Steven Pivnik – How to Be Built to Finish (472)

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Episode transcript below:

00:00 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Hi everyone. Mike Malatesta here and welcome back to the How’d it Happen podcast. On this podcast, I dig in deep with every guest to explore the roots of their success, to discover not just how it happened but why it matters. My mission is to find and share stories that inspire, activate and maximize the greatness in you.

00:19 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
On today’s show, I have an amazing conversation with an entrepreneur, an athlete, an adventurer and an author, and when I say athlete and adventurer, I mean it. Steven Pivnik came to the United States from the former Soviet Union, in territory that is now Ukraine, when he was three years old. He learned grit and determination from his parents living what he calls the immigrant lifestyle. We talk about that his business failures, his business successes, why he is a huge believer in visualization and manifestation, the endurance mindset and why Steven is built to finish, which is also the name of his book.

00:58 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
As entrepreneurs, sometimes we just jump in right with both feet because we’re a little bit less fearful than others, and that was definitely my case with my first ultra marathon. I couple of hours of sleep, I get to the starting line and very, very early on, within the first like couple hundred meters, I’m having a hard time breathing. Silly me didn’t do any research that this course is a mile above sea level and it’s hard to breathe. You have to acclimatize. Turn to the guy next to me. I’m like what’s with the sand on this course? He goes oh, you didn’t read the race guide. 50% of this course is going to be sand. I didn’t know about the altitude, I didn’t know about the sand. I’m like, what else could possibly go wrong today? And this was no fault of my own it started hailing. My feet are bleeding, I’m cramping up, I’m freezing and I’m dodging golf ball-size hail.

01:43 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
This episode is sponsored by the Dream Exit. The Dream Exit is a private bespoke program for successful entrepreneurs with annual revenue between $5 million and $100 million who realize that they have one chance to get their dream exit right and that the odds of realizing that dream by themselves all alone or at the last minute, are stacked against them.

02:03
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02:22 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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02:28 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
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02:39 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Go to dreamexitplaybookcom today, prepare to be inspired, and now here’s Steven Pibnik. Steven, welcome to the how Did it Happen podcast.

02:58 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Thank you, Mike, for having me Looking forward to it.

03:00 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, it’s. The more I dug in, the more interested I got in having this conversation with you and sharing it with all of my listeners, because there’s a ton here. So I gave you guys a little bit of a teaser in the intro. Now I’m going to tell you a little bit more about Steven Pivnik. So Steven is a CEO, an entrepreneur, an athlete, an adventurer, an author and probably a lot more than that too.

03:27
After founding and growing his startup company Binary Tree for 27 years, stephen sold the business to a strategic competitor and began the often difficult transition in his what I call what’s next world, and we will learn all about that today and today, through several companies he’s founded, stephen helps entrepreneurs and leaders chart a successful pathway forward for their companies, develop growth strategies and prepare for their eventual sale or acquisition. It sounds to me like he gets people ready to achieve what I call their dream exits Outside of work. Stephen is an Ironman, an ultra marathoner, a mountain climber and all around endurance junkie. In his new book, built to Finish, stephen shares lessons he learned going from being a college dropout to successful entrepreneur and accomplished athlete and more. It’s the perfect message for any entrepreneur who’s hit a wall and isn’t sure how to break through it, and I feel like that’s just about. All of us have one time or another right. So, stephen, I start every show with a simple question, and that is how did it happen for you?

04:38 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Sure, let’s see there’s a lot to unpack there. I guess, if I were to summarize it, how it happened was know, I’m a immigrant. We came over to this country when I was three years old, so I, you know, lived the immigrant lifestyle. So my parents, you know, work from sunrise to sunset every single day no, never taking a sick day six days a week. So when it came time to start my career, I really I was bitten by the same entrepreneurial bug that they had and I decided to leave my time to start my career. I was bitten by the same entrepreneurial bug that they had and I decided to leave my employer, start my own company.

05:10
And the first one failed. Second one failed. Third one was a huge hit. So not giving up and going, continuously going after it, I think, is how it happened for me. In the business world, and along the same journey towards the tail end of my last company’s journey, I got into endurance sports and just fell in love with the challenge that endurance sports brings and I set a goal for myself to get to that Ironman World Championship in Kona, hawaii. So that’s why I wrote the book Built to Finish, because I finished my corporate journey, or at least because I finished my corporate journey, or at least my last company’s corporate journey, and then I did cross the finish line at the Iron man World Championship, and the book talks about both of those journeys in parallel fantastic this immigrant lifestyle that you referenced.

05:58 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
You came here from when you were three. Where did you come?

06:01 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
from on the former Soviet Union. It’s’s the ukraine now. I mean for the portion that woodland is the ukraine now, but it was a soviet union back then and what was it that prompted your parents to leave?

06:13
um, so we’re jewish and the anti-semitism was. It just became unbearable. Um, to them the the straw that broke the camel’s back was a woman approaching my grandmother in a store and breaking a bottle over her head, just calling her a dirty Jew. So it just got to the point where it was unbearable. Not that we were ultra religious at all, but we did practice some of the more important customs and it was just too much. So they left in search of a better life and they found it.

06:46 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And where did they come initially?

06:49 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
So initially it was Italy. Italy was kind of the central processing center for all immigration into the United States from Europe and Eastern Europe and we were given a couple of options when we were in Italy. We were given several options within the U? S and then we could have gone to Israel, could have gone to Australia, and my parents and grandparents had known one other couple that came to Brooklyn, new York, so they chose Brooklyn, new York.

07:16 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And were you all able to come together the same time, or was it?

07:21 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
For the most part, it was my, my mother’s family. We all came together with my mother’s parents and my mother’s sister, and then my father’s side of the family came over many years later.

07:33 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and when they got here, what kind of work did they?

07:38 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
do so. My father started off as an air conditioning mechanic, an air conditioning repairman, and then my grandfather started off as a air conditioning um mechanic and air condition repairman. And then my grandfather started off as a school bus driver and my father, you know, worked for a couple of other you know folks, and then, after he migrated his skill set from air conditioning repair to automobile repair and then he opened up his own automobile repair shop and um start started, you know the, the and started the entrepreneurial immigrant grind.

08:05 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and your parents now? Are they still in Brooklyn, Are they still with?

08:12 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
us. My father passed about seven years ago, but my mother still lives in Brooklyn, nice, and it’s her birthday tomorrow, so we’ll be visiting.

08:21 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, and Stephen was telling me before we started recording that he moved to New York City a couple of years ago and maybe it was. Maybe some of it was the things we talked about, like the restaurants and the shows and all that. Maybe some of it was to be close to your mom.

08:37 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Oh, 100 percent. So you know, growing up in Brooklyn, new York, I definitely have infinity. I’m to New York City. But when, after our first daughter was born, we moved to Manhattan, we moved to New Jersey and lived in the suburbs for many years and then, after I sold my company, we left the suburbs and came back into the Big Apple.

08:58 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and what part of New Jersey were you in?

09:03 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
North Brunswick, near Rutgers University kind of in the middle of the state.

09:07 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, I grew up outside of Philadelphia and my sister lives in Cherry Hill, new Jersey.

09:13 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Okay, I know exactly where that is.

09:16 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, so you grow up and you’ve got this example your parents you mentioned. You know they’re living the immigrant lifestyle. You talked to us about what they were doing and you’re seeing people grinding right, grinding to, and that obviously informed you, as you mentioned. But I’m wondering when you were growing up, did it feel like that’s the life you wanted, or what were you thinking as a as a kid or a teenager, about your future?

09:45 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
You know, if it was tough I’m not saying if it was tough, it was tough for them but they never showed it Right. So they never let us meet myself, my sister, the kids never felt how tough it really was for them. They just made it happen Right. So they put food on the table, they put a shelter over our heads at all times and they just did what they needed to do in order to get by. And they didn’t just get by, I mean, they did pretty well, you know, from from a especially being immigrants, not knowing the language, being, you know, brand new to this country. So they just provided. So I learned that as long as you work hard and you, you will provide and you will do fine by your family. So that’s kind of what I inherited just by witnessing it. Like I write in my book, you learn to grind by watching the grind.

10:38 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So what were you thinking about for your future when you were, you know, like in high school or as a teenager?

10:45 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
It’s an interesting question because a lot of my friends knew exactly what they wanted to do in the future with their careers. You know, the doctors knew they wanted to be doctors, some knew they wanted to be accountants, others lawyers, et cetera. I didn’t have much of a direction at all, I just I didn’t. I was a computer nerd growing up. My best friend was a commodore 64, which was one of the, you know, the first available consumer computers back then in the uh, I guess, late 70s, early 80s and when it’s. My mother found out about this computer programming course that offered um job placement after nine months of study. So instead of I’m sorry after only two weeks of college, she allowed me to drop out of college and to pursue this computer programming career, which was a godsend at the time. So, um, it took me six months to land my first job, and then the rest is history and your first job, which I don’t think he lasted that very.

11:49 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
I don first job, which I don’t think you lasted that very. I don’t know this, but I don’t think you lasted that very long, given the trajectory of what I do know about your career. Tell me about that.

11:55 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
I lasted there for about a year. It was a. It was a programming job at a, at a publishing company called Reader’s Digest. It was a I mean, I think it’s’s still I’m sure it’s still around but at the time it was one of the biggest publishing companies and I was doing mainframe programming for them and just you know kind of you know, learning the ropes of what it’s like to program in the real corporate environment versus programming games in my bedroom over the weekends at home. So, um, that that was a wonderful experience. And then I used that experience to get into my next job, which was for, I think, merrill Lynch. And then I worked for another company called Sealand. It was a container logistics company, again doing corporate programming on mainframes, because there were no PCs back then. Back then, and when the PC revolution came about, that’s when I migrated my skill set from mainframe programming to PC programming, with the help of some friends and other tutelage, and a couple of years after that I decided to branch out and start my own company.

13:01 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And was there a defining thing that happened? I always like to ask people like you know who started their own company Was it just a natural progression for you, or was there something that happened where that you were like screw this?

13:16 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
No, there wasn’t any like major event that made me say screw this. I just saw a lot of opportunity. I ended up getting a job. That was through a staffing agency that placed me on a project at American Express. And just from round numbers, let’s say, they were billing American Express $100 an hour and they were paying me $80 or $60 an hour and making a $40 margin and after like three or four or five months went by, I’d never sold my staffing company.

13:46
They didn’t add any value to the project. There was no project management, there was no customer relationship management. Um, there was no quality assurance. They were just collecting 40 an hour for every hour of my work and I’m like there’s no, I, I, just I again, I give them a lot of credit for for staffing me on this job, but I felt that you, if I was working directly for American Express, I could be making a full $100 an hour and I just thought that that was a lot more opportunity for myself. So I convinced a couple of other people and we started a company together doing just that providing those same exact services, but directly to the big customers in New York City at the time services but directly to the big customers in New York City at the time.

14:28 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and you mentioned earlier that the first company and I think the second didn’t work out the way that perhaps hoped. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

14:39 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, I was a little bit younger, not that I mean I was still young when I started the third company, but there was just very little direction. There was very little bit younger, not that I mean I was still young when I started the third company, but there was just very little direction. There was very little strategy. It was just, you know, put an ad in the paper and advertise, you know, computer skills for $40 an hour. Actually, I have the ad sitting right here. I framed it.

14:56 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Oh, what’s it say.

14:57 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
It’s actually, I think I’m sorry I put it away. It says don’t read this, um, don’t read this If you’re tired of paying inflated consulting rates, or something like that. And it basically advertised computer services for only $40 an hour, which was a pretty bar, a bargain at the time. But again, it was just like literally, um, you know, just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, and um got some, got a couple of gigs as a result of it. But you know, just throwing, you know, spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, and um got some, got a couple of gigs as a result of it, but you know, nothing glamorous okay, so that’s one.

15:32
That’s company number one yeah, that’s company number one. Then a friend of mine was doing some programming for a um fashion, a company in in manhattan, on on fashion avenue in new york city, seventh avenue, and it helped. It was a system that helped the company manage inventory and sales. And I said to him you know what? You wrote this program for them. Why don’t we package it as software and sell it to a whole bunch of other fashion companies up and down from seventh avenue in new york city? So I put together this marketing campaign, which was basically I typed up a flyer detailing the the features of this system and so I sent that out to about 40 different companies just that whose name I got out of the yellow pages. And, um, that went absolutely nowhere. I didn’t follow up with anybody. I didn’t make any phone calls following up the distribution of the letter. It was like again, through a whole bunch of spaghetti up against the wall and guess what? None of it stuck. So that went nowhere.

16:39 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So, respectfully, I’m not seeing a ton in those first two experiences that would make me think that the third company would become the success that it did. So what would you do differently? What did you learn to get this third company off the ground and get momentum going with it? Binary Tree is the name of that one right.

17:05 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Well, the third company. I established a fantastic relationship with the customer. It was American Express at the time. Okay, they were doing a significant amount of, you know, computer development work across multiple departments. I was able to get you know several of my colleagues you know contracts there as well, and it was a really, really large organization and they had an incredible amount of demand for the skill sets that we had.

17:34
So we felt that with the relationship that we had and the amount of work that they had, that we could really make a real run at this and do something significantly bigger. And we did um, we, we, within a year or two probably no like about a year and a half we grew to 25 employees just within one customer, and then we built quite a reputation for ourselves in a specific technology that we were experts in and all of a sudden, you know started getting other customers um in new york city. So american express led to philip morris on, led to jp morgan, led to the united nations and slowly but surely, you know, started building up a, an extensive customer base within manhattan and what was the actual work you were doing?

18:21
so we um it was. It was a combination of a couple of things. It was just custom application development. You know, back then, right now, if a customer or if a company needs a system, you go. It’s the. It’s a software as a service model. You go online. If you need a human resources system, there’s 15 to choose from. If you need a package there’s 15 to choose from. You just subscribe to it and you get this functionality. Back then, the SaaS model was not available. If a large company needed a specific system to meet a specific business requirement, they would need to write it from scratch. And that’s what we did. Our expertise was to write systems from scratch. We wrote logistics systems, we wrote customer information management systems and we wrote down billing systems. There was a whole slew of different projects that we worked on, and one of these custom projects actually turned into an entire line of business for us, because we wrote a custom project for one company and then other companies needed it, and that’s how we launched the software line that we had.

19:23 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, so there’s a connection to what you were trying to do with the fashion companies, kind of right exactly that’s what you’re trying to do with those. Okay, so you started in 93 this company, this third company, and you were how, how old at that time I was uh 26 ish, yeah, 26, so you’re like the exact same age as I was when I started my first company and the timeframe is kind of similar too.

19:51
So at that time you know you’re still working with mainframes. The internet is like just kind of happening right 1993 or so, more like 95, 96.

20:03
95, 96. 95, 96., yeah, and you mentioned when companies needed something, they needed somebody to build it sort of custom like what you were doing. I’m curious as your company grew and as the years went on, stephen, as I understand it, you had maybe 200 people working in your company or more. How did you stay ahead of the commoditization effect of the internet, particularly when it came to, like you mentioned, the development of software as a service and those kinds of things?

20:44 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
So this custom project that I just mentioned was an email data conversion project. Jp Morgan was the customer. They were converting emails from one system to another and they wanted all that data to come across from one system to the next. And so we rode this email wave. Because in the late 90s I’m sorry, mid 90s onwards corporate email became a big thing and companies were converting from these little hub, isolated email and calendaring systems to centralized email systems. One of the first to market was IBM. Ibm bought a company called Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes was the first true enterprise email product. And then Microsoft got into the game with Microsoft Exchange. And so there’s all this consolidation of email and calendaring data that was happening around the world and that was our expertise and we grew the company around. In layman’s terms I call it a big email data moving truck, because there was a variety of use cases that facilitated the need for products and services like that and we provided the best in the industry.

21:57 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, I’m trying to think back to what email was like back then, but I remember. Yeah, am I remembering it right, steven, did you have like limits on the number of emails you could like have in your email box? Yeah, there’s all kinds of stuff right yeah, there was limits on everything.

22:19 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
I mean this storage was nowhere near as cheap as it is today. So storage was expensive. Networking costs were expensive. Email was slower than it is today. It’s evolved significantly over the years.

22:35 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
How did you learn how to get in to see the right people and negotiate with these big companies? You mentioned American Express, jp Morgan and a bunch of others. It feels a little intimidating, like it could be at least.

22:50 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Oh, for sure. I mean, once you get into one company or another, you kind of start seeing trends, you start to identify the types of titles that people have, that have the authority, that have the budget to spend money on the types of projects that you’re able to deliver. And I mean in today’s day and age it’s called like the avatar or the buying persona. So that’s the modern, you know definition of that. So we, early on, just identified, you know, buying personas of the types of um staff that would be able to bring us on board for a project, and we just rinsed and repeated that process over and over.

23:30 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and so about 14 years or so into this company, you decide on a personal level that you’re going to start well, become an athlete that you’re going to start well, become an athlete of and, if I understand things correctly, you weren’t really into athletics before that. Or tell me about what transpired there.

23:56 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
No, that’s exactly right, mike. I mean my wife hates when I say this because I call myself a couch potato.

24:05
I wasn’t a couch potato because I wasn’t. I wasn’t because I was active. I love to ski, but you know, skiing was the only real physical activity that I did, often at least. So when I turned 40, I started realizing that I’ve got some really bad genes in me between my grandparents and my parents. They had it all high High blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, strokes, you name it. They had it. And I said to myself you know what? I really need to start getting as healthy as possible. So because if and when these things hit, I want to be able to fight it. And I really didn’t know. So I knew I wanted to get healthier, but I didn’t know how I was going to do that.

24:41
By total coincidence, somebody at work had just completed a triathlon and I found out about it and I said to myself. I said to her how does a mere mortal, how does one of my employees, compete in this, what I thought was an elite Olympic event? And she basically educated me that there’s all these websites available and there’s triathlons run in many cities and of all varying distances they’re not all Ironman distance and you literally just sign up, pay $40 or whatever the entrance fee is, and race. I was just blown away by that. So I said, you know what? I’m going to turn 40 in the best shape of my life and I’m going to finish one. So I signed up for a short distance it’s called a sprint distance triathlon, Okay and completed that and I got instantly hooked into the sport. I just fell in love with it.

25:31
That night I learned. So I thanked her for the encouragement and the motivation and she replied. I thanked her via email and she replied you’re very welcome. I knew you can do it. We’ll see you in Kona one day. I didn’t know what that meant, so I googled kona and triathlon and then I learned about this thing called ironman and they’re a world championship in kona, hawaii. So a new goal was born, like right there. And then I said some way, somehow I’m gonna get to the ironman world championship in kona, hawaii. And I did so. It took 12 years, but there’s the metal right there above my head. Oops, the direction.

26:09 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, that’s amazing I know it’s very difficult to get there. Um, my, I have a friend who who did it twice, I think and um, I still think he’s crazy. So you are even crazier in my mind because you’ve done way, way, way more than that, but I’m so. So your wife, you know, this employee motivates you, your wife motivates you. Did you? How did you start? I mean, you said the sprint, but did you just show up at the sprint and be like OK, here’s where I’m starting. Or did you go to a gym? Most people go to a gym, you know, and do a little cardio?

26:50 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
I gave myself I think it was three or four months to prepare. So I knew the distances. The distance in a sprint triathlon is an 800 meter swim, so 32 laps in a pool, a 12 mile bike and a 5k run, so a three mile run. So the distances I it’s. At the time it seemed humongous because I wasn’t a swimmer. I knew how to swim, I wasn’t afraid of the water, but I did not have the proper technique of strokes. I didn’t have the proper breathing technique, the bilateral breathing that’s required. I couldn’t kick um.

27:20
That was the hardest for me to get um comfortable with okay and so it took, literally took months to be able to you know complete 32 laps in the pool, even though you’re allowed to. You’re allowed to stop in a triathlon. You just hold onto a buoy or you hold onto a kayaker who’s there for safety reasons. As long as there’s no forward motion, you can stop and rest, um, but a lot of people just go straight through. So, anyway, took many, many months. I spent a lot of time in the gym swimming. I spent a lot of time outdoors biking and running and I got super comfortable. And the race was hard, even though it was a short distance. I mean, right now I can do it with my eyes closed, um, but it was a couple of hours out there, but I got it done and I crossed that finish line and just felt incredible.

28:05 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And that was that in New Jersey, that first one.

28:08 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, it was on the Jersey Shore in New Jersey.

28:11 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
OK, and If you go to Stephen’s website, which is his name, stephen Pivnik dot com, you can see a trailer of his keynote talk. In there. You can see um a trailer of his keynote talk, and in there he shares a story of your first 50k run, yeah, which they call that ultra marathon. Is that what, what that’s?

28:34 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
called. Or also anything over a regular marathon distance is called an ultra okay and so 50k is the most common, I guess, entry-level ultra, if there is such a thing.

28:46 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, that sounds ridiculous.

28:49 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
But they don’t have 30 mile races. They have, you know, 50K, which is like a 32 mile race.

28:54 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and you? How many years into your journey from that first sprint to this 50K? What was the timeframe in that?

29:04 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, I think shortly after I got I finally. So I trained my way up from a sprint distance triathlon all the way up to the ironman distance. That took about a year and a half to do. Then, after I started competing in one ironman after another, I just wanted to change it up a little bit. And I, you know, the internet knows everything about you and all of a sudden you start getting commercials for you know, other types of events.

29:28
And I see all these great ads for all these like phenomenal locations that ultra marathons are held. You know, some of them are held in concrete jungles, some of them are held out in national parks, and this one was in a monument valley in Utah and the scenery just looked phenomenal. So I said, hey, I want to go. I’ve never been to Monument Valley. I want to go see this national park, and what better way to see it than to run 50K through it?

29:54 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And I’m going to ask you to tell the story, because you talk about the mistakes you made with that race and it reminded me of sort of the entrepreneurial mentality this may not have been yours at the time, but it reminded me of. You know, we tend to be quick start people Like we get an idea and we’re like, boom, going to do that, and maybe our follow through isn’t always like the greatest. So sometimes we either need somebody to give us that follow through isn’t always like the greatest. So sometimes we either need somebody to give us that follow through or we flat out miss it. We show up somewhere and that sounded kind of like what happened to you.

30:37 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, I mean again as entrepreneurs, sometimes we just jump in right with both feet because we’re a little bit less fearful than others and a little I’m not as risk adverse as others, and that was definitely my case with my first ultra marathon. The way I like to start this story is I’m a firm believer that the first time you do something without expert guidance, your results are going to be suboptimal at best or complete failure at worst. Right, so I show up to the Mindman Valley 50K and I come to the registration desk and I say I’m here to register for the ultra marathon on Sunday and the response I get was honey, the marathon race is on Sunday. Your race starts at sunrise and I’m like, wow, and I had just flown halfway across the country on very little sleep and now I need to get up in just a few hours and start racing a 32 mile race. Like, okay, you get a couple of hours of sleep. I get to the starting line, I start running at sunrise and very, very early on, within the first like couple of hundred meters, I’m having a hard time breathing. And I look at my watch. Sport watches have altitude pages. I look at my watch. I, the sport watches have altitude pages. So I look at the altitude and it tells me that I’m a mile above sea level.

31:51
Silly me, didn’t do any research that this course is a mile above sea level and it’s hard to breathe. You have to acclimatize. That’s why normally if you go to that type of venue, you should get there three days prior and let your body accumulate red blood cells to get used to breathing at altitude. Right, didn’t do that, right. So okay, now I’m just gonna, I’m gonna hop my way through this, I’m not gonna quit.

32:13
And then, like 15 miles in approximately the dirt trail ends and I’m wearing sand. So I turned to the guy next to me. I’m like dude, what’s with the sand on this course? He goes. Oh, you didn’t read the race guide. 50 of this course is going to be sand and and not the hard pack sand like the soft, mushy, deep, tough. Yeah, I’m like, oh, my god, this is going to be pure hell. I didn’t know about the altitude, I didn’t know about the sand, but you know what? I had set out to run 50k. I was going to run 50k that day and I didn’t.

32:44
My last mistake was I didn’t expect to be out there as long as I was. Um, when the sun went down, it got really cold and then I’m like, I’m like, what else can possibly go wrong? Today and this was no fault of my own it started hailing. So here I am, like five miles left, my feet are bleeding, I’m cramping up, I’m freezing and I’m dodging golf ball size hail. But it was so close and I got it done. I finished and got that medal and learned a huge lesson. Read the race guide. Every single course triathlon, ultra marathon, what have you is different. Read the race guide guide.

33:25 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
You get a lot of information was there someone there with you, like to meet you at the end? I’m trying to imagine what you look like at the end of this race.

33:35 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
No, um, for this specific race I was solo. So I my family like likes to come to a lot of my events, but for this specific race I was solo and my god was it a chore to find my car. A fellow racer needed to help me find my car in the middle of the night because it was like in this vast open parking lot and there was only like one or two cars left. I couldn’t see anything, I was hurting, I was limping.

34:00 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Um, it was quite, quite the ordeal, but the sense of accomplishment and the adrenaline that was, you know, pumping through me, just you know, got me through that evening and into bed okay, I, I’m not gonna lie, as I as I listen to you talk about it in the video, and then now I keep thinking of david goggins, because I don’t know if you’re familiar with goggins very much. So that was like the first thing he did was run like a hundred miles with no training at all, and he had a mentality that’s, you know, like yours. Like there’s no governor on my brain, I’m just gonna go. I mean, I just remember him. I don’t remember exactly, but remember him talking about what he, what it was like when he was finished with yeah, and along the way as well, it was for him.

34:51 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
He had the foundation of being a Navy SEAL first. Yeah, that kind of helps, so that definitely helped, but I’m not taking anything away from his accomplishment. Even if you’re a Navy SEAL, running 100 miles without proper preparation is a tall order and he got it done. I mean, that guy, his, his, um, perseverance and mental fortitude is second to none yeah, it just seems that way, doesn’t it?

35:16 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
um, okay, so you get to the point. I guess what that was 16 years, 14 years into that. And then, guess what, that was 16 years, 14 years into that, and then another 13 or so, 27 years with your company and you’re, you have an opportunity to sell it. So I’m I’m interested in a couple of things, stephen. What did you do personally to help yourself keep up with your company as it continued to grow so large? So you know, you start as a startup and you get traction and then, all of a sudden, you’ve got 200 people and you’re dealing with lots of revenue, lots of projects, lots of high-end clients, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up right. So I’m wondering how you, how you, kept up? That’s my first question, and then I’ll get into the exit.

36:12 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Sure, I mean it’s really around people, Right, I pride myself on surrounding myself with really smart people and I’ve always had really smart people around me, both from an employee usually from an employment perspective around me, both from an employee, usually from an employment perspective, right, I had a great team, you know, and I continuously invested in, you know, sharpening the ax, if you will, to make sure that the team stays as capable as possible so that we can remain super competitive and continue the company’s growth journey.

36:41
And then later on and this is one of my many regrets journey, and then later on and this is one of my many regrets is that I should have brought on advisors a lot sooner. I finally, you know, had the idea of bringing on advisors in the later stage of my company’s growth, but they helped tremendously. So, you know, better late than never, but I brought them on and they really helped get the company to a point where the sale became possible. So it’s really it’s all around the people. I mean I take a lot of credit for a lot of good decisions. I take the responsibility for some bad decisions, but the best decisions were just the people that I brought on to help me out.

37:17 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And what were some of the things that this board of advisors that you put together did to help you get the business ready that you wouldn’t have been able to accomplish? Without them or as quickly without them.

37:31 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, well, one of the biggest pieces of advice was around the management team, because we weren’t 100% sure what type of exit we were going to have, whether it was going to be to a strategic acquirer or to a financial buyer like a private equity firm. Most prep not all private equity firms invest in a team. Yes, they like a company, they like a product, but they want to make sure there’s a team there that can help get it to usually five times, if not four times, you know the, the size that they’re buying it for, because they want, they want to buy at a certain level and then they want to, you know, quadruple their money. So the advice was, you know, I needed to as much as I love my management team, I needed to get a management team which was significantly more experienced in growing and scaling a business. So we did that. We found some roles for some of the folks that were, you know, they were ready. Other roles, you know, just needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, that’s just, you know, par for the course in business.

38:37
And then we just really buttoned up our books right. We made sure that our financial processes were in such a shape that would really increase the perception from an outsider when they did some, when they did due diligence on our company. So we went through this entire process of making sure that we were super buttoned up. We closed our books within seven days of the month ending. We had all of our reports readily available. We had all our contracts in a centralized repository. So the second somebody would ask for that information. It was just a matter of granting them access to the data room instead of scrambling for weeks or months to get that data, which a lot of companies do, unfortunately.

39:15 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Right, yeah, super smart. I call that operating your business with a buyer’s lens. You kind of know what they are going to want and you make sure that you have all that set, because when you can respond quickly and correctly with the requests, the likelihood that they’re going to dig deeper into this or that kind of goes away right, because you’re playing the game the right way. So when you decided to sell your business, did you go through a sales process with an investment bank or did you find a buyer yourself? How did you go through that?

39:52 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
So we actually went through our due diligence with various investment banking firms. So we reached out to three, based on recommendations from my network and some of the advisors that I had, and we positioned ourselves to these three investment banking firms. We gave them an opportunity to go away, do their homework, come back and pitch us on how they would sell my company. And the one that won was a company called Investment Banking Firm, called Fairmount Partners, out of Pennsylvania. We felt that they understood us the best and we’re going to do the best job possible in bringing the company to market, which they did. So we received several offers a couple from two private equity firms and one from our number one competitor, which was this $4 billion software company called Quest.

40:42 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Obviously, you closed, so congratulations. I asked you before if there was a trigger about that happened to you, about getting becoming an entrepreneur. Now I’m going to ask you was there a trigger in your life or in your business that made you think now’s the time for for me to look at selling and transitioning, uh, into the next part of my life?

41:04 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
yeah, it was really just the the size of the company. And, having done it for so long and there’s no regrets, right, I never took out any outside capital. Had I taken on outside capital, I probably could have grown the company significantly faster or larger. I chose to go the bootstrap method and self-fund all of our growth, with some debt financing but no equity financing. So, yeah, but it was a long journey, right, it was, you know, 26, 27 years in the making, and the company finally got to a level where I felt that it was enough, right, the money that I would get after, you know, all the taxes, all the payments, all the stock option payments, all the debt, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I felt that, you know, that number would be enough. And I kind of manifest and I write about this in my book I really I manifested this for myself.

41:52
I’m a huge believer in visualization and manifestation. I wrote a check, like four years prior to the actual event. I wrote a checkout to myself and I hung it on the wall in front of my computer so I can see it to my peripheral vision all day, every day. And I did the same exact thing with the Ironman World Championship. I put a poster of that right next to the check and I said, some way, somehow I’m going to get to that number and I’m going to get to that race. And I visualized and manifested that every single day. And voila, the day both happened.

42:27 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
How silly did it feel the time you wrote it and maybe silly is not the right word, but how intimidating or how realistic.

42:36 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
You know what? I’m a firm believer. I forget who actually said this, but if you’re going to set an audacious goal, you have to firmly believe that it’s possible. Even though maybe audacious and large have to firmly believe that it’s possible, even though maybe audacious and large and larger than life, you have to firmly believe that it’s actually possible to achieve so. Um, it didn’t feel that silly, it felt large. Right, it was a big check and that’s you know. Kona is a long ways away and it’s hard to get into. But I said you know what, if I do the right things in both of those categories, I’ll get to both, and they both happened exactly 13 months apart oh, is that right?

43:12
yeah, oh, I didn’t know that yeah, so the company was sold in September of 21 and Kona was in October of 22, wow, well, that’s pretty amazing.

43:25 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
I. I think that’s a great lesson for, uh, for everybody that’s listening. You know that this visualizing, um, what you want and not just in your mind and not just a secret, right, you got to put it out there, because when it’s out there, not only are you thinking about it, but other people are thinking about it for you too. Like it seems to me, like they see it and they go oh, steven, you want it? Okay, yeah, and they’re thinking about how they can help you. Like feels to me, like, the more that it’s out there, the more one it’s out there so you can’t run from it, right, and two, it’s out there and people are. It’s almost like inviting people to help you. Oh, yeah, 100%.

44:14 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yes. So from a corporate perspective, obviously I didn’t share how much money I wanted or how much I was going to get from the transaction, but we had a stock option plan in place, so everybody was going to benefit from a sale at a certain enterprise value. Yeah, so we were super, super transparent. We said at x amount of enterprise value, your, your personal stock option grants are going to be worth y or approximately y. Yeah, so and and so, with the entire management team and several layers below them were all incentivized, you know, to get to that enterprise level.

44:49 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And when you sold the business, did you stay on? Did you have a transition period? Are you still part of the business? What happened there?

44:59 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, so I strategically did not want to be part of the sale. I love my baby. I mean, this company was my first child for all intents and purposes. This company was born four months prior to my first child being born, so it wasn’t my first baby, but I did not want to be part of the sale. So, in order to ensure that that happened, I actually brought on a CEO two years prior to the sale to run the company on a day-to-day basis. Okay, so that when we got into due diligence, it was very, very easy to prove that I was no longer an integral part for the running of the business. So and that’s exactly what I said at the due diligence kickoff meeting, I’m like hi, my name is Steven Pivnik, one of the founders of the company, and I’m executive chairman right now. And here’s my management team, including the new CEO, who’s been around for two years now, and they’re going to be participating in the due diligence process with you. This is probably the last time you’re going to hear from me.

46:01 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay so all the management presentations. They handled Exactly. Okay so all the management presentations they handled Exactly. Very good, very smart. Yeah, very good, very smart. So the book Built to Finish how to Go the Distance in Business and in Life.

46:20 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
When did you start thinking about writing this book? So shortly after finishing Kona, the Ironman World Championship, when COVID ended and trade shows started up again, I went to an IT trade show for one of my clients and one of the keynote speakers was this guy by the name of Ed Visters. Ed Visters is a super famous mountain climber. His claim to fame is climbing all of the seven summits as well as all of the peaks surrounding Everest, including Everest, without oxygen. So he was giving this presentation up on stage and at the end which was a great story and at the end he promoted his book. And I’m like, wow, you know what? I don’t have that story yet.

47:01
I’ll get to Everest in a second, but I’ve got a pretty interesting story with Kona and like a couch potato getting to the Ironman World Championship, which is a big deal I just sold my company, which is a big deal. You know what? For me to get up on that stage and motivate others to do big things, I need to write a book. So that’s literally when the project was born. I need to write a book. And then I figured you know what I’m really going to enjoy memorializing my own story so that my grandkids can read it one day and I really hope that it motivates people to you know, dream big and to accomplish um cool things and how’d you do it?

47:38 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
did you? I know you talk a lot about um, you know getting help and having advisors and you know not doing everything on your own. And when it comes to writing a book, I know from experience that is a difficult process. It can be a grind. Getting back to the grind thing how did you approach it?

47:58 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
So I took my own medicine and I hired a ghostwriter. Okay, I love blogging. I love blogging about all my various adventures, but blogging is radically different from writing a book. I just I didn’t. I’m to my early point of the. First. Time you do something without expert guidance, the results are going to be suboptimal. I didn’t want this book to be suboptimal. I really wanted to come out of the gate with a good piece of work. So I love the out of the gate with a good piece of work. So I love the ghost.

48:28
I interviewed a lot of ghost writers, narrowed down the selection to finally one, and I love the process that we went through. We met face to face to get to know each other, and then they come up with an outline, basically the chapters of the book, and then for each chapter he would interview me, go away for a week and write it, send it to me, and then I would rewrite it to make it sound like me. And we went back and forth like this, for I think there’s 28 chapters in the book, we, you know 28 times um, he interview, he writes, I modify, finished product, Okay, and that’s. And then we went that and then that’s before the editing process and then the editors take over and then they modify it further and further and it’s like continuously polishing it until it finally gets printed.

49:09 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And besides being this sort of like validation, right, so that you’re, when you’re talking to people, you have a book, right? It’s what? What else has writing the book done for you?

49:24 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
It just really helped me relive a lot of the fun and also the not so fun experiences of my corporate journey and I love to learn and you can learn from successes as much as you can learn from failures and it really helped me relive that entire journey and it was quite a walk down memory lane to be able to put all these stories on paper, with some highlights and definitely some lowlights.

49:53 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And you mentioned earlier the concept of an avatar or persona. Who did you write this book for?

50:03 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
I wrote it for entrepreneurs because obviously there’s a business journey there. I wrote it for entrepreneurs because obviously there’s a business journey there. Ideally it’s an entrepreneur that has some, that’s athletic and wants to take on an additional hobby. I say in the book that there’s just there’s so many parallels between entrepreneurship and endurance sports. When I got better at one, I got I started getting better at the other. Specific example is when I started training for triathlons.

50:30
There’s a lot of tracking that these watches do right and your pace, your mileage, your heart rate, calories, burned calories in. There’s so, so much data. I started looking at these dashboards and I’m like Holy cow, I have more dashboards about my personal and athletic performance than I have about my company. So I quickly called the meeting with my management team at the time and I said we’re going to go KPI dashboard crazy. I met with each one of them individually and I said man, we came up with, like you know, five or six reports that each one was going to have prepared and ready for a monthly operating review meeting and we created a nice little binder with sections for each department and, instead of going around the table with just you know subjective status updates on what’s new and exciting? We would review data all the time.

51:22
And what’s wonderful about that? Is it almost not almost. It created a little competitive environment amongst the senior leadership team, because nobody wanted to come to that monthly operating review with their trends going the wrong direction, right, right. Everybody wanted to make sure that there’s everybody was, everything was trending to the right and up, so so that’s that’s why I say that. You know, becoming an endurance athlete turned me into a better businessman, and and then the two kind of you know, fueled each other.

51:48 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
How did doing that accelerate the success of the business?

51:53 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Well, neil added you know you can’t manage what you don’t measure Right. And if you’re measuring a lot of things, if you measure like utilization rates, average bill rates, you know website hit, website conversions to leads, leads to deals, sales numbers, et cetera, et cetera, like, once you start measuring things and it’s a lot easier for those things to start growing.

52:18 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Right. Imagine that Simple as that right.

52:21 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Just bring awareness to something and put people on it and incentivize them to get it and voila, put people on it and incentivize them to get it, and it’s mind boggling how few, how many entrepreneurs and companies don’t do this. I was talking to another client of mine. We’re doing the same investment banking shopping process for a client of mine and the investment banker was telling me a story that one of his other customers, when they asked for all this information they asked for their financial reports. They got two reports back cash in and cash out. This is a $50 million company. Oh my gosh. He was running his business on. Am I making more than I’m spending? And if the answer was yes, he was happy. There was no other reports that he was running his business on. So I mean, that’s an extreme example. Of course there’s companies out there that just don’t track enough.

53:10 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So let’s get back to Everest. Yes, you’ve got a goal. We talked about the Ironman and the ultra marathon, but we haven’t talked about climbing mountains and we’re not probably not going to have time to get into helicopter skiing, but that’s another thing. So what’s happening? What’s your goal? What’s your journey?

53:33 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
Yeah, so this is head of the press. I finally qualified for and got accepted to an Everest expedition, which is happening in May of next year. So you can’t just sign up for an Everest expedition. Most reputable companies that won’t let you die require that you have a lot of mountaineering experience. I’ve been to the top of Kilimanjaro. I’ve been to the top of Akin Kanwa, which is the highest cousin to Everest, 23,000 feet. I’ve attempted Denali in Alaska twice. Unfortunately, due to bad weather and other conditions, never made it to the top. But even without making it to the top, you know, spending a month on two different occasions on that mountain and living in extreme Alpine conditions is great, great training for Everest. Okay, between the two Alaska expeditions and the Kilimanjaro and ekinconwa and other training that I did, um basically qualified me for everest and I’m going in may of next year.

54:34 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
25 may of 25. Yeah, I’m gonna have to check back in with you in may, 25, june of 25 and see how you did, because that’s exciting yeah, I haven’t figured out exactly.

54:48 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
I like I want to blog and you and share the entire journey, because the training is going to begin a year out right, which is around the corner. So the training will begin soon because, just like I turned 40 and the best shape of my life for that small triathlon, I’m going to be 55 and I need to be in even better shape because Everest is a beast of a trip well, I feel like there’s a lot of certainty that that’ll be the case, that you will be ready, based on everything I’ve learned about you today.

55:20 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So, as we finish up here, stephen, that is, is there anything that? Is there anything I haven’t asked you or that you’d like to share before we call it a day?

55:30 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
um, yeah, don’t get the only other thing.

55:33
Um, like you mentioned briefly, I really really enjoy giving it back to the entrepreneurial community and helping, you know, founders truly realize the value of what they created. I mean, I was certainly stuck in, you know, further growing my company and getting the best evaluation possible. I think a lot of other founders are in the same shoes and they really don’t know exactly where to go. So I welcome phone calls from any middle market type company. I mean, it is my specialty, but I find that a lot of growth and sales challenges are the same across any vertical. My ideal customer has a company that’s doing between 10 and 50, five zero million in revenue and that wants to put a plan into place, a multi-year plan. It could take 12 months, could take four years to really realize the value of what they’ve created. So that’s the current, that’s the chapter that I’m living in right now and loving it, loving every minute of it, loving, living vicariously through other people’s businesses um, yeah, so, as I mentioned in the beginning, I call that the path to dream exit.

56:37 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So that is what uh sounds to me like what you’re doing and how does somebody? What’s the best way to to connect with you? An email or website?

56:47 – Steven Pivnik (Guest)
what’s the best. If you go to my website, stephenpivnikcom, it has all of my social handles. It has my email address on there as well. It has a contact form. That’s the best way to contact me.

56:56 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, perfect. Well, stephen, thank you so much for joining me today and joining us and sharing at least some of your amazing story and planting the seed with us of the amazingness that is still to come and for everybody listening. I end every show the same way, and you know this one it’s especially. I think you’ve got a special example of what I end the show with every day, which is you have greatness inside of you and I want you to maximize it every single day. Write something nice about me, give me five stars or whatever you feel is most appropriate. Number two I’ve got a book. It’s called Ownership how Getting Selfish Got Me Unstuck. It’s an Amazon bestseller and I’d love for you to read it or listen to it on Audible or wherever else Barnes, noble, amazon you can get it everywhere If you’re looking for inspiration that will help you unlock your greatness and potential order or download it today so that you can have your very own copy and, if you get it, please let me know what you think.

58:14
Number three my newsletter. I do a newsletter every Thursday and I talk about things that are interesting to me and or I give more information about the podcast and the podcast guests that I’ve had and the experiences that I’ve had with them. You can sign up for the podcast today at my website, which is my name, mikemalatesta.com. You do that right now. Put in your email address and you’ll get the very next issue. The newsletter is short, thoughtful and designed to inspire, activate and maximize the greatness in you.