What an amazing conversation I was able to have with Andrew Warner; a man who certainly knows his way around business podcasts, having done over 1,300 interviews himself via his own platform on Mixergy. Andrew was MORE than generous because, even with a 2 week old at home, he spent an hour with me talking about his journey as an entrepreneur and what roads he has traveled to get to where he is today.

Andrew gave us some great insight into how he quickly built up a multi-million company with his brother and proceeded to exit the business and the grind it came with, before eventually reigniting his entrepreneurial spirit to get where he is today. There is a lot we can all learn from the vivid and amusing account of where his mind was at during the different phases of his life after business.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

The ideal type of business that kicks out cash

What 1300+ interviews will teach you

The fine line between financial goals and burnout

Why you should find a way to put yourself out in the public

What Andrew’s definition of legacy is

How did Andrew Warner start out in business?

Andrew always knew he wanted to sell… whatever he did he wanted to hustle and be passionate about what he was involved in. He found home in a partnership with his brother, trying a few web-based businesses before eventually hitting the jackpot with an online greetings-card business. Once Andrew gained an understanding of affiliate marketing and advertising space for email newsletters, the growth of the company was exponential.

Andrew had some straight forward goals… to put 1 million dollars in the bank. The way to do that was, in his words, ‘to put in pennies and shit out dollars’.

What did he do to make the company grow?

By embedding a code that enabled him to capture the data from his greetings-card customers, he was able to harvest a captive audience for his regular newsletters. In the newsletters he would sell advertising space. Then he added another great money-making tool to his greetings-card signup process, selling the right for other companies to be able to offer their services to the same user. At one point he said he was paying 10 cents for each occasion a user populated a form, but was receiving $1.50 every time somebody signed up.

What was his goal?

He wanted to get rich and have $1 million in the bank, and leave a company that would outlast him. It took him 2-3 years to reach his goal of one million dollars in the bank but then he struggled to figure out what was next. Because Andrew is one determined dude, he couldn’t help himself but to keep competitions and benchmarks with himself even while he was on his “sabbatical“. He eventually defined it as: “let’s see how far I can run”.

How long did the business last?

After only 5 years, and tens of millions in revenue, Andrew and his brother hung up the towel of their company Bradford & Reed. But in his mind he’d wanted the company to last for hundreds of years. On his website he declares his exit strategy as ‘death’ (he’s inspired by the likes Apple and McDonalds, i.e. companies who outlived their owners), so although his business reached the initial financial goal, he didn’t hit his ultimate goal of leaving a legacy.

Why did he stop so soon?