Building The Future Show - Radio / TV / Podcast

Intro / Outro: Welcome to building the Future, hosted by Kevin Horrock. With millions of listeners a month, building the future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEO's and more. The radio and tv show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full show times, past episodes or to sponsor the show, please visit buildingthefutureshow.com dot.

Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show. Today we have Sarah Dusick, she's the CEO and founder of few and far. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah Dusek: Hello, nice to see you Kevin.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show today. You're doing astronomical amount of stuff, but maybe before we dive into all of that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I'm originally english, but I'm also a naturalized american because I married an amazing american man. But please do not hold that against me. Mister Canadian sounds good.

Kevin Horek: No, I love people from all parts of the world. No problems here. I travel to America and I actually been to Europe a couple of times and so I. Yeah, I love traveling in different parts of the world, so this is great, but. Okay, so you went to school. What did you take and why?

Sarah Dusek: That's an interesting question. I studied law at university. You get to do that in the UK. You get to do that as your first focused major in the UK. So I went to law school.

Kevin Horek: Wait, sorry to interrupt you for a second. What do you mean you get to do that?

Sarah Dusek: Well, in the states you don't get to go to law school out of college, right?

Kevin Horek: Oh, I see what you mean.

Sarah Dusek: You have to like study a whole bunch of things and then you go to law school if you decide you want to be a lawyer, whereas you get to do that right out of the gate in the UK. So that's what I did because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. And what I realized was through that process and sort of my early part of my career was that actually I didn't want to be a lawyer, but actually what I really loved about the law was justice. And that actually what made my heart sing was this idea of fighting for the underdog and fighting for those who didn't have that I cared about equality, that I cared about some big issues in the world, and law was sort of a natural segment into some of that.

Sarah Dusek: I just didn't quite realize how boring for me personally being a lawyer would be. So I never ended up practicing law.

Kevin Horek: Fair enough. Okay, so walk us through your career, maybe some highlights along the way, and then getting your masters, and then let's dive into what you're doing today.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. I have a slightly unusual career path in that I became an accidental entrepreneur after eight years of working for nonprofit organizations. So not your usual foray into entrepreneurship after working for aid agencies, but that was what happened to me. I worked all over the world. I spent several years in Africa and then several years in the Far east, working for different christian organizations, doing amazing work. But at the end of that time, I was burned out and frustrated, and I went with this big save the world attitude that wanted to solve big problems in the world and fight for the underdog and make amazing things happen. And the work ground me down. It was hard and slow, and nothing was changing.

Sarah Dusek: And I experienced a very profound burnout that took the wind out of my sails and that sent me back to grad school, sent me back to the drawing board as well as grad school, and started a new path.

Kevin Horek: Okay, interesting. Okay. So as somebody that's experienced burnout in the past myself, how did you kind of pull yourself through that, especially to go back to school? Because that's like, both those things are challenging separately, never mind combined.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. I mean, school was like light relief. I mean, I think school was buying me some time to rethink my interesting dance about the world and my place in it. And I ended up doing a missiology program, which is basically thinking about the mission of God in the world. And as a someone, as a person of faith, I was questioning my faith. I was struggling with who I was in the world, what my place in the world was. What was I going to do with my life? Because what I had been doing with my life, I couldn't imagine being able to do again because I was so spent and so exhausted and just burned. And burnout is not something you get over very quickly. Right? Burnout.

Kevin Horek: Right. Yeah.

Sarah Dusek: Is not put a bandage on and suddenly, like, bounce back and, like, hey, I'm back. And it took me several years to recover. And so study was part of recovery, and it was part of reimagining my life and reimagining my world and. And who I was going to be going forward.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay, so you get out of school, walk us through what you're doing today, because, like I mentioned earlier, like, you're doing a ton of stuff.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. Doing lots of things right now, which were all informed by burnout, amazingly. And that. And that's that season of study. I mean, I said I became an accidental entrepreneur. And that is what happened. After sort of several years of master's research, I ended up thinking about business as a vehicle for doing good in the world, and business as a vehicle that was a much better vehicle, potentially, for driving change, solving big problems, creating shifts. And, of course, this was 20 years ago now, and it was a period of time when no one was talking about B Corps or social enterprises or, you know, were still in the midst of, you know, were just coming off the.com bubble burst, and tech was all the buzz.

Sarah Dusek: And so there wasn't a lot of talk about tech for good or tech as a vehicle for driving change and all the rest of it. But these were some of the ideas that I was starting to think about and starting to think about how business could be this vehicle for doing good. So if you're starting to think like that, the obvious segment is to think, well, maybe I should learn about being in business. And I knew obviously nothing about being in business. I had not been in business for the first part of my career. So it was a major mental shift and physical shift to thinking about how do you build something for profit? As opposed to how do you use nonprofit resources to try and do good.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay, so what types of businesses have you created? And then let's maybe dive. Go through each of them.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I've had plenty of failures. Maybe let's start there.

Kevin Horek: Okay. No, that's the best advice. I think that's the problem. Yeah. Like, but not a lot of people will brutally, honestly tell you that. It's like, oh, I had this idea, and I made a million dollars. It's like, yeah, but how many failures did you have before you made a million dollars?

Sarah Dusek: Did you have that didn't work before you made a business that made a million dollars? Absolutely. And that's what I know to be true, really, is that there is no pathway to success without having some failure along the way. You can't avoid it. I mean, whether you. Even if within the same business, right. You're going to have constant failure. So, you know, failure is just iteration. Failure is learning, and failure is discovering things you didn't know so that you can use them to your advantage.

Kevin Horek: No. And I keep thinking about how Apple just announced that they basically canceled their car project, which is, like, one of the biggest companies ever, basically, just basically had a huge failure. So if Apple can't figure out certain things, you're not going to figure out certain things some of the time. Right. So do you maybe want to walk us through some of those failures and what you learned along the way until they became success.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I mean, I think they're endless, I think. But maybe failure overall teaches you have to keep getting back up. Right. So if you don't hit a home run the first time, it doesn't mean you're not going to hit a home run. It just means you have to take more swings. And I think that sometimes as entrepreneurs, what? We forget, we get disillusioned by the things that didn't work and don't realize, okay, well, that's one more thing I know that doesn't work. So I can take another swing at something that does. And that's probably my biggest overall takeaway from things that didn't work. So that you can, even if you make minor adjustments and minor tweaks and minor changes, all of those things are helpful for getting you to the thing that does work and the pathway that does get you somewhere.

Sarah Dusek: So I had a business in the UK that we launched, must have been 2006, and a social enterprise that were very excited about. Our first sort of endeavor and sort of crossing this divide between profit, nonprofit world, and within a year, the great financial crash of 2007 rolled around and it basically wiped the financial markets out. And everything were doing was no longer viable and we lost a ton of money and that business had to close its doors. We had to stop doing what were doing and we had to rethink our whole strategy, lay everybody off, try and, you know, preserve and protect everything you can, but basically figure out how you're going to get yourself out of what now is a massive financial mess and navigate your way through. And, you know, that was hard. That was challenging.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, not a great way to start and not a great way to think. Oh, yeah, I'm definitely onto something. But as any good entrepreneur will tell you have to pick yourself back up and figure out, let's take another swing and let's give it another go. I think there's something there. We just didn't have the timing. We didn't have the right moment. We learned a whole bunch of stuff. Even with what was working before financial markets took us out. Let's go again and let's figure it out. My husband and I then moved to the states. We picked ourselves up, we had one little baby, six month old baby at the time, picked ourselves up, moved to Montana, of all places, which is where my husband's from, and started again trying to think about, okay, how do we earn a living?

Sarah Dusek: How do we think about building a business and how do we use what we've got to try and create some income? Think about building something that's bigger than us.

Kevin Horek: Okay, so what did you create? And then walk us through that.

Sarah Dusek: We ended up creating a business called under canvas, which became one of the largest clamping companies in the US. Still the largest glamping company in the US. But that business took three years before we really hit product market fit and probably before we really had a home run and started thinking about, yes, we've got something that's. That's scalable, that we can grow, that can be something significant and we can do a lot of good with at the same time.

Kevin Horek: So how did you through that three years? Like, what wasn't working? And how did you iterate on the idea until it became successful? Because I think that's the real hard part, that so many people that haven't been through it before think that they're just going to build an app or start a company and it's going to be successful, and it can take years. Right. And I think it sounds so stupid to say for somebody that's been through it, but I, like, I get pitched ideas all the time. It's like, well, you build it. I have this idea, we're going to be rich in six months. It's like, it doesn't work like. Well, like, it can work like that.

Sarah Dusek: Worked like that.

Kevin Horek: You know, it's like you can win the lottery when you buy a lottery ticket, but your chances of hitting that are, like, very much zero.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, exactly. And entrepreneurship's a bit the same. Right. And that's why you've got to take a lot of swings, and you've got to make a lot of pivots and a lot of adjustments, and you've got to be really agile and very resilient. Your skin has to be very thick to be able to take the pain that the amount and the amount of failure that entrepreneurship requires because, yeah. We started with an idea for a tented experience on the prairie in Montana, where my husband's parents lived, and they did not work, quite frankly. People loved the product. People would phone us about how amazing our tents looked and how great the product was, but nobody really wanted to come out and stay in the middle of the prairie, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Montana.

Sarah Dusek: And so we just didn't have all the components. Right. So we had to iterate. We had to create a new version of our business model and go again. So we made an adjustment. We took our tents and created an event, tented event company. We'd start taking our tents and two others around the country who wanted to host weddings and events, so took the thing that was working. People loved the tents and they said, we just love them, where can we get them from? So we started saying, well, other than saying, well, you come stay with us. We started saying, well, we could bring them to you for an event. And so we would start hosting parties and weddings and family reunions and all the rest of it.

Sarah Dusek: And we would drive around the country with beautiful, amazing, furnished, lovely tents, which started, was the start of a business that, you know, could do a million dollars and could do something significant. But I think what we realized with that business was it was very hard to drive growth, very hard to drive scale. And this is my role. I have a venture capital fund now. I'm also investing in other startups now. And one of the things that's really interesting as an investor looking at early stage startups is what's your growth formula for scale? Do you have a pathway to be able to scale what you're doing? Do you have something that is easy to sell or easy to acquire users that we can see there's a pathway here to growing something really quite ginormous. And what could that be?

Sarah Dusek: And it was really interesting with our event company because whilst it was super popular, I basically had to wait for people to call me. And that's not a strategy for growth, right? Waiting for the phone to ring is not a growth strategy. So we then had to go back to the drawing board and go, okay, how am I going to drive the phone ringing? What is going to make the phone ring more, and how are we going to do more business? And long story short, we basically ultimately realized there were very little ways to do that with an event company.

Sarah Dusek: So again, had to make a pivot with, okay, maybe the business model is not right, which I often tell the story to folks and I go, well, that's pretty crazy because you had a business that was doing a million dollars and deciding that's not your magic formula. So sometimes good can be the enemy of great, right? Having something that works is making money is fulfilling your, you know, you think this is great, we've got a good little business, we've got a strong little business here, but we're going to stay in the little business category if we don't do something else, if we don't make a change, if we don't adjust, if we don't pivot again, yeah, that's interesting. We pivoted again.

Kevin Horek: That's. That has to be a really hard decision, though, right? Because, yeah, you're making, like, a million bucks, say, and, like, you could lose it all by pivoting, right?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, exactly. And I see this all the time now as an investor with businesses that are functional and making money, but really going nowhere and not going to grow beyond what they're doing right now. We're not going to drive any amazing changes or just not gonna have any significant. You know, there's no trajectory that says this is gonna be any different next year than it was this year. And that's. That's a. That's a hard thing to face up to. And then the question just becomes, well, what do I want? The question is, do I like what I've got? If I like what I've got, and it works for me, and I'm perfectly happy, and the world is great. Great. You stay with that. That is really great. Really fantastic. Right.

Sarah Dusek: But if that's not what you want and you want your business to grow and you want your business to change, then you've got to start asking yourself hard questions and start making hard changes, and that requires an enormous amount of courage.

Kevin Horek: Sure. So what did you pivot to? Kind of. Again?

Sarah Dusek: So we realized, okay, people like the tense keeping the tents. People want us to bring the tents to them, but we can't generate enough sales by driving around the country. How about if we take the tents to where the people already are? So we ended up pivoting a third time and taking the tents and setting the tents up as a tented hotel outside of national parks across the states. And we started with one national park. We started with Yellowstone in Montana, where were based, and just tried out a theory and rented some land, created a temporary pop up hotel with our tents, and waited to see if anyone would be interested coming to stay in a tented hotel. And lo and behold, they were. And that business under canvas has been on a wild ride for the last 15 years now.

Kevin Horek: That's very cool. So you're not involved with that anymore, or you are, or how does that work?

Sarah Dusek: I am still a very minor shareholder, but, no, I am not involved in the day to day operations of the company.

Kevin Horek: So did you sell the company or walk us through that?

Sarah Dusek: I sold the company in 2018, sold the majority of the company in 2018, and I remained on the board. I stayed as CEO for a year after that and remained on the board for several years after that.

Kevin Horek: Okay, very cool. So did you take some time off? You start the venture firm right away. Walk us through that.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. One of the things that happened to me whilst I was trying to grow and scale my own company was I realized as a female founder, it was actually really quite hard for women to raise capital. Actually quite hard for women to grow and scale big businesses.

Kevin Horek: Still is, from my understanding.

Sarah Dusek: Still really is, yes. So one of the decisions I made in my head was if I ever sold my company, I would become the investor that I wished I'd had and would become an investor to other female founders to help them grow and scale and go on the journey that I have been on. So in 2019, at the very end of 2019, we launched a capital firm called Enigma Ventures, and that we invest in female founders across the african continent who are trying to grow and scale incredible, impactful enterprises.

Kevin Horek: Very cool.

Sarah Dusek: So back to. I started my career in Africa, so 20 years later, we came back and that's awesome. As investors to Africa.

Kevin Horek: So what types of women and companies do you invest in? And how do you. Because the geographic distance, do you go over there and validate businesses, or do you get. Do you bring them to America? Like, how does that kind of work? And what types of businesses are you investing in?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I spend a lot of my time based out of South Africa now, so I'm on the continent a lot. I'm mostly investing in tech. We've got some consumer goods, but our thesis has been around anything that really does have very significant ability to scale. And obviously, tech is usually much more able to scale and able to reach infinitely more numbers of people than any other kind of business. So everything we have got has got some tech component of some kind.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. Is there like, walk us through or give us kind of a quick overview of where does a business need to be at for you to kind of look at them and invest in? And then what's your check size range?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I'm really early stage, so I'm usually the first institutional investor on the cap table. So we write seed checks and we typically write checks anywhere from sort of a couple hundred thousand dollars to five or $600,000, and then often follow on if they're doing really well. Magic sweet spot. I like very close.

Kevin Horek: No, I don't blame you. That's where I'd want to be if I was an investor, for sure. So do you maybe want to give us a couple quick examples of. Of companies you've invested in just so people get some idea and. And is there. And then maybe give us. Is there industries within side of tech that you kind of focus in, or is it kind of broad?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, we've done all sorts. We've done some AI, we've done some edtech, we've done some fintech. We've done. Have we done some e commerce platforms? Because obviously Africa's at the front line of digitization now.

Kevin Horek: Sure.

Sarah Dusek: What else have we done?

Kevin Horek: Aren't they a leader? And you correct me if I'm wrong, aren't they a leader in, like, a lot of. Kind of being first for a lot of, like, tech kind of innovation just because they have to be?

Sarah Dusek: Yes. We're making massive amounts of inroads on innovation over here, and that's really exciting because obviously, you've got a huge population, you've got a billion people on the continent, and a lot of people have not had access to digital services previously. So, yeah, we're really at the front end of frontierland over here.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. And we just kind of take it for granted, I think, a little bit in North America, right. Where other parts of the world don't have that.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. Think about banking apps and, you know, being able to create digital wallets. And Africa's certainly going to leapfrog on the cash front in terms of the amount of digital money that is moving, will eliminate cash here much faster, I think, maybe, than the western world will. For example. Same with, you know, nobody has landlords landlines here. Everyone's just got cell phone. Everybody's got a cell phone. So the amount of business that's being carried out on a cell phone and the amount of things that are happening on a cell phone is infinitely more than what's happening on a cell phone in the US or Canada, for example.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay, sorry. Maybe you want to give us a couple examples of companies you've. Yeah, you don't have to mention names if you don't want to, but you can and kind of promote what they're doing.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, absolutely. My two favorite fintechs are a company called Premier Credit and Lupia. They're both out of Zambia, both doing really interesting stuff in the digital banking space, which is very exciting. I have another company called COA Academy that is an online school for african students, which is really pioneering on the continent, really reinventing what education could look like for the continent, which is very exciting.

Kevin Horek: Sorry, can I ask a follow up to that? Is it just grade school or what are they teaching?

Sarah Dusek: That school is grade school. Yes. So they're going all the way from grade four through to grade twelve. So all the way through from kindergarten to graduating high school.

Intro / Outro: Very cool.

Kevin Horek: And it's all online.

Sarah Dusek: All online.

Kevin Horek: That's cool. Okay, keep going.

Sarah Dusek: Sorry. Great community hubs built in so that kids are socializing and connecting and doing meaningful project work together and socializing in their local areas by being connected online. So it's really exciting to see that and exciting to see just how they are thinking about reimagining education. And we know education is one of those things that hasn't changed for like a million years. And we've not really reimagined the way we teach kids or think about diverse kids or neurodiverse kids or ways of learning or any of that kind of stuff. And that's super exciting with that business. I've of course, got some AI in our portfolio. We've got one amazing company that's building recruitment AI technology, which is also very of this moment and very relevant. By 2040, I think over 25% of the world's workforce is going to be in Africa.

Sarah Dusek: So it's going to be really important that we can a create jobs that employ those Africans, but also that they can get jobs easily and efficiently and quickly so that her tool is working on making that possible.

Kevin Horek: That's interesting. So like trying to get people inside the country and jobs kind of remote outside of the country kind of thing.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, both just helping employers employ quickly by helping finding appropriate matches quickly without having to spend, you know, a whole lot of time recruiting. So trying to speed up the recruitment process and using AI to find great matches and to find great candidates that might fit particular profile.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. Any other companies you want to highlight or should we dive into Fu and far sue?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, let's go to few and far.

Kevin Horek: Okay, so how did you come up with the idea and what exactly is it?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, so few and four is our newest travel company with the idea being I fell in love with the safari experience like a long time ago. Right. And it informed the business we built in the United States under canvas. And so now with all the work that we've been doing in Africa, I spend a lot of time in Africa and just, I still love it. There is still something very powerful, very energizing about being out in nature, connecting with it and contributing to it. And we all know keeping our wild places wild is not a luxury, is a necessity if we're all going to keep breathing over here.

Kevin Horek: So it's mind boggling how people don't think of that. Like what it's like, you know, when we. Yeah, yeah. We don't need to get political.

Sarah Dusek: For the last few years, we have been involved in a really large conservation project in South Africa, developing a new lodge, which we are opening later this year, which is seeking to conserve over 100,000 land that's currently not under conservation. And we're putting it under conservation and doing a whole bunch of rewilding work to regenerate the area and regenerate the soil and also create an incredible place for guests to come and experience incredible Africa. So that's coming later this year. But as part of our own travel portfolio, we're also taking guests not only to Africa, but around the world on safari style experiences. Do good and do well at the same time.

Sarah Dusek: So all of which will be connected to either conservation initiatives or social initiatives in rural communities and using travel as travel dollars as a means to support those rural areas and not only create incredible bucket list travel experiences for all of us, but really give back to the communities who are trying to sustain some of the wildest, most precious places on the earth.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. So just. I'm on the website right now. It looks like, obviously, parts of Africa, South America. Where else are you guys planning on doing trips to?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, we've got some trips in Europe already and a few in North America, and we're working on South America, Central America at the moment. We've got several in Central America that will be on the website before the end of the month, and we will add Antarctica shortly.

Kevin Horek: Wow. Antarctica.

Sarah Dusek: Antarctica. Yeah, there's an amazing lodge that Antarctica that is doing incredible conservation work. And we're also going to look at Asia later this year. So we're going to have the whole world covered. It's just going to take us a little bit of time.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Very cool. So, obviously, it's probably a range, but how roughly, how long are these experiences?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, anywhere from five days to however long you want. Five days, I think, is probably the shortest trip that we've got on our website. But several of those trips can be put together as back to back itineraries. I think what I found with the safari industry in particular, you often are relying on your travel agent to tell you where you should go, but there are so many options. Travel agents don't know how to tell you where to go and what you should do and how you should do it. And so one of the things I was really keen to do was create itineraries that you could look at and go, yes, that's the trip I want. That you could just go to the supermarket and decide, yes, that's the spaghetti sauce I want, please. And make this happen.

Sarah Dusek: For me, so that it's easy, it's quick, you can understand it. You can see how many days it is. If you want to alter it or change it, you can. But here's the best of the best, some of the best places in the world, some of the most significant conservation efforts around the world, and here's how you can be part of it, and here's how you can make it happen.

Kevin Horek: So are these trips, like, kid friendly? 18 plus a bit of both? Walk us through that.

Sarah Dusek: Yes, yes. Almost all of our trips can be navigated for families. I don't think there are any trips that can. I am a mother of two boys myself, and when we built our first travel company, we built our travel company with us in mind. So we had a dog and two small children. And so under canvas, you could bring your dogs and your small children and come and stay. And this is the same, except no dogs because you're getting on the airplane. But, yeah, absolutely. And creating. I am always looking for extraordinary adventures to take my kids on. I want them to see the world. I want them to be engaged with the world.

Sarah Dusek: I want them to be global citizens, but also understand how important it is to protect our planet and be engaged in protecting our planet and understand some of the really big issues that our world is facing. And travel is an amazing way of doing that. And so all of our experiences have kids in mind. Some of them are going to better than others for kids, but all can be adapted. And the safari experience is magical for kids. Really, really magical.

Kevin Horek: Kids of all ages, probably kids of.

Sarah Dusek: All ages, big and small, kids at heart and kids in real life. Absolutely. Yeah.

Kevin Horek: Because, like, I've never gone love to go on a safari one day, but I've had, like, friends that have gone and, like, as an adult, and they said, like, it's incredible. Like, I can't even imagine how incredible it is.

Sarah Dusek: It is. It is very extraordinary. I don't know that there's anything quite like it. And the ability to feel like you are making a difference with and at the same time having maybe the best vacation of your life, I don't think that gets any better. I think being able to do both those things create magical memories with the people and your family that you love. Unplug your life just for a few short weeks and stimulate yourself and your senses in ways that you've not been stimulated before is an extraordinary thing to do. And I think they're priceless.

Kevin Horek: Sure. No, I 100% agree with you. So outside of kind of airfare because people come from all over. What's the kind of cost range of some of these experiences?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, we're in the 5000 to $15 to $20,000 range. So it really varies depending on where you go and how long you go for. But yeah, five to 20 is probably the person is probably the bracket.

Kevin Horek: Okay, well, yeah, that's just like going anywhere else. Right? Like you can easily spend Disneyland or whatever. Like, it's not.

Sarah Dusek: Yes, exactly. Not wildly different. And I think the unique thing about all of our trips is that we are including offsetting your carbon footprint for your trip. Oh, interesting. And it is unbelievably affordable to be able to do that. I have been shocked recently by how affordable it is to offset your own carbon footprint. And it was really important to me that we're not doing more damage to the planet by going on a trip, which arguably is a luxury. We don't need to go on trips. Sure. So super. Although depends how you argue there, I could also argue it is definitely not a luxury. We definitely need trips in our lives to make us healthy and whole. But definitely the ability to not cause more damage to our environment by traveling is super important.

Sarah Dusek: And actually it costs as little as ten to $12 a ton to offset your carbon footprint. And usually each one of our trips is between one and two tons a trip. So think about $24 to offset a trip, you know, not including the flight. But the same dollar value applies, right. Per ton. It's not very expensive to offset your carbon. And it. So we all need to behind supporting projects that are rewilding, that are doing conservation efforts to protect our soil, protect our planet, and to keep sequestering more and more carbon because that's how we are all going to stay breathing.

Kevin Horek: No, that's really cool. So you also have a book coming out. What's the book called and what's it about?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, the book's called thinking Bigger, a pitch book strategy for women who want to change the world. And the book is written to explain my own entrepreneurial journey with under canvas and also help female entrepreneurs understand what makes them investable and how to think about building a big enough business. So like we talked about earlier with the event business, that just really wasn't an investable business because it wasn't scalable. The book's about helping us think about how we build businesses that are investable, that are scalable, and that are bigger than most of us are thinking most of the time.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Can you give us some more? Okay, keep going. Sorry.

Sarah Dusek: No, it's fine. I was gonna say it's coming out for pre orders on April 1, and it will be available on all good places you buy books. But I think the magical thing for me about writing this book was there were so many things I didn't know as an entrepreneur. I mean, most entrepreneurs don't know unless you had a really expensive, fancy education in entrepreneurship. There are lots of things we don't know. And I learn a lot of the lessons I learned the hard way and the expensive way by making mistakes. And there are some mistakes we don't need to make. Some mistakes we can learn from other people. Right. Some mistakes we can learn by reading a book.

Sarah Dusek: And I wrote this book so that other women wouldn't necessarily have to make the same kinds of mistakes that I made and could help them think about building the kind of businesses that would help get them funded and help think about growing and scaling into building something much more significant.

Kevin Horek: Can you maybe give us a couple examples of things that you talk about COVID in the book?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. So, each chapter in the book explains a page of the pitch deck. So the pitch deck is a standard sort of ten page slide deck that takes you through telling the investor what your problem that your solving is all the way through to what your ask is at the end of your pitch. And so on each page of the pitch deck, there is an opportunity to present the information that you really need to hook an investor and get them on your side. And most of us don't know what investors are looking for. Right. We don't know what a magic winning formula is, and we don't know what investors need to hear.

Sarah Dusek: So each chapter of the book really unpacks a page of the pitch deck to help show you what's really important, help you understand your own business, maybe, and think about how you build differently, how you could communicate differently. And what are the really critical, important things that you need to be working on that are going to be really interesting for investors?

Kevin Horek: No. That's very cool. So I'm curious, is there any advice that you've maybe learned along the way that you would like to pass on to, well, anyone, really, because I think it's relevant whether you're male, female, or whatever. Right. Just being an entrepreneur. Right?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I mean, I think. And the heart of the book was think bigger. Thinking bigger. And I meet a lot of female entrepreneurs now who are just not thinking big enough. And for me, thinking bigger is not about just putting more dollars in your pocket. Thinking bigger is about solving some of our biggest, most systemic, most difficult problems that we're all facing on this planet together. And if we don't start thinking big enough, we're not going to solve the things that need solving. We're not going to overcome. We're not going to move forward. We're not going to drive the change that we all want to see and build the world that we want to kind of see. So that would be my biggest piece of advice. Let's think about the world we want to build. Let's think about what moves the needle.

Sarah Dusek: And let's think, let's not be afraid of tackling big challenges that have, that are big problems that maybe we could solve a piece over. Because if we all do our part right, if we all take our tiny component of the thing that gets us up in the morning, the thing that we care about, that's how we build a better world. That's how we build a world that works for everybody. That's how we build a world that includes everybody. And that's how we create solutions for some of the biggest inequalities that, you know, our world is facing.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Any ideas for actually coming up with an idea? Because it's kind of daunting. You're just like, okay, I have this hypothetical white canvas. I can do anything, but potentially doing anything is scary. Right?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. And the best place to start with that is thinking about what do I care about, what matters to me, what problems can I see? It's great to. People often think that you can see a problem and everybody can see the same problem. But actually, that's not true. Not everybody sees the world the same way, and not everybody sees the things you can see, because there's only one you, there's no one else that looks and sounds and smells and feels like you. And that's what makes us all unique. And so if we can take our eyes and take what we can see and take what we care about and decide, what am I going to do with that? That's the beginning of genius ideas.

Sarah Dusek: And actually the ideas that get funded and the things that we get to make happen often are because people really care about something and they really are passionate about it. It's really hard to raise money for something you're not passionate about. Right. And it shows people can see it, right?

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Sarah Dusek: You can see it in your eyes, right. That you're dead inside if you don't really care about this thing. So you got to really care about what you do and why you do it. So that would be what I would say, start with what you care about and start with what you can see.

Kevin Horek: Well, I think that's actually really good advice. The other thing that I would like your thoughts on is I think certain people still have it in their mind that you need to come from a certain type of background to be successful and be an entrepreneur. And, like, I don't think that's true at all. And I'm assuming you would agree with me on that. But do you want to maybe demystify that a little bit?

Sarah Dusek: Yeah, I mean, we, sadly, are playing in a world where white men who went to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, et cetera, have raised most of the venture capital money that gets deployed in our world. But the best people to solve the world's problems are not only the white men that went to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et cetera. We need everybody at the table solving the problems they can see. So I had a non profit background, and I did not go to a fancy school. So I am not your typical classic entrepreneur, but I've been a very successful entrepreneur. And, you know, I think whatever background you come from, whether you've had a career in corporate for, you know, most of your life or you're a high school graduate with a great idea to solve a problem, that's the beauty of entrepreneurship. It does not matter.

Sarah Dusek: It does not matter where you are from, who you are, how much education you had or didn't have. It matters that you have an idea that you care about, that you have a great solution for, and that you can assemble the right team of experts and people around you to help make that thing happen. That's really the skill. Those are really the skills that are required. Right. Can you build a team? Can you have an idea? Can you have a strategy for how you're going to solve that problem, and can you make it happen? And if you can do that, nothing really else matters.

Kevin Horek: I think that's actually really good advice. The other thing that I find interesting about it is sometimes, even if you don't come from that industry and you're bringing fresh insight and you don't have the red tape and bureaucracy and just like the. Yeah. Of that industry, sometimes you can really disrupt that industry because you're like, well, this is dumb. Why are we doing it like this? And everybody was like, well, that's how we've always done it.

Sarah Dusek: Exactly. Exactly. I think the best innovators are often people who can just see things, and it's hard to see something if you've been in it for, like, forever and ever, and you're indoctrinated in it. It's hard to see the. Hard to see the blind spots. So agree 100%. Often the best disruptors are people who are not coming from that industry. For sure.

Kevin Horek: We're kind of coming to the end of the show. But I also want your opinion on kind of one last thing set or maybe demystify a bit about how much money you actually really need to get started. Because obviously, if you're doing, I don't know, like a drug medicine type thing, it's going to cost you know, a ton of money, right? Millions, tens of millions of dollars or more.

Sarah Dusek: But in a lot of cases on day one, right? Sure, it cost you $10 on day.

Kevin Horek: One, but you can get your business off the ground, especially in tech now with no code or free tools or building your own mvp for hundreds, maybe a few thousand dollars. Talk about that a little bit.

Sarah Dusek: Yeah. I mean, and then the other thing connected with that is you don't have to give your day job up right away either. Right? You could, your day job can fund your night job. If you've got a great idea and you want to build something, you've got to invest in you first. So you've got to take whatever little money you've got, put your own skin in the game, whether that's your time, your savings, your house, your pension, whatever it is, put yourself in the game and stop paying your 401k for a while and start paying your own startup to make something happen. Right. And figure out how to just make it happen. When we started our first business, we had been working for nonprofit agencies for like, almost a decade. We had no money, nothing. No savings, nothing.

Sarah Dusek: And, you know, we scrounged together a little bit of money from our friends and our family. We put the little bit of cash that I had saved, and we got ourselves going and we tried and we tested, we failed. We lost it all. But we still said, let's go again. And not being afraid to lose what you've got is, even if it's a little. Right. And sometimes we're afraid to lose the little we've got because it's all we've got. But that is, there is no getting around that. There is no. I meet entrepreneurs all the time who want me as an investor to be their safety net. They want me to put my money in their business to make their idea happen. And I'm asking them, okay, what have you done so far?

Sarah Dusek: What skin in the game, have you got, how are you working three jobs? Or you like, are you putting everything that you've got of yourself into this thing? And, you know, it's your passion and your baby? And often the answer is no. And I'm like, well, why not? And they're like, well, it's a bit risky. It's usually the answer. And I'm like, so you're asking me to take a risk and you're not willing to take a risk. That's not going to work. And so, you know, you're right. You don't need hundreds of thousands of dollars to start a business. You just need an idea, a bit of willpower, a bit of creativity to, you know, maybe some encouragement from your friends and families to support your idea.

Sarah Dusek: Maybe if you can convince them it's a good idea, that's a good sign that they believe in you and they care about the idea that you've had and see what you can make happen. I mean, honestly, I think venture capital spoils a lot of businesses. The best businesses don't have a lot of cash. They have to be nimble, they have to be creative. They have to be strategic about what they build and how they build it and when they build it. And they have to think about generating user activity or customers as quickly as possible. Because when you do that, you start to test your idea, right? And you start to test, is this a thing? Do we even want what we're building? Are we building this thing wrong? Have I got it in the wrong place? Can I actually drive any sales?

Sarah Dusek: You know, and all these things you learn by having customers and relationships with real people in the real world. And often investor money doesn't help you do any of that. It often just pushes that down the road. So I'm a massive fan of starting with a little and seeing what you can make happen with a little. And if you've got something, you'll make it happen and people will be banging at your door to invest in you.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. But how about we close the show with mentioning again where people get, can get more information about you, all the companies, the book and any other links you want to mention.

Sarah Dusek: Thank you. Yeah, my own website is going live in a couple of weeks, Sarah Dusuk.com. And you'll be able to find all the information about my venture fund, my travel company and my new book coming out on that site. But my travel company's few and fourcollection.com, you can find us there and the book is thinking bigger, a pitch deck formula for women who want to change the world. And that will be available for pre sale from April 1 from all good places where you can buy books.

Kevin Horek: Perfect. Sarah. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.

Sarah Dusek: You, too. Thanks for having me. Kevin.

Kevin Horek: Thank you. Ok, bye.

Intro / Outro: Thanks for listening. Please visit our website@buildingthefuturesshow.com, dot, to join the free community. Sign up for our newsletter or to sponsor the show. The music is done by electric mantra. You can check him out@electricmatra.com and keep building the future.