From Single Studio to 7+ Figure Exit with David Hilton

David Hilton is a results-oriented management strategist dedicated to unlocking the potential in businesses. He serves as President of Strategic Vision Business Development Corp., where he works with firms across diverse industries, including computer software, photography, and medical professions. His specialties encompass strategic planning, marketing and sales, business growth strategies, and operations, including Scrum/Agile Implementation and Theory of Constraints.

Practicing what he preaches, David successfully grew and recently sold a profitable manufacturing, sales, and retail company. In this role, he managed multiple locations and was responsible for recruiting, hiring, and training over 500 people, ultimately developing the company to thrive without his day-to-day involvement.

David holds a Doctorate in Business Administration from SMC University, a BS degree from Rochester Institute of Technology, a Master’s in Education from Worcester State College, and an MBA from Boston College. He is certified in Scrum and Theory of Constraints, and has extensive experience as a Senior E-Myth Coach and Independent Business Advisor with Glazer-Kennedy’s Insider’s Circle.

Known for simplifying complex business issues into “plain talk,” David draws on his “been there and done that” experience to provide new insights and solutions for business owners. He is the author of SPARK, Taking Your Business from Struggle to Significance and co-authored The Ultimate Success Secret with Dan Kennedy.

David Hilton Episode Transcript

 I either figured the boss was gonna kill me and I was terminally unemployable and was gonna have to do this for myself. The average studio owner makes about $32,000 a year. You can make more than that at Home Depot. Well, this little thing called profit is rather important. You have to focus on profit.

It’s easy to get volume and go out of business. Many companies do ’cause they’re chasing volume. It was four times their price, but the product we had was very desirable for them. It was a a couple years of pain to do it, but then we opened the third studio and we went from zero to 900,009 months. 900,000 is three or four times the average studio that’s been in business for 20 years.

Employees are not to be taken lightly. Employees are very key people to you. What if you could build a multimillion dollar business that not only grew revenue wise, but also gave you back your time and freedom? Imagine creating a real business that operates profitably without your daily involvement.

This isn’t just a dream. It’s exactly what my guest today achieved. Welcome to today’s episode of Your Business Growth podcast. I’m your host Jeremy Shapiro, and my guest today, David Hilton, started his entrepreneurial journey like many of us. Running a single owner dependent business deeply involved in every part of the day-to-day operations, he quickly recognized a fundamental truth, doing things the same way, would always yield the same results.

And this realization sparked a quest for a better way, leading him to seek out the best business minds across the country. What David uncovered was a powerful principle that allowed him to change the result. This understanding led to a radical transformation in his photography studio, allowing him to multiply its size sixfold in the first year alone.

Then he scaled beyond that initial success, navigating the challenges of expanding to multiple locations, ultimately building a business that thrived without his constant presence he achieved. True financial success and the freedom to step away. Today we’re gonna dive into David’s remarkable journey, exploring the mindset shift that he made, the challenges he overcame, and the precise strategies that allowed him to not just grow, but to truly thrive and gain his freedom.

Let’s dive in and find out how he cracked the code to scale. Welcome, David. Well, thank you for the introduction. You know, I said it is interesting what you were saying there because. You know, I love systems, um, and even what I did is systematical and it can be applied to almost any small business. Okay.

The fundamentals are fundamental at the end of the day. Doesn’t matter what business you’re in, fundamentals always apply. Yeah. I I, I think you and I both commonly say the same thing, like, you know, business is, business is business, and you know, you hear from folks, but my business is different. And like, yeah, sure it is.

But also like we can solve most of the problems the same way. Or you don’t understand my town, right? Yeah. But, but it’s different here. So David, before we get to your breakthroughs, scaling and exit, tell us how you even got into this family business in the first place. Well, you, you, you said a key word there, family, business.

So, uh, my, my dad had a typical mom and pop photography studio. Um, in high school I was an okay student, but I. Was it really a motivated, uh, student And I really didn’t know what I wanted to do after high school, so off to Rochester and pseu of technology. I went, my father had gone there for photography years ago and, um, when I was there and, um, you know, and then I enjoyed it, uh, the experience, but I also realized it has to be something bigger.

I mean, the average photographer or studio owner in the country doesn’t make the whole lot. Okay. And that’s a sad. Sad truth. And it doesn’t need to be true because I’ve got clients in the photography business and several other businesses, but photography business who make seven figures net profit each year.

So, um, it’s possible, but it’s rare. But it’s, but it’s a system. It’s, it’s, it’s a process that anybody can do. And, and it works for all kinds of businesses. So David, there are a lot of photographers out there, like, how did you guys differentiate in such a crowded marketplace? The fortunate news and my particular case is, um, I was gonna get outta the photography business, quite frankly, be when I realized that this isn’t going anywhere and I didn’t have a vision for where I wanted to go.

And so I’m starting to look at other kinds of businesses and so forth, and that, those days was the. Beginning of the desktop computers. Okay. And, uh, coming away from mainframe to desktop and I’ve started to get involved in that. I, again, started to get involved in some manufacturing things, had had a degree in edu, master’s degree in education, starting get my MBA.

And, but you know, going through interviews with bosses, I either figured the boss is gonna kill me, I’m gonna. Kill the boss. So at the right bold age of 21, I figured out I was terminally unemployable and was gonna have to do this for myself. So, so, uh, um, nice realization because that’s, uh, that’s actually a key point that many people want, you know?

Well, I’d like to be in business by myself ’cause I know more than the boss does. Yeah. But the boss knows how to, you know, work day to day and, and produce income for himself and for his employees. Most people don’t. Okay. That’s, that’s starting place right there is that, you know, when you’re decide to go into business for yourself, you’ve made a decision that any money you earn is gonna come from what you do and not from what you’re owed.

End quote. Um, you know, so most people prefer a paycheck versus at risk money, but when you’re on your own, you’re at totally at risk money. So that’s a, a key piece right there at the very beginning to un understand that, to be successful. But anyways, I attended a lecture one time and fortunately met a person who.

Ultimately became probably the wealthiest photographer I’ve ever met. Um, he, somebody nobody had heard, ever heard of. Um, he lectured once or twice, maybe four times the most ever in, in his lifetime. He did, didn’t like lecturing, and I happened to be in one of his lectures and had a 300 feet of people in the audience.

I think I was the only one taking notes. Everybody else thought he was crazy. See, I always took the road less travel, Jeremy. Okay, if everybody else is doing this, I’m gonna do this. Go the other direction. And this fellow was doing that, so I didn’t copy him, but I got a vision out of him. I said, this guy has 10 studios.

Mul ended up being 14 when he retired, but, um, 10 studios, uh, across, um, the West Coast. And I said, if one guy can do it, two guys can do it. So that’s another lesson here too. If you’ve seen somebody be successful, they can do it. I can do it. If you’re willing to put in the work, the learning, the suffering and so forth in the process, the suffering is just a lesson to be learned, that’s all.

It’s not a roadblock, it’s a lesson to be learned. When you stepped into the business, what would you say was wrong with the business? Like it had been successful for years before you got involved? Yeah. I mean, you know, we grew up middle class. Okay. And, um, and, you know, got by, you know, we didn’t travel a lot, things like that.

We traveled locally and, you know, I thought we were doing well, but like today’s standards, you know, photographers aren’t doing well. Okay. I mean, the average studio owner makes according to some benchmarks from the National Association. Um, the average studio owner makes about $32,000 a year. You can make more than that at at Home Depot.

Okay. I wanted to make way more than that. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, so I have to do something different. ’cause if I did it the way other photographers did it, I’m going to get what other photographers get. Yeah. That’s another important lesson. If you do what other people in your profession are doing, you’re probably gonna get what they get.

And if that’s not much, um, then that you might wanna take a different direction. Yeah. So, uh, given that you didn’t like where it was and even where most folks ended up, um, where was the studio even finding customers? Like was it growing, was it steady? Like, were there a lot of repeat customers? Like how did you guys get growth?

My dad, who was a wonderful photographer, but um, you know, he would photograph anything. Okay, somebody wants shoes, photograph, which we did have a, an account that did that while I’m photographing shoes today, you know, if somebody needs a family portrait tomorrow, he is doing that. If somebody else needs a headshot for their business, he’s doing that.

Somebody needed passports, he’s doing that. Somebody wanted a wedding, he’s doing that well. So no specialization. No, and that’s a quick thing I learned out and I through some other people I had met, and again. Not people that other people knew or copied. Most of the people I learned from, they didn’t care about being known in the profession.

They just cared about being successful in the profession. I had to seek them out, uh, and find them. And, um, not, not easy, but it’s worth the, it’s worth the opportunity. And I didn’t have money to do this. If I learned about somebody, I’d call ’em up and I’d say, can I buy you lunch? David, um, you’re over in the Boston area.

I’m in California. I said, yeah, I, I’m gonna fly out, buy you lunch. I didn’t have money to fly out, but I had to get it together ’cause that’s a person I need to talk to, to learn something to help my vision. Now this is a, a really, really key point for everybody. Most people I talk to in business, yeah, I wanna build this business so I can make money.

That’s their idea of a vision. No. Now the money will come. If the vision is good, the vision is strong. The vision is something that can customers can relate to, and you do that well, then the money flows. The money is not a vision. Money is not a goal. That was a really tough thing for me to get over is money is not a goal.

Money is a result of doing something. Well, it’s not the goal though. Okay, now, yes, I’d like a lot of money. And I might even put a number on it, but it’s not gonna be the goal. It’s gonna be the result of doing the right things. What was it that, that you were establishing as your goal? Like how did you take that knowledge and put that in place for yourself?

Well, due to the, my, my original mentor, um, he changed the nature of high school. Photography. And that’s why everybody in the audience thought he was crazy. ’cause the stuff he was doing, he was copying magazines and that’s not what high school photography looked like at the, at that timeframe, years and years ago now.

Mm-hmm. Um, and I said, well, again, one guy can do it. So, so I started picking up magazine. My dad said, this is crazy, we’re gonna go broke. I said, well, we’re gonna do this or otherwise I gotta go someplace else. Okay. And he said, okay, I’ll work for you. So in my twenties, I’m already in my dad switching to working for me.

But the kids flocked to us ’cause nobody was doing it. We changed the nature of that whole industry because we saw something different. My friend was on the west coast, I was on the east coast and we just changed the entire sta what senior photography would be today, uh, would be a result of the thanks we did.

Wow. So I, I’m hearing a few things there, right? Um, one is that you went from this, we’ll photograph anything down to a really, really narrow niche, which was scary for a business owner who had previously gone wide to hear about going deep. But that. It worked. Right. Uh, I’m also hearing that you sought out advisory and mentorship, and that really made a big difference for you as well.

Um, I, I’m curious, David, like, did you find that, like just working or hustling harder is what grew the business? How did the Hustle Factor show up into the growth that you guys had? Well, I love a, I love a quote that Steve Jobs has. Uh, and it’s, uh, if you find a vision for yourself that’s strong enough, it’ll pull you out of bed in the morning.

Okay. You don’t have to worry about getting up in the morning. You’re gonna get pulled out of the bed to go. ’cause I wanna work on that vision. Okay. And my, my vision that I had for my business lasted the 35 years I built that business and my goal was to retire when I was 55. I retired and, uh, when I was 54 and a half, so, okay.

Um, and, um, but I the same vision the whole time. Not changing. Okay? And it may have evolved, but it didn’t change. Okay? Might get a little bit more perfected but didn’t change. And you focus on that and you do that. And if it’s different than other people and customers want it, you’re gonna own the market, which I did love it.

So. Let’s talk about that for a moment. You know, you guys niched in and you got to a point later on where you owned the market, but, um, were you just chasing more sales with the portrait photography or were you also looking at profitability? Like, was it volume, was it profit? What was the, what was the metrics you were looking at?

Well, this little thing called profit is rather important. Okay. So, so you have to, you have to focus on profit. It’s, uh, it’s easy to get volume. Go out of business. Okay. Um, and many, many companies do because they’re chasing volume. Okay. That’s, that’s seldom way works. Okay. Um, you know, cost of goods sold matters a lot.

Or gross profit margin. Okay. Matters a ton. You know, it, it’s, it’s like Walmart. People say, well, I’m just gonna be like Walmart and be cheap. Okay. Walmart. Has huge gross profit margin because they built a system so they can put products in their store less expensively than anybody else. So Sears tried to match their price.

JC Penny tried to match their price. We got a business because they didn’t have the systems in place to put the product in the store at a much lower cost. Okay. So profit is incredibly unfortunate. Okay. As you’re building it. Yes. And so pricing has to be appropriate, and my pricing were higher than most all my competitors, but we also.

Well, first of all, the, my product was different and the clients wanted it, but we also had to be able to be able to build value, why our prices were higher, the sales pitch marketing and everything else had to go along with looking like the price we were gonna charge. Love that. So tell me more about, uh, what you guys were doing to, to show that higher value, right?

So that there was not just higher perceived value, but real world value that justified, you know, uh, a premium price point. Well, listen, if this would be a deeper conversation that would really go into the high school market, which actually, um, when I sold the business, we were at the pinnacle of the high school market, um, because that the.

Digital was coming online at that time and so forth. We’re back in, you know, close to 2000 now. So quite a while ago. Um, 2010 actually. But, and I already saw the peak coming. Now most people didn’t. Most people thought, oh, this is an awesome business. Let me uh, just get into this. So I had, I was already looking for buyers for my company, and that’s a three to five year process if you wanna sell it, right?

Um, another discussion if you want to take questions later, but on it. But, um. You can see around the corner and know that the market is, that’s the time to sell. Okay. ’cause other people are saying, oh, this is thriving, thriving, thriving, and they watch your business and I know it’s time to exit. That’s a good time to sell.

Yeah. Take the money. So had you guys not pivoted away from casting a wide net and narrowing down a niching and going a value-based premium price direction, like what would’ve happened if you didn’t change, but, and you stayed the course? Yeah. You wouldn’t succeed? Um, you know, if you think about it, you know, Steve Jobs got fired from Apple.

He came back to Apple and they had about a hundred products. Within the first month or so, I’ve forgotten exactly the timeframe you’re in Silicon Valley, you probably know better. But um, but when he came back, he made a mandate, we’re dropping to 10 products from a hundred. ’cause he knew that we couldn’t do all those.

So he had to focus on where the success and the niche for Apple was. And the rest is history of course. So. Okay. You know, Microsoft’s not all thanks to all people either. They’re not trying to be an Apple. Okay. They’re trying to, they’re doing products really. Were all designed for, um, companies. Okay? You know, businesses not customers.

Now, not for individual customers. Apple was much more on the consumer side at the time, you know, they both sort of morphed and come closer together these days, of course, but yeah. So, and you know, so, and, and you, you think about, well, Walmart sells all this kind of stuff. No. Walmart focuses on who their customer base is, and they have products for that customer base.

They don’t try to, they don’t try to get, um, you know, Neiman Marcus’s clients to Walmart. Okay. They don’t even try to get Target’s. Customers, although Target’s, you know, tangentially close to Walmart, they’re just a, a nacho, but. That’s not where their focus is, their focus is they know their customer basin, that’s who they go for.

’cause you start going broader than that, you know, the seas and was trying to be something to everybody. And the rest is history of course. So it sounds like you, you learned a lot from that and tried not to be something to everybody, but be everything to someone. And I love that sort of, that, that duality there.

So, um, something David, you and I have talked about in the past is this idea of like. If you’re looking to restart growth, you know, do you go after more revenue, more profit, more customers, like, you know, which direction do you go with all the options that, that you had available for growth? Like how did you choose what to implement first to six X in that first year alone?

If you understand. Understand which customers are profitable for you. Okay. You know, what can I do at my price level? I mean, obviously the higher price I can. Charge and have value from my customer and I can produce the product cheaper. Okay. Um, let’s call it less expensively. Cheaper Sounds like, you know, something that’s sh shoddy.

Okay. But less expensively. That’s giving me the profit margin. When I raised my, as I raised my prices, then that’s a key thing because my biggest competitor was a billion dollar company. Um, they’ve, they’ve moved on, uh. Almost gone bank. Well, actually they got sold out. They were almost out of business now, but, um, but a billion dollar photography business and, um, biggest in the world.

And, um, but, you know, I was four times their price, but I had a, I had a, I mean, the product we had was very desirable for the kids. Okay. And the kids are the decision makers in that case, mom’s the financial, but, but if the kids want it, that’s where they’re going. Okay. And, and we did families and children as well, but we also knew how to beat our competition.

So I’d come into a town, you know, when I moved a, a studio into a new town, there was always a dominant photographer in town, or maybe two or three that had been there for 20 or 30 years. We were the dominant photographer in the first nine months because of our marketing also. So not only did we have a great product that we knew and had tested with real customers that they wanted, we also had great marketing to support that.

So that, you know, I looked at it, I, I never study photographers. I study outside of the business. So for instance, if I’m opening studios, I don’t wanna see what some other photographer did to open their studio. ’cause it’s probably not very good. So, but I look at. People like say Olive Garden or somebody who opens a big chain of studio of restaurants or something, or even Home Depot or whatever.

I mean, on day one, when they open the door, you can’t get a seat in that restaurant, okay? Because they’ve already trained their staff, they’ve got their marketing in place, et cetera, et cetera. And so on day one, so I, I learned that. So I said on day one, when we open a store, we’re gonna be busy because we’ve already got it.

Marketing plan in place if, you know, decide, you know, getting the leads and things like that. Those are beyond a too narrow niche to talk about today. But, but I got the leads and so forth, uh, to do that. So I love that. You know, I have a client that, uh, I’ve done some great work with that opens up gyms and part of his whole formula for opening up new gym locations, um, is on day one.

When it opens, it’s already fully booked up. Membership is full. They don’t need any new customers. And so they opened day one and they’re just booked up, and the next order of businesses opening the next location. So I, I love that you looked outside the photography industry, um, at, who was full from day one and, and implemented the strategies.

That’s, that’s really cool. Well, you know, it’s interesting. Let’s use the gem one analogy for a little bit. Um, I have a company down the street from where I live here, um, called Planet Fitness. I think they’re pretty big, but I think they may be getting close to a billion dollar corporation now. Plant fitness.

Okay. It’s a 24 hour chi. Okay? But. Okay. How do they differentiate themselves from every other gym? Okay. Now I also, you know, I happen to go down to Florida in the wintertime. Um, spent a few months down there and I have a neighbor down the street and he drives some very expensive cars. Okay. But he is a one man gym.

He’s got his own thing, but he’s a trainer. He trains very wealthy people at a, at a, a huge amount of money. Okay. So two very different models can both exist. Okay. As long as there’s a clientele available to them. Okay. It, it’s this fellow down in Vero, you know, move to a town that was not very, um. Didn’t have a lot of money.

Okay. You know, average or less American income. He, he wouldn’t have any customers. He’s in a neighborhood where people care about that stuff and there’s an audience for him to play with. Okay. You know, planet Fitness could open up almost in any city because their prices are very low, but they’ve got a good product.

You’ve touched David on two different ends of that spectrum, right? You know, two businesses arguably in the same industry. But choosing to serve different audiences with value in different ways, very similar to what you did. So not all businesses have figured themselves out and know who they wanna serve and make that same mistake that, um, that you saw of trying to serve everyone.

So before you decide to go on the more premium side, had you tried discounting your way to profit? Like, did you guys ever try to be a low cost provider? Discounting in my world would be, anybody uses that world, I want to punch ’em in. Okay? Discounting will put you out of business. Simply put, okay. Ways I can combine things and I can have a, um, special price, but I’m gonna make sure my margins are staying.

Okay. Um, people think they can discount them their way to success. You can’t, it’s not possible. Now you say, well, the big department stores do it in January. Okay. Yeah. That’s ’cause they’ve got last year’s inventory and they have to get rid of it. Okay. It’s still not a really good idea. The, the ones who’ve under who have under he’ll have gotten down.

Forecasting is really hard in that business. That’s a really hard business. Um, you know, merchandise, um, merchandise particularly because it changes so fast. But the ones who get their supply chain operations down much, much better, don’t end up with excess inventory in January. Okay. And they can become much more profitable.

Because they’re looking at next season stuff ahead of the curve and things like that, so, so that’s very important in that kind of an industry. But discounting, bad word, bad word. I couldn’t agree more. I And, uh. I’ve learned a fair amount of the math behind that, you know, from, from our conversations in the past.

So that’s great. So, okay, sometime you’ll need to teach ’em about that math. I could do it with you, but that’s, that’s a whole nother longer conversation. I love it. We cover a high level, uh, overview of some of the dangerous, uh, the dangers of discounting in the book. So, uh, there’s some good examples in there.

So, alright, David, um, you guys niche down. We talked about how niching allows you to specialize in, bring in more customers and that allows you to charge a premium. Once you’ve done that, tell me more about some of the other changes you made to increased revenue and profitability with those customers and that lead flow of, you know, of clients coming through the, through the front door.

We had another, another piece to that as well for the small business people out there, because, you know, so many small business people I talked to, I said, well, David, I could never double my business. I’m already working, you know, 12 hours a day. I couldn’t work 24 hours a day to double my business. No, the theory is make more work less.

Okay? And we do that by Sy Systemization And systems will set you free. Well, people say, well, no, systems are too rigid. You know, systems, they’re not human. Okay. And so forth. No, not true. Okay? Not true if you do, if you design them properly. Okay? A good restaurant chain has good systems. Okay. McDonald’s succeeds for a reason.

You can go to any McDonald’s in the world and get exactly the same product. ’cause they have exactly the same system you and I have for decades talked systems and, uh, we can do a lot more with that. So without diving too deep into the importance of systemization, all of that, um, there’s one really cool thing you did after you six folded the business.

Um, in one year or six exit, you then went on to open a second location and more beyond that. And one thing you’ve shared with me in the past is that. Opening a second location is often what kills most businesses. And you clearly that that was not the, the nail in your coffin. It was close. It was close.

What happened when you went to open that second location? You think you have it nailed when you’ve got the one building working. Okay. ’cause you’re right there. You’re the guy. Okay. Um, yeah, you might have some help. Maybe you’ve got some system, a few systems in place, which we did. And you think you’ve got it now?

I can open a second one. No. Um, because you’re gonna quickly learn what systems you don’t have, which is probably most of the necessary ones. And so that second business, if you’re not careful, if you don’t get some good help or advice from somebody who’s done it, wipe out a lot of businesses when they try that.

I mean, it almost did it to us too. Fortunately, I figured it out and, but, but it was a, a couple years of pain to do it. But then I, we, we opened the third studio and we went from, I don’t know, zero to 900,000 in nine months. And the photography business, 900,000 is three or four times the average studio that’s been in business for 20 years.

And, and that was just that third studio? Yeah. My mentor had told me, Dave, you’ll understand it when you get to five. Thank God I understood it when I got to three. So, whew. So when you’re not physically present, how do you ensure that the money is accounted for? Operations are consistent. You know that the experience for clients is the same matter where they go, like, what were you doing to provide that consistent experience?

And allow the studios to run without you physically being there, first of all. Yeah. Who’s overseeing the employees to make sure they’re doing their jobs and doing them to the standards of your systems? That’s a really key point because people think of systems, but they don’t think of the standards that we need to.

If you’re gonna be top notch, you’ve gotta have top-notch standards and people have to adhere to them, so you have to have a measurement system. And so forth now. Now the other challenge is, is when you have more multiple location. Now sometimes you go into a mom and pop restaurant and mama is taking the cash at the cash register.

Okay? Because she knows her employees will steal from her. Okay? You know, dad stays to the end of the night. To make sure the back door is locked and nobody’s taking all the alcohol out the back door and so forth. Okay? But when you go to studio, you know, uh, business number two, location number two, mom’s not taking all the cash, dad’s not locking up the door, and we gotta make sure the inventory isn’t going out the back door, the cash isn’t going out the front door, et cetera, et cetera.

So those are just other processes. Again, I had to live through one of those situations in studio number three, and you get some lessons out of this. Okay. Fortunately, it wasn’t so bad to put me outta business, but, but, uh, it was a significant amount of money. One of our very, what I thought was very, very trustworthy.

People had worked for me for about four years, but something happened in her life and she needed more money. And so a little bit goes out every week and over the course of a year, a lot goes out. So, you know, and. We’re able to recover part of it, but not all. But that’s a lesson learned. Okay. And I think, so I think piece that people are deathly afraid of is a, you’re gonna have these setbacks, okay, you’re gonna have roadblocks.

Okay. You know, you’re gonna have struggles. Okay? And those aren’t stop signs when people realize there’s not a stop sign that that obstacle in your way, that, um. Brian Holiday, I think it was wrote the book. Um, the Obstacle is the Way. Okay. Um, I like the title. Um, the book’s pretty good too. Um, but the title says it all.

Okay. The Obstacle is the Way. The Obstacle is not a stop sign. It’s a little sign in the road say, Hey, do slow down. You got something new to learn. And if you get that lesson, man, you take off. Now you know how to break through that, which most people don’t. I love that. I have many of his books. Um, and you know, it’s interesting that I think one of the things that’s scary for many prospective business owners from starting a business is this, I, this fear of failure.

This fear of, you know, the problems and challenges and things that come up, um, and that can, you know, keep you in bed and prevent you from walking out the front door every day because there’s not green lights the whole way between here and where you’re going. Uh, or, or you take that first step, right? And understand.

You’re gonna face some obstacles, um, and that it’s okay. You’ll learn from them, right? And, and grow through it. So you had asked me somewhat earlier, but um, you know, how much am I working in the business now? By the time we get to studio number three, I mean, I opened it as the photographer. Okay. And quickly realize you can’t manage three studios in.

Ridiculous concept. Okay. And I also like to be done my work at five o’clock, come in at, you know, nine o’clock, uh, go home at five o’clock. My girlfriend still says to me, David, you always could work at five o’clock. Yep, why not? Okay. And, and you know, my goal when I was 40 was to take up four weeks a month, which I’d accomplished forever since, um, at least.

Um, but, um, you know. It’s about training people and then having standards for them to live up to and having a measurement for that standard. You know, I mean, getting into how to do that, you know, we can teach, but that’s beyond the scope of what we can do today. But lemme go into a, the piece I’ve kind of learned about this, the stages of growth, okay.

That people are gonna go through and they can be painful, but don’t think of ’em as painful. Think of ’em as, you know, a super education. Now the first part I see is it’s based on EDU levels of education, even if you will, or abilities to learn. Okay. The, the first piece is unconscious incompetence. Okay. I don’t know what, I don’t know the problem with unconscious incompetence.

People do think they know it all many times and it, and you can tell it by arrogance. People in there that when you see arrogant people, they typically are unconsciously incompetent. They don’t know what they don’t know. Okay? But if we can get ’em out of that, then they can begin to learn. So the really learning starts when I become consciously incompetent.

Okay? And I call that struggle, okay? But if I’m willing to seek out sources of learning. Your book, okay, my books, et cetera, getting the right advice and so forth, okay? I can begin to learn and, but it’s still gonna be struggle. I’m still gonna hit those obstacles more often than not, but get the lessons from the obstacle, okay?

Because then I move up to conscious competence. Now I have to think about it. I have to read the system, the brownie recipe. Okay. Um, but my business is stabilizing now, and then eventually I get to unconscious competence. And this is where you don’t really know what you know, you just automatically do it.

Okay? You’re still systems, but you, this is just natural. And these people don’t really generally know how to teach. It’s pretty, pretty interesting thing when people like you and me figure out how to teach when we’re already consciously competent. That’s sort of a different trait. Okay. But now we’re, now we’re at the sex, you know, twice of mastery.

Okay? And that’s what success it really is. And that’s the level of getting up to hill that we want to get to. And then really above that is significance. Um, now I’m doing good for other people too. Okay? I can do good for my community and things ’cause I’ve got money. To be able to do other good things. Do good for your employees, always treat your employees well.

Employees are not to be thinking lightly. Employees are very and very, very, very key people to you. Um, but here’s the other key piece about that whole sort of pyramid of growth. It has to be continuous learning because the second you stop learning, the second you stop changing. Second, you stop a adapting to what’s going on in the world, you’re gonna slide right down to the bottom.

It’s like shoots and ladders. Okay? Because if you’re not changing, the world around you is always changing, and we have to pay attention to that world. So continuous improvement is super important at that. Especially as you’re getting to the upper echelon, one of the words I love talking about often is this, uh, Japanese concept of kaizen.

This like continuous, never ending improvement. Continuous improvement. Yeah. And you know, a lot of folks think that at some point their business will have made it or they’ll have made it and they’re done. And it’s really this ever evolving thing. And before we wrap up, there’s actually a quote of yours I love that’s sort of around that, that we’ll, that we’ll get to, but we’re not there yet.

Um, I wanna ask, so. You achieved this incredible growth. You multiplied the studio six x in the first year. You expanded to multiple locations. You got the lessons of a five studio company when you had three, right? So you focused on premium pricing, niching systems, and then you went much further. How big did the business get?

By the time I sold it, we were in, at least in the top 10 of, in the country. And there’s 30,000 photographers in the country. So, you know, um, yes. Okay. Um. Was it hard? No, there were a lot of lessons along the way. So some people would call that like hard. No, I didn’t think it was hard. I thought it was fun, you know?

Yeah. You alluded, you’ve alluded to it a few times. Not, not on this call today, but I call it the great game of business. Okay. You know, I, you, you think about football. Okay. Um, if they, the team that’s behind at the end of the first quarter, the chances of them winning the game are pretty slim. They can rebound.

Okay. Um, Kansas City Chiefs, what, a year ago? Not this year, but a year ago, um, rebounded. They were really losing and they went in the locker room and they figured out a plan. Okay. And, and they motivated themselves to execute on that plan. The other team thought they were way ahead and they got cocky. They didn’t plan on continuous improvement and they lost, which isn’t normal.

Okay. But, but it still can be done. I love it. So once you scaled, tell us more about the journey, um, post scale as you were moving towards the exit and tell us about, about the exit. Well, the end game was, um, first of all. I’m recognizing it’s time to sell because the market’s changing so much that I could have adapted the studio to something different.

But it would be like turning a aircraft carrier around in, you know, Boston Harbor. Not, not gonna probably pull it off, you know? Okay. Have it ending up in Logan Airport. Uh, um, but um, that was in that natural time to, to sell. Okay. And because. Nobody else. Everybody else thought it was, man, this, this is, we’re riding the high wave.

Yeah, you’re riding the high wave at the peak. Okay. So, um, but, but you know, when you’re gonna sell, it’s, it’s not something you decide and you’re gonna sell next week. Okay. It’s a process of now finding the right buyer for your business. It’s, uh, it’s a marketing process. It’s looking for the right customer, et cetera, et cetera.

So it’s generally, you know, a few year process as opposed to, you know, like. Put my business up for sale. I’ll sell it in a couple weeks. You know? No, it doesn’t, not, not usually. Well, unless you wanna fire sale it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, then one of the things I, I mean, I’ve, I’ve coached a lot of people who are selling businesses.

I’ve helped them sell businesses and things, and, um, but my first question to them is, what are you gonna do next? ’cause if there’s known next, you are gonna be very unhappy for the rest of your life. And, um, unfortunately, people who have known next see. Longevity is about six years. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Because people without a purpose don’t last long.

And so, you know, my next became my teaching, which is, you know, something I’ve always loved. So let’s talk about that for a moment, David. You know, based on your journey, right, not just with your own business, but have, having worked with thousands of business owners, um, around the world, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give a business owner who, who’s feeling stuck, who’s feeling plateaued in their business?

And trying to figure out how that, how to break through and how to, how to move beyond that. Uh, there’s a wonderful person I learned a lot from Dr. Ellie Goldratt and the Book for Goal and several other good books. Um, look for the constraint. What’s the key thing that’s mostly holding up and back? It’ll always be one.

Okay. Um, think of an hourglass. Okay. If I can widen that little space there, I get a lot more out. Okay. Um, sorry. You gotta look for that constraint. You start with that, okay? And you build from there. So what’s the next constraint? Next constraint and so forth. Um, we gotta teach ’em how to manage differently.

We gotta tend teach ’em about what’s their money is. Okay. I’ll do p and l reviews with, you know, many clients and different kinds of businesses. And the owner often is paying their employees to watch them work, you know, and, and they’re not making any money, but the employees are, you know, so that’s not good.

That’s not good. Um. But, um, but we get it corrected. Okay? It takes some work to do, but we’ve gotta educate first. Um, and because oftentimes they’ll say, well, whoa, whoa, whoa. I, I need this, I need, I have to do it this way. No, you don’t. There’s other ways to do this. Yeah. But it’s not the way I do it. I know it’s not the way you do it.

The way you do it is what’s getting you the result you’ve got, and you don’t want that result. So I have to change. How I do it, you know, change the system, change the results automatically, instantaneous. I love that. Change the system, change the result, and it happens instantaneously too. So, yeah. David, you touched on earlier, um, how important finding mentors was, and um, you’ve used that word a few times.

Um, I know how important mentors have been, you know, in my career and all. But if you were to restart your whole entrepreneurial journey with everything you know now, is there anything you’d approach differently in terms of finding mentors or your earlier education in, in the world of business, I personally love to read, so I’d probably knock up a book a week.

I’m a lifelong learner. Somehow accumulated five college degrees. So that’s not normal and that’s not necessary. Okay. But breeding is okay. Um, finding the right people is, I mean, I’ve never had not had a coach. Okay. Um, so I, well, I can’t say never, but in the past 30 years Okay. I still pay coaching. I, I had, right now it’s on advanced ai.

Okay. But, uh. Yep. So Ellie Gora, Dr. Ellie Gora was a coach of mine for many years. I got got to study with him even over in Israel at his office and so forth. So, yeah, so I’ve always been looking to find, uh. What I need to know. Love it. All right. You dropped this quote early in the episode, um, which I love because it’s so you, but I had in my notes here that I want to ask you about a quote of yours, um, that I love, right?

And that’s about how when you wake up each morning, you get to play the great game of business. The first time I heard that from you, there was so much packed in just those few words about this being the great game of business. Tell us, you know, for our listeners, um, more about that mindset and like what it means to you to look at business as a great game versus I think how many business owners typically view their.

Their business. And this is something I’ve taught to some pretty big businesses. I mean, I’ve worked in businesses up to even a billion dollar businesses and um, it’s certainly hundreds of millions of dollar businesses and things like that. And it’s always still gonna be the great game of business. And sometimes they don’t realize it even at that level.

Okay? And you take a $15 million business, which is buy over way in, in the country, a rare commodity. And the average 90% of all businesses in America are under $2 million. So, you know, when you get into 15, even 15 million, you’re already in getting into rare territory. Nevermind when you’re getting into a billion dollars.

Um, but um, so great game of business. Okay? So think about football, any sport, okay? But we’ll just play with football ’cause I already use that analogy. So we’ll stick with it. You know, if even at the Super Bowl game, if 10 minutes into the game they turned off the scoreboard and told the crowd, we’re not gonna turn it back on.

How much crowd would be left by the third quarter? ’cause nobody knows what the score is. Nobody knows how many yards they gotta go, you know, and nobody’s gonna hang around for that. Okay. So measurement is important. Are we, are we, have we meaningful goals in different kinds of areas of our business? And are we.

Getting to those goals, okay. What’s our metric today? And one of the things I try to teach most of my clients is win the day, win the week, win the year. Okay, so if I know I need whatever business you have, you know, if I need a photography business, it might be five clients a week or 10 clients a week. And you know, if some other business might need a thousand people a day, okay.

Whatever it happens to be, we need, you know, about 65 or 75 clients a day. Okay? Um, you know, I need to make sure that my lead generation, lead conversion system is getting that done. Because if it doesn’t happen today, I’m already losing the year. Okay? And I can know a business, I look at a business in January, February.

I can tell ’em whether they’re going to succeed this year or not. And if they don’t change, and it’s just like in the football game I mentioned, you know, it usually at a quarter, the losing team usually loses. Okay? Not, not a hundred percent. By halftime it’s getting even worse. And third quarter it’s getting worse, and now we’re down to minutes, you know, so, okay.

So we wanna know those answers. It’s thrilling because now I have a scoreboard. Well, speaking of, uh, you know, coming down to the end of the game, David, I’ve learned a ton from you over the decades we’ve worked together. Uh, and even just here on this call, I always am jotting down good notes, um, from, you know, from our conversation.

So what I’m hearing and to recap for our listeners is that you stepped into an established but poorly performing family business. You six xed it in the first year and then grew to one of the top 10 in the country and made a very high seven figure exit. And getting unstuck came down to focusing on getting more customers first.

Then generating more revenue and profit with your customers and incoming leads, specifically through premium pricing and niching and reducing the cost of goods sold to those new customers. I’m very important. Message market match. I’ve gotta know the customer I want and I’ve gotta give them the message they want.

Huge. I love it. David. And for our listeners who wanna learn more about you, uh, or connect, where should they go if they message me on LinkedIn? Um, I’ve got, uh, two books published right now. I’ve got, uh, two more soon to come. Uh, you’ve got them right there on back of you, I think. Uh, spark. Yeah. Okay. So if you go on Amazon.

Um, and you just type in the word spark and the word Hilton, you’ll come up with that book. And the other book is not on Amazon, but it’s, uh, with Jan Dan Kennedy, and it’s the Ultimate Success Secret, uh, co-authored. Um, and if you message me on LinkedIn, um, I can sell you those two books for, um, just postage.

Okay. So it’ll be 7 95. Love it. And if you’re looking for David on LinkedIn, um, you’ll find him. I looking for David Hilton, his, you know, username there on LinkedIn. Is David a Hilton? And we’ll of course have all that in the show notes. David, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been great. I always love our conversations and come away feeling wiser and supported.

So thank you for taking the time. I wish everybody the success of their dreams. And it can be done. It can be done okay, but change is necessary. Love it.