Craig Handley - Revenue Is Your Shield From Your Mistakes

Oct 20, 2022

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BIO: Craig Handley is an author of a best-selling book: Hired to Quit, Inspired to Stay: How Focusing on Employee Dreams Built an Exceptional Culture and an Unbreakable Company. He is a musician writing music for artists all over the world.

STORY: Craig’s company invested over a million dollars in software that was never used.

LEARNING: Find a niche and concentrate on that. Review your financial statements monthly.

“If you’re a company doing X, don’t try to be a company doing everything else.”

Craig Handley

Guest profile

Craig Handley is an author of a best-selling book: Hired to Quit, Inspired to Stay: How Focusing on Employee Dreams Built an Exceptional Culture and an Unbreakable Company.

He is a musician writing music for artists all over the world.

He is a bit of a comedian who has done Stand Up on Broadway in New York City.

Craig also moonlights as CEO of his company ListenTrust, named #1 in Business Products and Service on Inc. Magazine’s 500 and 5,000 lists.

That company does about $150m in sales for their clients and answer 100’s of thousands of C.S. lead generation calls.

ListenTrust employs close to 1,000 awesome people, and Craig now runs a social media company called SocialClose that’s gone from 0 to $600,000 in revenue in the past 60 days.

Craig has cage-dived with great white sharks and rappelled down Table Mountain in South Africa, driven the Baja 500 trail in Mexico, and hiked through the jungles of Malaysia.

In Iceland, he snowmobiled across a live volcano, swam in the Blue Lagoon, and dove in the famed Silfra Fissure, the only dive site in the world where your dive is in the crack between two continental plates.

He is also the 85th civilian in the world ever to jump out of a plane from over 32,000 feet (HALO Dive)... out of respect; mosquitoes don’t bite him.

Craig hung out on Necker Island with Richard Branson, met Ringo Starr, and bumped into Paul McCartney (before security escorted him back to his table while trying to get a selfie.)

And in Calgary, he had a scarf blessed while meeting the Dalai Lama (which he has since misplaced).

He has partied with Akon, Snoop Dogg, and many other celebrities who asked him for his autograph (because they thought he starred in Vikings or Game Of Thrones, and he did not correct their thinking).

He served five years in the U.S. Army infantry during the first Iraqi war, leaving with an honorable discharge.

Handley studied voice and piano in college. He has written and produced hundreds of songs, from rap to pop to ballads to humorous parodies, and even opened for Coolio and hosted the Adult Entertainment Awards.

He once turned down a record deal because it would have been “a pay cut” from his profitable businesses - and the required tour schedule didn’t leave him enough time for his business or family.

Worst investment ever

Craig owned a call center and was paying a lot for software licensing. He figured he could save money by building the company’s own order entry platform. The company hired a team of five people to make this software. Each of them was getting paid around $70,000 a year.

The programmers told Graig that the company needed to have a specific piece of software to integrate with the platform they were building. The software was at a discounted rate of $330,000 a year. This would save the company a million dollars yearly by not having to pay for a third-party platform. So Craig bit the bullet and paid the $330,000. That was about 14 years ago. To this day, nobody has ever logged in to that platform. Nobody integrated it. Nobody did anything with that software. So the company not only invested $330,000 in that product but also invested in five salaries that produced nothing. The company basically put almost a million dollars into building its own software that was never used.

Lessons learned

Learn what business you’re into and think it through. If you’re a company doing X, don’t try to be a company doing everything else.

Andrew’s takeaways

Software isn’t what it appears to be.
Don’t develop software without reading The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Revenue is your shield from your mistakes. It prevents your mistakes from destroying you.
Get on-time and accurate financial statements from your accountants and review them monthly.

Actionable advice

Ask for help when you’re not sure about a significant decision you need to make.

Craig’s recommended resources

Craig recommends his book Hired to Quit, Inspired to Stay: How Focusing on Employee Dreams Built an Exceptional Culture and an Unbreakable Company for anyone who wants to build a perfect culture within their organization
Craig also recommends Matthew Kelly’s book The Dream Manager: Achieve Results Beyond Your Dreams by Helping Your Employees Fulfill Theirs.

No.1 goal for the next 12 months

Craig’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to grow his marketing company to over two and a half million. Craig also hopes to win a Grammy next year.

Parting words

“Be unselfish and give before you take. Be a person of faith who believes that when you help others, the universe will come back around and help you.”

Craig Handley

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