Tailor Brands Co-Founder/CEO: Why You Have To Fail To Succeed - Yali Saar | PEP Talk S3 EP6

Key Takeaways

this week on pep talk you can have the best people on board you can have all the money in the world and you would still fail coca-cola launching the new coke no one liked or apple launching the newton 20 years too early my name is ali sarr i'm the ceo and co-founder of taylor brands with over 30 million businesses using the platform today we provide a variety of tools that really help take an idea and launch it as a business within minutes eventually everyone has to fade i think that's the underlying true fact and every organization in order to succeed has to develop a system that allows it to remain flexible and find paths to success our mission is to help 10 million people start and grow a business in pep talk we interview industry leading experts from around the world who share actionable know-how and life lessons that's why we're excited to team up with godaddy to power pep talk i have been using godaddy for years and would promote them on this podcast even if they didn't sponsor us you can use their free website builder and start your online business at no cost for example you don't need lots of money to start a business if you leverage the tools at the purposeful project and godaddy godaddy even help with naming a business check out the links in the podcast notes below to connect to godaddy tools [Music] on today's podcast we're going to talk about failure why it's good you've probably heard that saying it's good to fail does it make sense is that true let's talk to someone that knows all about success and failure and learn from my guest today yali yali welcome to the podcast thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me that's a real pleasure perhaps we could start off by perhaps telling the audience that don't know about you or your company a little bit about about yourself yeah sure so my name is ali sarr i'm the ceo and co-founder of taylor brands taylor brains is an online platform that helps people basically turn ideas into businesses with over 30 million businesses using the platform today we provide a variety of tools ranging from brand design to back office solutions that really help take an idea and launch it as a business within minutes we help make the journey of starting a business into something that is simple and fun we don't just give people tools to build businesses we guide them through every step of the way like an automated partner everyone needs when they start their own venture um yeah so i had some different roles in my past i uh acted on national television and theater i was a political spokesperson i was a journalist for a while i started my own non-profit uh and today i'm a i'm ceo and and running taylor brands i love for my audience to understand how you go from building such an incredible business like taylor brands how do you go from i read you a timeout news reporter to to doing this so give the audience some idea of your your journey what was the process yeah so you know i i actually stumbled into the entrepreneurship world by accident maybe i started out as an actor i was literally i never wanted to be an actor i never planned on being an actor i walked down the street and a caster caught me and asked me to uh if i want to come to an audition and that eventually became a career um which had a lot of fun kinks to it but at some point i realized that i'm you know i'm spending a lot of my time basically acting out other other people's stories and i was really set out uh to write my own story um so i started through this whole journey of entrepreneurship and you know we started a lot of small ventures along the way and uh you know one of the last ventures that i started just before taylor brands uh was venture called raising the bar and the idea was really creating um you know an ecosystem for people that come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to attain higher degrees um and we started that simply because we saw a problem that we wanted to solve and taylor started uh way back as a logo maker and and we initially aimed to utilize ai creative technology to automate different aspects of business branding needs and really create the first automated branding agency over the years taylor's popularity grew today we onboard roughly 700 000 new businesses every month and with this increased opportunity we realized that our mission was much bigger than simply providing logo design a logo is just really the beginning of a business journey and today we help really guide our users hand in hand with the mission of helping uh turn business creation into something that anybody can do 700 000 new customers a month that proves that this is needed in the world i think but it must have not been like that at the beginning i mean i'm reading back you started this in 2015. talk us about the early days of the business how did you know this was definitely something people needed how did you get it off the ground yeah so i didn't um if to be completely honest you know my two good co-founders and myself we were all good friends and this whole thing started when we wanted to work with each other we wanted to create something together and we actually um decided to take all of our savings and find uh the only apartment that we could rent in brooklyn we didn't have the entrepreneur's house back then uh and it was uh this really crammy apartment um that the jmz just you know literally went out of the ground just outside of the apartment eight times a day we had to hold everything together and we started testing different ideas uh together and every day we would wake up and we would create we would do an ideation session together and we eventually worked on three parallel businesses one was in the restaurant field the other was in the real estate field and the third one was taylor and if to be completely honest you know taylor was uh wasn't my first pick um but as a ceo at the beginning of the business i didn't have you know too much to do i was going around the uh knocking on doors trying to get people uh to partner up with us for businesses that weren't you know fully launched yet and i knocked dough after door to try and get restaurants to the restaurant business and real estate agents for the real estate venture and nobody would open those doors and i went back to tom one of my co-founders and i told him listen let's um let's create a logo for this thing let's create business cards let's let's turn this into something that looks like there's more than just me in the background and suddenly people started opening those doors and i went back to tom and i said you know damn i i i finally understand you know i'm getting success with the other two ventures but i'm i'm understanding right now why is this idea so important and this is really when we decided to focus on taylor brands and and start scaling that and we initially started as a you know the idea was really just a b2b business we were working with different printing partners the idea was incorporating the technology we created in the backbone um and the i think a lot of the mistakes that we've done along the way actually got us into the right course got it to understand who are our customers we initially thought that our customers were small businesses as you kind of learn and understand the field you realize that a lot of the people that are starting a business they're not really small businesses they're solopreneurs they're founders and we kind of realized how the solution should look like as we tried failed repeated until we kind of find the success that we have today there's so many things that i don't want my audience to miss in that that overview of how you started so i think some really crucial things that many people haven't heard before most people talking about starting a business i had a brilliant idea and then i did this that that's the normal story but i think the reality is there's so many different ways to do it and you just highlighted one three friends you know two people you get on personally really well with sat down and said let's work on something together let's let's make a business and and so everybody listening today could do that you don't have to do it on your own you don't have to have a brilliant idea all on your own that's the first thing i don't want the audience to miss the second thing i really love about what you just described there is you it wasn't your first pick this incredible company you've built it's so successful it wasn't the first pick and you had a real estate business that you tried to make happen and you realized that your other business the one you weren't initially so in love with was the solution to the problem you were having with the other business you were working on and so you almost discovered the reason that other business was important through a problem you had yourself starting another business and that is the process i think uh that a lot of people don't necessarily follow i really love that and you found out who your customer is at the same time and i think that's probably what then led to this incredible growth you had so so you used your own business to do the real estate business then what happened you realized how powerful taylor brands could be as a service to companies what did you do next if we're looking at kind of the the process of taylor brands i think one of the critical things that you just highlighted is and and for some people that have been through this business quite a lot it's it might be quite obvious um but that identifying the true problem for the solution that you're trying to build is much more important than you know having a great idea for a solution because the solution might change a lot of the times i think that a lot of times especially as first-time founders we focus a lot on the solution we are building that could be a product that we're selling or a service that we are offering for taylor brands as i said the the first solution was to build out a logo maker and we had an absolute success launching that product and we scaled that pretty fast doubling our revenues month after month but despite that initial success and maybe because of it we never actually stopped at least in the early days um and to really distill the problem our solution was solving and that's might seem mundane to some but distilling that piece has a profound impact on a business success the solution we built was a logo maker initially but the problem that we were trying to solve was really helping people start their business easily and this is the reason they used our solution not to build the logo the logo wasn't their end goal the end goal was creating a business and once we truly were able to distill the problem understanding what the next set of solutions we would be offering to our users became much easier and really allow taylor brands to grow tenfold if before we had to continuously debate what it is that we need to build out next once we distilled the problem it was really a no brainer and i think that distilling the problem allowed us to turn table brands from a logo maker into a one-stop shop or a small business operating system and that allows our system to create or allows our users to create a logo set up their online presence social presence open up their business um now i think that this this whole process didn't really happen with too much intention at first and this was this brings me to kind of maybe the second point um that was really critical uh in the success of taylor brands and that was using you know a reverse engineering strategy to chart our our path to success a lot of people think that you know they need to tackle a business problem linearly meaning you think about your goal and then you immediately think about what your first step to attaining that goal but i think that a lot of the smartest business leaders i've encountered actually use a reverse engineering strategy to plan their path to success this means that you kind of work backwards from your end goal and you plan your step backwards in order to make sure that you don't miss anything that you need to do along the way and i'll give you an example let's say my goal is to go and get ice cream walking linearly the first thing i might do is to get out and start working towards the ice cream store but then i might get there and realize i didn't take any money with me and i don't have an open tab um working backwards from your goal means that you calculate the last thing you need to do before getting that ice cream is paying for it one step backwards you'll need to make sure that you have cash and one step before that you'll need to get your wallet and this is an oversimplified example but in real life there are many different steps that you need to take maybe you're picking up ice cream for a friend and maybe you need to talk with them before going to the store and finding out which flavor that they want and the whole purpose of using this reverse engineering strategy is getting you from point a to point z with as little steps as possible so if you're building your business and your next big milestone is the goal let's say that you want to take a loan or you want to go fundraise and so in order to qualify for that you will need to you know do a certain number of steps you can't think about building a business as if you're going on a stroll you need to think about it as if you're going on an expedition to what is usually kind of an uncharted territory and you might survive solely on having great business instincts but you really need to you'll really be able to increase your odds if you plan as much as you can and so i think at some point after we kind of launched the the initial logo design platform and um we started seeing that traction we stopped and we started planning and ahead and trying to figure out what is our kind of end goal and where do we need to get and start kind of building the steps backwards from there it's such a great insight both the points you're making there i don't want people to miss this this is so important what is your true problem people do misunderstand that when they're trying to figure out what their business does i interviewed ben francis who's the founder of gymshark now a three billion dollar company here in the uk and he uh he basically said everyone else was making clothes nice clothes he wasn't making nice clothes he was making things that made people feel comfortable in the gym you know it's just going that one level down into what problem you're actually solving for people because there's plenty of people making nice clothes so you know so that's so important i think the reverse engineering process is also genius and and again a lot of the time i say to people if you want more luck in life know your destination because you if you you won't know that you're lucky you won't even realize it because you don't know where you're going and the analogy around ice cream by the way makes me want ice cream and i'm sure everybody listening now wants ice cream but but that whole concept is is just brilliant because the other thing i think it does and again i don't want people to miss this is if you know where you're going you can inspire brilliant people to join you on that journey whereas if you're just heading off somewhere if you again using your analogy if you're just going out for a while you want to come i'm all right you know i'm going out for ice cream you want to come oh yes you know like so it's it's absolute gold what you just just said i don't want people to miss it i just want to take a moment to thank our sponsor taylor brands for supporting this podcast and entrepreneurs taylor brands are aligned with our mission to help you start and grow a business and already empower millions of customers around the world to kickstart their business with their ai driven one-stop shop for aspiring small business owners with everything you need to jump start your business such as a logo maker business mailbox online and physical business cards printed merchandise social media tools and so much more to find out more about taylor brands and how they can help you click the link below and get 40 off your first order using the code pep now let's get back to the podcast i agree completely and i i think that you know i like to remember something i call the the four c's when you go into that reverse engineering psychology and the first one is a compass meaning that you know what your goal is and where you're headed the second thing is your course meaning that you map out you know like we discussed step by step the third one as you said is is company meaning you know what are the resources and who are the people you need to complete each step of that journey and being able to get them on board because you know where you're going and the fourth one which a lot of people you know tend to miss out on is the curses meaning that you know what are the possible problems that you will encounter in each step along the way and you have some kind of a backup plan in case you get to each one of these points well if you missed that folks we'll put that in the notes down below four c's sounds like the beginning of a great book and uh very very useful i guess let's talk about failure for a second because when i listen to your story and and what you've just described there it feels like and maybe to my listeners listening you you go and focus on taylor brands it now has 700 000 monthly new users 30 million customers taking advantage of the platform so that's it you know you started it you were a big success but i know you have a philosophy around failure so talk us through a little bit about that about the journey that you've been on to build this company yeah so you know i think that a lot of people they open up the papers and they see a lot of the success that is usually detailed in articles because we usually write about success and not about the the failure portions i like to say there's probably a um you know a million biographies about success there's only one that i found about failure and starting a business is tough you can have the best people on board you can have all the money in the world and you would still fail there's you know numerous examples of that and one of the main reason is that most businesses have elements that they can't correctly predict when they start building the business some businesses uh meet uh brickstone earlier and join the statistics of businesses failing within the year within the first year and some people and some businesses meet it later in their lifetime but everyone fails eventually everyone has to fade i think that's the the underlining the underlying true fact and every organization in order to succeed has to develop a system that allows it to remain flexible and learn from these failures and find paths to success and in other words i i like to call it creating a fail-safe environment in an organization not an environment that is safe for failure but an environment that makes failing safel meaning that you can't build your business with the mindset of saying okay this is my only path and i'm not going to fail along the way it's these types of environment that allow startups to pivot or huge corporation proceed after mega failures like coca-cola launching the new coke no one liked or apple launching the newton 20 years too early now i think that the value of creating this fail-safe mentality within our organization allows you to a make failing less deadly and b promote innovation um so this is something that we focus a lot on taylor brands how can we not just as you know founders or the ceo of the company feel comfortable failing within the organization but create a whole environment throughout that allows everybody in the organization feel as if they can fail they can try they can repeat that whole structure until they find the right path to success and how do you manage failure as a you know an organization that has a lot of people working in it of course we hear stories about you know banks that have rogue traders for example that perhaps they gave them too much freedom to fail is is there an innovation dilemma element there how how do you how do you manage that do you complementalize it so the first thing that i did when i wanted to figure out how can i create this environment is i went ahead and asked myself why was i able to create a fail-safe environment for myself when i was just starting taylor brands right and when i thought about that question i came up with you know five five to six main main reasons the first one is i understood the big picture of what i'm trying to accomplish so i could take calculated risks i knew where i can fail and where i can't the second thing is i had skin in the game i i had something to gain from winning the third thing was i believed my fate was in my hands and and you just you just mentioned that autonomy autonomy on its own is not enough if you don't create a mindset for people that they can impact their path to success that even you know the market is crashing and you know there you have competitors you always have the ball in your hand and decide where you're going to take it from there and and i think you know four and five is i i didn't need to cover up for my for my mistakes i had checks and balances and then i went ahead and i tried to recreate the same environment in taylor brands so i created transparency for people to understand what success means in a big picture context i didn't just give them their goals and said you know disregard the rest i wanted them to be able to evaluate where they can take a calculated risks versus the entire organization until today all the data in taylor brands is available for everyone in the organization the second thing is we provided incentive for people to win and this is not just through options and salaries right people want to be able to celebrate their own success people are a lot of times competitive by nature and we created you know bi-weekly meetings in which these these different teams in the company can present their success they come there and kind of like different tribes showcasing what they did in the last two weeks we provided autonomy for people by basically segmenting the entire company into very small startups so taylor brands today is a company but within that company we have a lot of small companies that we call brands each of them is in charge of different elements in the product itself but they have complete freedom to make their decisions within that unit and i think you know last but not least i made it socially acceptable to admit mistakes no one with skin in the game ever feels truly safe failing but without a clear understanding that failing is a crucial part of the way you don't learn anything from your mistakes so you know i like to showcase the mistakes that i've done and i've done a ton of mistakes throughout the lifetime of taylor so every one of these bi-weekly meetings i don't just tell people to showcase the mistakes they've done i also like to kind of put at the forefront the mistakes that i've been doing in the last two weeks month or few years beforehand i love the culture development piece that you're discussing there again this doesn't get just talked about enough like you say all the headlines about how much money people have raised and how successful everybody is but no one really talks about the fact that they managed to do that because they failed many times previously i also really love the point that you just made about um you know you mentioned newton for for my young listeners listening you might need to go google this but they're way ahead of their time developing technology so they tried it and it failed but it turns out they should have tried again and again and again failed again and again and again because eventually they would have been the right timing so they were early they were too early so that's the interesting thing about learning you just said there from failure learning the right lessons from failure as opposed to the wrong lessons so newton may be made the wrong assumption oh people don't want this what they didn't realize is oh no what we really mean is there's not enough broadband acceptance in the market yet to make this work properly and newton's technology by the way is still being used in a lot of different products today and a lot is true for a lot of other failures right we have google plus they close down that service uh after a long time they've tried to make it work google glass project loon i think just closed down you have facebook with facebook credits you have the amazon fire phone i think netflix which um you know they had the quister or something like that they had a service that they tried to launch at some point you're taking me back now i'm suddenly feeling old a lot of my listeners might not even know google plus you know you're gonna have to google on google what google plus what google plus network um so i think that you know a lot of times we like to talk about the statistics that nine out of ten businesses fail right but nine out of ten ideas fail and it's not just about finding and this goes back to the focus of a problem rather than the solution right don't focus on the solution the solution you might end up failing with that solution you might end up failing with the next eight solutions that you bring onto the table but you need to create an environment in which you feel very confident in the problem that you're trying to solve and then be able to learn and reiterate on the solutions until you find the right one so true airbnb folks said many times we failed nine times before we succeeded they launched that site nine times and no one used it right so um you know there's something in that is it's the persistence point again i think what you were saying earlier the persistence point is is so crucial i want to have you back on the podcast we promise our listeners we won't take up too much of their time i think you have taught us about failure you've given us some insights on how to innovate inside our businesses and i feel inspired i'm personally very grateful that you have succeeded for lots of reasons first of all you built a business that helps people start and grow a company if you can't find a job you can create one for yourself thanks to tools like yours so i'm really grateful and i'm really really grateful that you're also sponsoring this podcast and supporting our mission to help millions of people start and grow a business and so your success you many times failing has now helped us ensure that we can do what we do so i thank you for that butterfly effect and for the support that you give the entrepreneurial community thank you simon thank you for having me real pleasure [Music] thank you for listening to our podcast today and i hope you got value from it please feel free to follow us on any of our social media channels and if you have any questions about business ask us we will help you again we want to thank our sponsor godaddy for supporting this podcast from naming your business and buying a domain name to building a website for free godaddy has you covered godaddy provides us entrepreneurs all the help and tools we need to grow a business online you're not alone entrepreneurs see you in the next one