Where, like, where can they find you? I'm pretty easy, Sam. Actually, it's not as easy to say Sam at event dot gives. That's not event gives. Dot com. It's even dot gives. Okay, so I guess you'll always find me awesome. Well I appreciate you coming on. Yeah. This has been great for sure. Yeah I mean yeah.
