Why Custom Systems Hurt Your Exit, and What Founder-CEOs Should Build Instead

Bruce EckfeldtWelcome, everyone, to From Angel to Exit. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt, I'm your host. Our guest today is Yarin Gaon. He is an exited founder of a couple of different businesses, with some interesting stories. I'm excited for this. He's got some experience here that I think is going to be really interesting and really helpful for folks. I'm excited to get into it and hear what he has to share. So with all that, Yarin, welcome to the program.

Yarin GaonHi, Bruce. Thank you for having me.

Bruce EckfeldtIt's good to have you on. Before we dive into the business side, I'd love to get your personal background. Give us the backstory before you got into business. Where did you grow up? What was the energy around things before you started your first company?

Yarin GaonThat would be a short history, because I started my first company at 14.

Bruce EckfeldtI saw that.

Yarin GaonSo a little bit of context. I'm Yarin. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I'm originally from Israel, and I started a couple of businesses in Israel. The last one became the largest e-commerce platform for military goods, which we're going to talk about today, and which I sold.

Then I moved to the States, finished my MBA, and joined a venture capital firm as an entrepreneur in residence. Basically, I helped the startups that were failing and running out of money. The fund sent me in to turn them around, and that's what I did. I'm a mentor at the University of Chicago. I've mentored a little over 400 founders in the last six or seven years.

I quit about three years ago to start Fractional Partners, which is my growth advisory firm. I'm a father. I have a two-year-old. We live in Salt Lake City. We moved here for the skiing. I don't know if you're a skier. Last year was really bad.

Bruce EckfeldtIt was.

Yarin GaonAnd that's a little bit about me.

Bruce EckfeldtPerfect. I'm curious, before you started your business, and obviously you started early, were there motivations? In kindergarten, did you always want to be an entrepreneur? What got you into the first business?

Yarin GaonI always loved money. My parents just don't understand how that happened, but I always loved it. I loved the transactions. When I was younger, I picked up programming, and it allowed me to play. When you build an e-commerce or SaaS product as a young person, nobody really cares that it's you. You built a product or a service, and either it provides value or it doesn't. Nobody knows that you're 14 or 16. So it allowed me to experiment and do things I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Bruce EckfeldtHow did you pick your first business? Did you sit down at a big whiteboard and strategize what it was going to be? Tell us the founding story.

Yarin GaonNo, I was 14, and I loved money and I loved tech. If I take you back over 20 years, to the world before iPhones, there were a lot of services built on micropayments over text. Think of American Idol, where you could send a text message to vote, or download a ringtone or a wallpaper back then.

And I thought to myself, "Wow, that's such a cool way to make money." The challenge was that there was a barrier to entry for smaller websites. Think about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, when there were a lot of blogs and microsites, and teenagers were on MySpace. There was a lot of content creation, but if you wanted to monetize your services, you couldn't unless you were at a certain scale that let you establish relationships with the cell companies.

So I thought that would be a really interesting problem to solve. I got a programming book, learned how to program, and built a service called SMS for Cash. I know, very to the point. The premise was: let's aggregate a lot of these small websites. I'll establish the relationships with the cell companies or the billing companies, and you basically work under my account. That lowered the barrier to entry. I took a cut, and all you needed to do was sign up, get a script, implement it on your website, and start charging your visitors.

It was really designed for other teenagers at that time. There wasn't a whiteboard. It was just, "Wow, this is really cool. There's a barrier to entry. What can I do to aggregate the smaller players?"

Bruce EckfeldtYou literally saw the problem and started figuring out how to solve it.

Yarin GaonYes. And there was no one in the market doing this, because none of the big companies wanted to deal with the smaller players. It's just a headache. I'll take your crumbs. Perfect.

Bruce EckfeldtWhen you started that one, did you have visions of selling it? What was your goal in founding the company?

Yarin GaonHonestly, I wanted to make money. I wanted to build cool tech. Down the road, we were in negotiations to sell it to the second-largest cell phone company in Israel, which didn't materialize. But I was in high school. I wanted to make some money and create something cool, and I did that.

Bruce EckfeldtWhere did you go from there? What was the next business?

Yarin GaonThat was when I was 14. About two years into running it, I got feedback from clients, really users. It was called reverse micro-billing, and it was capped at what would be about $5 in the States. You could only charge up to $5, which put you in a very specific niche.

But I had clients saying, "I want to charge more. How would I do that?" At the time, there was no PayPal and no mass payment processing service in Israel. So I said, "I already have the infrastructure. I already have users. Let's see if we can do payments over credit cards."

Same business tactic. Let's take all the crumbs, all the small players the credit card companies don't want to deal with because of the high barrier to entry, and build them a platform where they can sign up and start collecting credit card payments. So I did. I partnered with the second-largest credit card company in Israel.

I went in with my mentor and we pitched. It was really cool, and somehow they said yes. We created a service called ePays, for electronic payments. It was basically PayPal before PayPal came to Israel. Same idea: you sign up, you get a payment link, and you start charging for your content. That's what I did.

Bruce EckfeldtI'm curious what you learned going from the first company, from text, to payments. Was there any crossover, anything you had figured out that you could reuse?

Yarin GaonI learned a lot. One thing I learned is that just because you have mentors doesn't mean they're right. I was very fortunate to have a couple of mentors during this experience. As we grew, there was a conversation about pricing, how we should create price tiers, and my mentor ended up creating a really elaborate pricing structure. It makes a lot of sense if you have an MBA, but not a lot of sense if you're a small website that just wants to charge. It actually hurt me in the long run. That was the first time I learned that just because a mentor tells me something, and they know a lot, doesn't mean they're right about that specific instance.

That was learning number one. Learning number two was the transition from B2C into B2B. The first business, SMS for Cash, was purely B2C. It was almost a consumer-facing product: very simple micropayments, not a lot of regulation. You just sign up and start charging. Credit card payments are done by companies.

So I left my normal target audience for one where I didn't have an advantage. I was a small fish in a big pond, and I wasn't really suited to solve that problem at that scale, at my age, with my infrastructure. I didn't have a B2B sales force to recruit them. It was just a different business. An adjacent industry, with different capabilities required to actually be successful, if that makes sense.

Bruce EckfeldtSo while it looks very similar, the underlying challenges, resources, and assets required can be quite different. Tell us about your first exit. What was the company you really exited from?

Yarin GaonAt 18, I joined the military. In Israel, there's mandatory military service. I was a combat soldier, and I couldn't manage my businesses while serving, so I closed them. I didn't sell them. There wasn't a lot of exit value there. Then, as I got toward the end of my mandatory service...

Let me give you a little context on the problem. In Israel, there's mandatory service, and the army doesn't give you enough equipment when you go in. So there's a whole secondary market. Imagine you're the parent of a newly drafted 18-year-old.

Bruce EckfeldtYeah.

Yarin GaonYou want to make sure they have everything: the socks, the shirts, the flashlight, the watch. And once you're in the military, there's a whole secondary market of, "I want the best gun strap, the best vest, the best helmet, the best accessories." So the need exists.

The problem is that while you can find these products, you have two major problems. One, they were always sold inside hiking stores. Hiking stores would carry gear, and a small section would be military gear. So it was hiking first, military second.

The second problem, which was the biggest, is that you couldn't find any of this online. Israel observes Shabbat, meaning that from Friday night to Saturday night, everything shuts down. No store is open. As a combat soldier, you get to go home every two to three weeks for about 48 hours, from Friday morning to Sunday morning. So if you wanted to buy anything, you had a very small window to find what you needed and rush before everything closed at sundown.

As I was finishing my military service, I thought, "Why doesn't this exist online? Why can't I just buy it online and ship it to the base or ship it home?" It seemed simple, and it was, but it didn't exist. So I started what became the largest e-commerce platform for military goods in Israel, and it started with two premises.

One, let's do a military-only niche. I didn't carry any hiking equipment at all. I was the first store in Israel dedicated to retail military equipment, period. That gave me differentiation. The second was a mobile-first, e-commerce-first experience, a different level of execution than what existed, where soldiers could buy what they needed online and pick it up on Friday morning, or ship it to the base or home. Basically, make sure everything they needed was there, and let them pre-purchase.

That's how I started. We grew, and I ended up opening a brick-and-mortar store, because people want to feel and experience the products. It was the first brick-and-mortar store for military goods only. I ran the business for about seven years. Then my wife and I knew we were going to go back to the States.

We were about to get married, so something needed to happen. I needed to decide whether to keep running it remotely, or put a bow on it and close it or sell it. So I went on a journey of finding a buyer, and I found one. We signed the contract about 24 hours before I was on the flight.

Bruce EckfeldtA little bit of time pressure.

Yarin GaonA little bit of an ultimatum never hurt anybody. I sold it to my largest competitor, who basically took my business, kept the brand for a little while, and absorbed it into his operation.

Bruce EckfeldtTell us about finding the buyer. That's always an interesting process in most deals. Did you approach them? What was the conversation like?

Yarin GaonI got a broker to help me sell. As we went through the process, I think the real learning came from the exit itself. I talked to a lot of different potential buyers, and we were at different stages with different people.

My buyer wasn't my first choice, because I made a lot of mistakes while building the business that kept me from having a smooth exit. I was able to exit, but it wasn't smooth. If I did it again, some things would be different.

Bruce EckfeldtTell us some of those, because every interview I've done has a long list of these things. What do you wish you had done differently earlier in the business?

Yarin GaonI made two major mistakes that caused me to take a big cut in my exit value. The first was around systems, custom systems. As I shared, I'm a developer, and I came from SaaS. When I approached e-commerce, Hebrew is a right-to-left language, which means a lot of the e-commerce systems out there didn't really support it, and it's also a super niche market.

So you could either use a mediocre off-the-shelf system or build your own. Shopify wasn't even an option then. I chose to build my own. I built the entire system the business ran on: the store, the CRM, the inventory management, the ERP. When we opened the brick-and-mortar store, I built the point-of-sale system too. I felt I could, and it was also a much higher quality experience.

It was a differentiator in the marketplace from the consumer's point of view. It was smoother, it was customizable, and I really knew my client, so the experience was flawless. On the back end, I was the only one who knew how to maintain that system. So when a buyer came into the picture, the first question was, "How am I going to maintain your system? Do I need to move the whole business onto a different ERP and e-commerce platform?"

And the answer was, "Yes, you do, because I'm not going to be writing code from 5,000 miles away. I don't want to be a developer anymore. That's not my profession." What I thought was a core capability, a strategic advantage, really hurt me when it came to exit value. It was great for generating cash flow, but as an asset it hurt me, and I took a big discount, because no serious buyer would take a system built by a 27-year-old and build their business on top of it. So that was mistake number one.

Bruce EckfeldtYeah.

Yarin GaonMistake number two was that I brought people into the business to help me, but purely at a tactical level. The people I hired were low-level employees, because, honestly, I was cheap. I hired people to stock, to pack orders, and to do a lot of the back-end work.

That created two challenges. One, I was the main person leading the business, and my bandwidth was very limited. I didn't mention this, but I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees while running this business. The whole purpose of the business, for context, was that I was going to go to business school and wanted a platform to play on as I learned these concepts. Which I did, but I also had about 20 hours a week of actual school.

And two, when I sold it, I didn't have a strong team inside the business to keep it running. So the value became not so much the company as the brand equity and the website. Not my operations, because my operations depended on very junior people who couldn't hold the business together without me in it. Those were my two biggest mistakes.

Bruce EckfeldtHow have those mistakes informed how you moved forward from there? Give us a little of the next steps for you.

Yarin GaonI'm very much against custom anything, unless it's a core capability or a differentiator. This is really interesting right now, because we're in the age of AI, and everybody's saying, "I can create my own custom apps, my own internal tools, and we can do it better."

My argument is: what kind of company are you, really? Are you a pest control company or a CRM company? Go back to the core capability and double down on what you do best. Otherwise, when you want to exit, what you think is an asset turns out to be a liability.

Bruce EckfeldtThat's going to be tough. So you moved to the US and started working there. What was that transition like? What did you do at that point?

Yarin GaonI moved to the US and finished my MBA, doing my last semester as an exchange student at Kellogg. Through the school, I met the person who would become my boss, and I joined a venture capital firm in Chicago as an entrepreneur in residence. For people who don't know, an entrepreneur in residence is the in-house entrepreneur or founder within the fund.

The fund invested in all kinds of startups. Some of them didn't do very well. Some ran out of money or never found product-market fit. They had different challenges. So instead of cutting off funding completely, some of those companies came to me. The idea was to bring resources from the fund, figure out what was happening, and try to turn them around and salvage them. I did that for about three years, and I learned a lot then too.

Bruce EckfeldtI'm always curious about this. Venture capital is looking for a couple of real winners, and a lot of the portfolio isn't going to do so well. How did the fund decide, "We should shut this thing down," versus, "We should give it some life support and see if we can turn it around"? How did you participate in that decision? What were you looking for in the companies that had some hope?

Yarin GaonThe short answer is: the companies the fund had over-allocated to. Those got the most resources. The companies the fund had given too much money to, where the loss would be significant, are the ones that landed on my desk. That's the ugly truth.

Bruce EckfeldtYeah.

Yarin GaonAnd here's what I found. For a little context, while I was working with venture-backed companies, I also volunteered at the University of Chicago and with SCORE, and I saw something really interesting.

I saw a lot of bootstrapped companies that had product-market fit but were missing a skill set. And on the other hand, I saw a lot of venture-backed companies that didn't have product-market fit and had a lot of resources sent their way. In those venture-backed companies, I was expensive, my salary was expensive, and I came with resources, and they basically got me for free for a long stretch of time.

Meanwhile, the companies I volunteered with were cash-flow positive, making money, and had product-market fit, unlike the companies I worked with at the venture capital firm. They couldn't afford someone like me and got me maybe once a quarter or once every six months. "Let's meet for 45 minutes, and good luck." It's a really interesting contrast between bootstrapped and venture-backed companies.

Bruce EckfeldtWhat were the typical problems in these companies? You mentioned product-market fit and resources. Was there a pattern, or a set of patterns, that came up?

Yarin GaonThe problem is that all the distressed companies I worked with didn't have product-market fit, meaning they couldn't prove that the market actually wanted what they had to offer. And the difference between venture-backed and bootstrapped companies is that the venture-backed ones had money to spend, and they spent it.

They were able to burn a lot of money trying to figure out things that, as a bootstrapper, you wouldn't even try, because you'd sniff out very quickly whether there was product-market fit. And if there wasn't, you wouldn't continue, because it's your own money. When it's not your own money, you play a different game while building a company, if that makes sense.

Bruce EckfeldtThere's not as much discernment about whether to keep pursuing something, because the cost is very real in a bootstrapped company, whereas in a VC-backed one it's a little more like funny money. I'm curious how much pressure you see to actually spend the money. Say I've got a couple million dollars in venture capital. If I can't find good product-market fit, I shouldn't be spending a lot of money trying to make it work if it clearly doesn't work. But there's a certain pressure there. Did you notice that dynamic in those situations?

Yarin GaonThere are a couple of pressures. One is the pressure to show results, and to spend that capital.

Bruce EckfeldtTo deploy the money, to show growth.

Yarin GaonAnd there's pressure for hypergrowth. There's a time aspect to it. Venture capital doesn't play the same game. The goal is to create a billion-dollar company, or a $500 million company. When you enter with that hypergrowth mindset, the biggest challenge is that you value revenue over profit.

It's growth at any cost. And when you apply a growth-at-any-cost mindset, you make a lot of decisions a bootstrapped founder would never make, because they just don't make financial sense. You optimize for a different set of metrics, which I'm personally not a huge fan of, coming from bootstrapping my own businesses.

It's just a different game. What you see is companies that have revenue but burn a ton of money every month. In venture, that's okay. It's a weird industry where you can lose a ton of money and they'll keep funding you. Some of it works. A lot of it doesn't, especially when founders get into the mindset of "I'm going to build for scale" or "I'm going to build for revenue" instead of optimizing for EBITDA, for profit. It leads you down paths that don't always make sense.

Bruce EckfeldtWhat metrics did you bring into these companies that helped change the decision-making, or helped frame the problem better? How would you actually approach things?

Yarin GaonMaybe some context first. I believe a lot of founders, once they reach product-market fit, are great executors, and their challenge becomes strategic decision-making. They've proved they can build a product people love. They've proved they have product-market fit. But now the challenge isn't execution anymore. It's the decisions you make along the way about what exactly you're building and where you're taking the company.

I wanted to create a framework for working through this in a structured way, without forcing decisions on the team. Almost a guided process, where decisions stack on decisions, the path illuminates itself, and I don't have to shove it down their throats. What I ended up building is a tool called the Growth Decision Canvas. It's publicly available, and I'll share it at the end of the call.

It's basically a one-pager, kind of like a business model canvas, but designed for companies that have product-market fit and are now trying to scale profitably. Emphasis on profitably, because scaling and scaling profitably are two very different things. It's basically coming in as a fractional partner and walking the team through a series of decisions that, a lot of the time, were never made explicit.

My belief is that if we help them make those decisions explicit, the path illuminates itself. I'll give you an example. A lot of companies have a mission statement. Great. But a lot of mission statements are BS. They're just, "We want to do great things." They're not strategic filters.

If you can get a company to articulate a problem-solution thesis, meaning what problem they've noticed and how they're going to solve it, then the moment they articulate a solution, they've already chosen a path. Then you go through the next step: where do you want to be? That's the vision. A lot of companies put a revenue number as their vision. "I want to be a $10 million company." Why? "Well, I don't know. It sounds..."

Bruce EckfeldtIt's better than a $5 million company.

Yarin GaonYeah. Five million, ten million, fifty million. The challenge is that these visions don't really help them make left-or-right decisions.

So I like to work with companies to define the ultimate goal and a success metric that isn't revenue, tied back to the problem and solution. Forget about revenue, because revenue is a lagging metric. You want to be a $10 million company, great. Should you choose left or right? It doesn't tell you anything. What is the filter? What is the metric that represents success, that you can keep in mind as you make decisions? Once you align on that, you've already narrowed things down.

Then you ask: what are your strategic advantages and core competencies, really? That's the hardest question for most companies. What do you know how to do extremely well that other companies don't? Then you walk them through who the best customer is for that kind of company, the perfect customer for them.

These decisions stack linearly, and at the end you get a very tight business model, or growth model, designed for them. My whole belief is that strong operators with product-market fit just need to go through the process of answering these questions as a team, one decision after another, and what emerges is a super tight vision.

It's not just a vision. It's really a business model or growth model that they can then bring to EOS. You plug it into your Vision/Traction Organizer and create your rocks from it. The canvas shows you the direction, and EOS makes sure everybody is rowing in the chosen direction. Does that make sense?

Bruce EckfeldtIt does, and it's exactly what I found. I used EOS in my business originally, then I used Scaling Up, and a couple of other frameworks. Even today as a coach, I talk about strategy development and strategy execution as two separate things.

They're two separate muscles. Strategy development is that series of choices about what we're going to focus on, and more importantly, what we're not going to focus on. If you can get a team really clear on that, then you can focus on strategy execution: how do we make it happen? What's the underlying business model? What capabilities do we need? What ecosystem do we need to develop? What leadership style? All of those things start to get answered. But if you don't have a strong strategic direction, you're sometimes just rowing really quickly in circles. So it's key to get both of those right.

Yarin GaonLet me ask you something. Why do you think companies skip that stage? Not a lot of companies actually go through the kind of process we're talking about. A lot of companies are hyper-focused on execution and EOS. Why do you think that is?

Bruce EckfeldtWhat I've generally seen is that companies chase ideas. If it doesn't immediately work, they pivot to another idea. If that doesn't immediately work, they pivot again, and hopefully at some point they land on something that works and mine it. The problem is that's a very low-success-rate approach.

I use this phrase: we can climb any mountain you want, just not every mountain you want. There are lots of great mountains out there. We want to pick a good one, not a bad one, but pick one and focus on figuring out how to climb it. Where things go wrong is when people get halfway up, or half the team is trying to climb this mountain and the other half is trying to climb that one. That's where you don't do very well.

It's hard to make progress and get traction. You start getting into the higher elevations, things get difficult, and people want easy. "We should find an easier path." Sometimes there isn't one. A lot of the time, success comes from figuring out how to get through the hard stuff where no one else has been able to. But there is a summit up there you can reach.

Yarin GaonFrom what you said, I think there are really two things. One, you have to choose the mountain, and separate choosing the mountain from the actual path. What we call the assumptions versus the execution. You choose the assumptions, you choose the business model, and then it's about executing on it, not revisiting the business model.

Second, what I've found is that a lot of companies, as they grow, start by growing through addition. More clients, more revenue streams, more channels, more products. And at the beginning, that's fantastic. It's the right way to go.

As you start, you want to see what works. You want to try this type of client, this type of product, this type of channel, and that's great. But once you find product-market fit, it creates complexity and confusion. You're just doing too much inside the company, and you can't execute successfully on any of it because you're spread too thin.

Companies try to keep doing what worked at the beginning, so they keep growing by addition. More mountains, more initiatives, more activities. And the key, in my opinion, not forever, but for a lot of companies between $2 and $25 million in sales, is growth by subtraction. Find the core, choose the lane, choose the destination, and cut everything else that doesn't serve you. One type of product, one type of customer, really one set of activities. Companies get to $10 million in sales and feel like they're done and want to add more. But if you're at $10 million in sales in America, you're barely scratching the surface.

You're at the beginning of your journey. They basically suffer from indigestion, because they try to do too much. The question is, what can we cut? That's the flip side.

As they feel the friction of that complexity, their first inclination is to fix execution. Let's put a system in place. Let's put in EOS, better meetings, better quarterly rocks, a scorecard. Let's systemize what is. When the real process should be: before you systemize what is, choose what you're doubling down on and what you're letting go of, tighten the model, and then systemize a very small set of activities. That's the shift I usually see, or the failure point.

Bruce EckfeldtIt's a classic business challenge, because sometimes these other things are good. Companies can have multiple lines of business, and they're good businesses, so it's hard to say no to them. But you want to pick the best one, make it work, and scale it. If you were a half-billion-dollar company struggling to find more market share, I'd say, "Okay, we need to start looking at other business lines." But until you get to that point, you should be able to mine that one business line for quite some time.

Yarin GaonAnd the challenge is that if they try to do too much, they become mediocre at all of their activities. A mediocre company does not scale well. You want to be extremely good at what you do. Choose a smaller lane, which is hard to do, especially when everything is cash-flow positive, but there's a huge opportunity there.

Bruce EckfeldtI'm curious whether you see that on the exit side. Do companies that make that tough choice, find their lane and execute against it in a more focused way, get better exit outcomes and better valuations? What's your experience?

Yarin GaonLet's talk about what happens if you don't do this, because that's most of the companies I work with. If you don't do this, nine times out of ten you end up with a company with high revenue and low margin. You've got a $20 million company that nets 5%. That hurts your valuation, both on your multiple and on your EBITDA, because valuation is basically a combination of multiple and EBITDA.

Low EBITDA plus a super-wide business that's hard to manage is going to get a lower multiple. That's the biggest impact. Different buyers buy companies for different reasons, but more focused companies usually have a better moat around them. They usually have a higher-margin business. They have more differentiation, and they usually warrant a higher multiple regardless of EBITDA when they come to sell.

Bruce EckfeldtI think they're just more buyable, too. A buyer looks at a company with multiple lines of business, or really complex processes, and says, "I like half of this business." The other half is marginally beneficial at best. In fact, a lot of the time it's detracting, because now they have to figure out how to spin it off or shut it down.

So there's a lot to be said for this on the exit side. Assuming you're under a couple hundred million in revenue, staying really focused not only helps growth and your EBITDA and profitability, it actually makes you a more desirable purchase. The buyer says, "I'm buying this very specific thing, and I know how to integrate it into whatever I'm doing next, or build a platform on top of it." Versus a really complicated, multifaceted company, where it's just hard to figure out who's going to buy it.

Yarin GaonThe whole idea was to bring the private equity playbook to companies before they sell. If I buy your company, I'm going to cut half of it. So instead of waiting for a buyer, do it now, before you sell. Cut it yourself, tighten the operations, and then talk about an exit. With the caveat that these things take time. This isn't a quick, six-month, put-lipstick-on-a-pig process before you sell. But if you focus on doing this probably 24 months before you sell...

Bruce EckfeldtTwo to three years.

Yarin Gaon...you can make a huge impact on your valuation. One more thought and we're done. Really, resist the first inclination of adding more.

Business at that scale, once you have product-market fit, is really about resource allocation. Your job as a founder or CEO is to take what you have and put the most eggs on the activities you think will produce the most profit. The more activities you have, the less effective you become at managing them and actually doing the work.

Choosing a smaller set of activities through a well-designed process, committing to a lane, and then putting all of your skill sets, resources, and capital toward moving the needle is usually a much more effective and less risky approach than starting things you haven't validated yet, which just take resources from the core and put them into shiny-object activities. That's it.

Bruce EckfeldtIt's a great one to end on. I think that's one of the biggest challenges most entrepreneurs face: early stage versus growth stage. Yarin, this has been a pleasure. If people want to find out more about what you're doing and about the frameworks, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Yarin GaonThe framework is free and publicly available at canvas.fractional.partners. It's a do-it-yourself system, because I don't want to gate knowledge. If you want it, you can use it. What I do is help companies go through it. A lot of the time it's hard for founders to do the work themselves and participate at the same time, so they bring me in and I walk the company through the process.

The company is fractional.partners. I usually focus on $5 to $25 million companies. That's my sweet spot. You have product-market fit, employees, a team, but something isn't clicking. Usually it's either too complex or not profitable enough. Then we go through a redesign process, get to a vision, and re-envision version two of the business. That's what I love doing most.

Bruce EckfeldtI highly encourage people to go check that out. Yarin, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

Yarin GaonThank you for having me, Bruce.