in Conversation with Adam Miron, billion dollar business owner

Today we have a very special guest. The reason that I chose to invite Adam, and he kindly accepted, is I was fascinated when I was reading his story because not only have you just launched your book, I think it came out on the 2nd of February, Billion Dollar Startup. So not only are you an author, but I think the story behind the book was something that really interested me because it's a very controversial topic. Because not only have you started a billion-dollar company, which I think a lot of people would find totally incomprehensible in the fact that what's that take to run, can we just have a little bit of understanding of what your background is?

Because not only are you an entrepreneur in residence in a university, you have multiple companies, but you retired at 35, didn't you? Yeah, there's more to that story, but yes, that is true. So, well, this is it, because you're not truly retired. So hit us with, like, where did it start?

How did you get involved in a billion-dollar startup? Yeah, you know, I often think back to that fateful dinner party that I went to. So my business partner, Sebastian St. Louis, is the CEO of XO, and, you know, we were both entrepreneurs through and through.

We had started many different businesses. We were in a position about eight years ago where we both had enough steady stream income from residual businesses that we had created that we weren't working a lot, which gave us time to come up with new ideas, have lots of discussions, which sometimes really just resulted in two more time in the pub than it should have been. But, you know, we were looking for a business, and I remember, you know, he came to me. He said, Adam, I figured it out.

I know what we're going to do. And I was thrilled. I was like, Great, what is this idea that you have? You know, we'd probably looked at half a dozen at that point.

And he said, We're going to grow cannabis. I was like, Nope, not interested. What else you got? And he's like, No, for real, you have to understand, there's a legal environment.

It's just been established. This is legit. This is an incredible opportunity. And I was like, I don't know, man.

And he said, I'll tell you what. Let me come by your house tomorrow morning. We'll sit down. I'll run you through some of the spreadsheets that I prepared.

And 15 minutes in the next day, I looked at this business opportunity and I thought, What an incredible opportunity to build something new. Because keep in mind, we were 29 years old, and we were looking to compete at a world-class level, which meant that we were up against people with decades of experience behind them. That wasn't the case in this industry because it was a level playing field from an entry point. So we spent a year and a half in my tiny basement, 157 square feet with five-foot-seven ceilings, which we crouched in, and we put a business plan together.

We raised our first million dollars, hired our first couple of employees, got an application in, and it was just a combination of incredible perseverance and a little bit of luck. So a lot of endurance. Now, I mean, I love the bit where you skirt past that you just raised the first few million. I think for a lot of listeners who are in business and know the struggle as an entrepreneur, did you use crowdfunding?

What was your strategy to raise the money? So neither of us had really raised capital before. I had been very, you know, lucky to have had an experience where I went and met with one of Canada's senators at the time, and I said, I have this idea to start this website. And he said, How much is it going to take?

And I said, Well, $35,000. And I'd spent all night working on this P&L, just being able to rationalize this valuation and this raise. And he said, Tell me about yourself. And I went, I didn't prepare for this question.

How do I— So we just talked, and after 20 minutes, he shouted at his assistant. He said, Bring my checkbook. He wrote me a check for $35,000, which was, I mean, my first investment. And I thought, Wow, is this really how things work sometimes?

Which obviously it isn't how it works most of the time, but it really gave me a sense of confidence. So when we set out to do this business, Sebastian and I were going to initially, and very naively, finance this ourselves. We were going to sell off all of our existing businesses. We were going to capitalize, and I think we thought we could pull this off for about $400,000.

Now, to point out just how naive we are, to date we've raised over $900 million in investment capital for this company. So we were a little off the mark, but the industry grew and the opportunity grew. So we set out and, you know, we put a business plan together. We needed a lawyer to figure out how to raise money because we didn't really know how to paper it.

I remember calling a series of lawyers that I Googled, and one of them, after a while, because they were all like, you know, a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks, and we were like, No, come on. We're young entrepreneurs. Like, we need to start raising tomorrow. We have to go.

And we called this one guy, and he kind of sheepishly said, Hello, as if we'd woken him up. It was the middle of the day. And I said, Is this the law firm? He says, Yeah.

And I said, Well, we want to raise some money. We've got this business idea. I said, How quickly could we put this together, get some term sheets? And he said, Well, if I don't sleep, I could probably have it to you in two days.

We were like, You're hired. You're our guy. So we put together these term sheets, and then with the paperwork, we said, Okay, how do we raise money? And honestly, like, a million bucks was more money than either of us had ever had in the bank before.

But it was from mostly ten- and fifteen-thousand-dollar increments from our family and friends. We didn't have any wealthy family that could write a big check, so it was our friends. And, you know, and that really had a big impact on all of us because everyone in our social circle, our parents, our siblings, like you name it, everyone that could invested, and I'd say at least a third of them invested off a credit because they didn't even have the cash to do it either, but they believed in us, so they went and got a line of credit. This is crazy.

I mean, I think what people are probably thinking at this precise moment is what Adam just started up, you know, selling cannabis. You know, what is the business? Like, what is the business idea, and how would you present it? I mean, because number one, it's controversial in terms of as soon as you mention the word, but how would you term what your business does?

You know, so there's two sides to it. We had to fight stigma right, left and center, and I want to be really careful to say, you know, to clarify something. When we claim that, you know, written by the founders, we're the founders of HEXO. We're not the founders of Canada's marijuana industry.

There have been people for years that have been fighting for this in a legal capacity, from an industry perspective. There are great founders of our industry. We're just happen to be founders of one of the big businesses in that industry. And so, but coming back to your question, I mean, in one regard, for us, we really thought of this as just any other agronomics or manufacturing company.

You know, we would say whether we're growing soybeans or marijuana didn't really matter from a manufacturing costing perspective. You know, I remember I had this great interview with one of Canada's largest publications right on the cusp of us getting our sales license. So I'll really quickly explain: the government would first give you a license to grow it, but after you grew it and they saw that you could grow it, you had to destroy it. Then if you could prove that for a while, then they would let you store it.

And then if you could prove that you could store it, package it, sell it, et cetera, in a demo scenario, they'd let you sell it. Now, for us, from being able to grow it to being able to sell it was almost two years, a very painful two years because there was no revenue coming into the business and an incredibly high operating cost. And in that period, Maclean's, the newspaper, the article came and asked, So, what's your preference? And I had to say, quite truthfully, I've never had our product, which of course is a very weird thing to say because it's highly controlled.

There's none of it sneaking out the back door, and I didn't have a medical prescription. And even if I did, we didn't have a license to sell it to me. So they kind of took a shot at me by saying, Well, you know, he prefers red wine. And I thought, well, that's not really fair.

But, you know, we weren't in the selling drugs. That's not what we were doing. We were building a business that sold a medical product. And I think that's the difficulty a lot of people's perception and stigma that you're up against, and that makes it even more fascinating.

I mean, do you go under the term CBD? You know, we see a lot of products like that. Just to make it sort of more understandable for listeners, they're probably more familiar, I suppose, in the UK market, et cetera as well, with these CBD products. One thing that interests me is that you will have met so many fascinating people, you know, even from like the conversation with the lawyer and so on.

Who would you say have been like the three most influential in terms of getting this business where it is now? Oh boy. Well, there's a bunch. Let me tell you, like you said, we've had the good fortune of seeing all sorts of different things.

You know, the first one, without a doubt, would be Dr. Michael Munzar. He was the only outsider who invested in that first million-dollar round, and it was through a friend of a friend who said, I know a doctor in Montreal. He owns a clinic.

He's worked and he's been on the board of big pharmaceutical companies. He might be interested. And it just so happens that Dr. Munzar was a little familiar with the product recreationally.

And so when he, you know, sat down with us, there was an instant kinship. And I remember we were still running this business out of my house, and it was a tiny little semi-detached near downtown Ottawa. And, you know, we're trying to sit around my kitchen table. My daughter, my now oldest daughter, was just an infant, and she's crying her lungs out in her room up above.

And we're trying to have this, like, very serious business meeting about growing a very big business, and we're in my house with babies crying. It was kind of a surreal moment. But, I mean, that's what it was. This is as much of a startup story as there ever was.

And I think that's what people relate to, isn't it? I mean, you know, obviously you've written the book. The book's coming out 2nd of Feb. What is the book about?

I mean, obviously it's talking about your journey, but what's the biggest reason, you know, that someone wants to go out and buy this book? So we tried to write this book for a couple of different audiences, but at its core, this is a book for entrepreneurs. Again, that mindset that we had, that it didn't matter what it was, whether it was soybeans or widgets. You know, throughout the book are a series of billion-dollar tips and billion-dollar lessons.

And we, like, it's a very raw book because we were two 29-year-olds, literally in a basement, a tiny little unfinished basement, bringing investors downstairs into that basement and saying—

We have a chance at building a billion-dollar company. Appreciate the absurdity of that statement. And we learned a ton along the way. And so we kept notes, we kept track.

We had an excellent co-author, Julie Vuon, who's been with us for over five years. She was our publicist. She was our comms lead. And putting it together was like this great sort of sit-down over a coffee or a beer, and what did you learn?

That was how we approached the book. So entrepreneurs were first in mind. Of course, there is this anybody that's interested in cannabis and medical cannabis, in how it's grown and how that's like, there's some of that. And, you know, there's also this sort of element of the underdog story, right?

It's two guys who had nothing to lose and something to prove. Yeah, and I think that's what people want to know about. I mean, your background, I mean, you obviously didn't sort of grow up thinking, right, you know, I'm going to start a billion-dollar company and the world's going to be rosy. Where did you start?

What was your kind of first career thoughts? So the first business that I recall I would have been 10, and I was blessed with parents that, on my mom, it was a constant confidence in anything I wanted to do. She would always tell me, You'd be the best at that. And my dad was a guy who would always sort of take me to the stream but never give me the water.

And he would sort of say, Hey, look, what do you think about this? So let me give you the example of me being 10. It was a cold spring. I lived in Alberta here in Canada, and we were trying to get our bikes up and running.

The snow was just about gone and we could start to ride around. So we have to raise the seat, tighten the brakes, grease the chain, et cetera. And my dad would say questions like, So do you think other people have to do this? Do you think everyone has the tools to do this?

And probably after about 45 minutes, he would then say, Do you think people would pay a couple of bucks for someone to do this for them? And then I'd be like, Dad, wait, wait, I have an idea. And, you know, and so he would always make it mine, and he would give me this opportunity to, like, have ownership over these ideas. And he just did that over and over again.

And so, you know, we started a little bike business, and, you know, and I remember we printed off all these little advertisements because he taught me, well, you got to get people to the door. So I remember the Dot Matrix printer going nonstop that night, and we cut out these papers, and I handed them out at school. And I really remember putting myself out there for the first time, being like, wow, I'm putting my image on the line. I'm opening myself up to this.

And the next morning, Saturday morning, woke up early, he woke me up, got dressed. I opened up the garage door, and we stood, and that driveway seemed very, very long when it wasn't. And I thought, what if no one shows up? And you know what?

That day I made a hundred bucks. And as a 10-year-old that makes a hundred dollars, because we got very lucky with a big flood of people, I was like, I was hooked. See, I love these stories because this is it. This is, I think, true entrepreneurship.

I mean, everyone has their own understanding, don't they, of it and what it really means. But you often just see the level of success, don't you? And I think what people need to kind of see, and what they want to see, is all the hardships along the way. If you had to say what was the hardest time, the time that you just felt like most alone, it was horrible, and you just really did not know where you were going to go, where was that in your career?

And has that happened? Sure. So that would have been during, you know, building Hexo. And I think we talk a little bit about this in the book.

There was this time where we had taken the 1.13 million dollars from all of our family and friends. And, you know, there was literally like, if Sebastian mortgaged his house, I put every penny of savings we had. Neither of us were taking a salary.

Like, we had everything on the line here. And I remember that whether or not we would get a license was in great jeopardy. There was no certainty. We were continuing to spend money.

It didn't look good. We were having issues with regulations all up the way. We didn't know if the city would give us a municipal business license because it was cannabis. And there were all these questions.

I remember it was the worst part for me. There was this moment where I thought, Maybe we do need to think again about this. Like, there's a little bit of money left over. Maybe we should just take it and pay back pennies on the dollar to all of our shareholders to at least do right by them.

And Sebastian and I were always working together constantly, and it was either in the basement or the pub down the street. And it was the first and only time that we got on a call first thing in the morning, and I said, Man, I'm really, like, I don't really know what we should be doing here. I think we need to think about this carefully. And he drove over to my house immediately, only lives 10 minutes away, and we had coffee upstairs in my living room.

It was the only time we ever did it, and it meant like it was like a serious deal for us to do this. And you know that analogy where you're lost at sea and one of the parents just has to keep rowing? On that day, it was Sebastian who kept rowing, and he looked at me and he said, full of BS, he said, We are going to do this, and we are going to make this work. And that was exactly what I needed to hear.

And so it was that, you know, we just kept pressing, and we kept pushing, and we didn't stop. Wow. And I think when you think about your journey, I mean, every entrepreneur has a slightly different story. What was your sort of background?

Where did you grow up in terms of, you know, did you come from an affluent family? Where would you say you sat? We definitely did not come from an affluent family. My parents had to work very, very hard.

In fact, I spent most of my childhood in a small town called Two Hills, Alberta. Fun fact, there's really only one hill. The river ate the other one over the last hundred years. But we moved to Two Hills, like, by hitchhiking.

All of our personal possessions were packed. You remember those the Mandarin oranges boxes that used to come around Christmas time? So basically everything we owned, we packed into eight of those Mandarin orange boxes, tied a string around them, put it on my shoulders, and, you know, the church that had been helping us gave us a little baby backpack, and we hitchhiked to a town called Two Hills from Edmonton. And my dad walked up to a construction site.

They were building a hospital. He was very young. He said, Can I have a job? They gave him a job, and he ended up working there for 10 years after that hospital was built and, you know, made his way to becoming a journeyman electrician and was able to do exactly what any parent needed to do, which was provide for his kids and create opportunity and instill upon them this sense of You know, opportunity to take on the world.

So, you know, for us it was a struggle. But one of the nice things about that is that coming from nothing made it very easy for me to bet everything, because I think people are always afraid of the other side because they've never experienced it. And I thought, well, hell, if we lose everything, I mean, I've been there. I know, like, that's okay.

We can do that. We can survive. Yeah. So would you say that that gives you more of a kind of element of being a risk taker because it's like all or nothing kind of thing?

One hundred percent. Yeah. So if we think about then your entrepreneurship in residency—sorry, entrepreneur in residency—how did that come about? I mean, because that's a pretty nice accolade to have where, you know, you're giving something back, aren't you, now?

How did that come about? You know, one of my favorite things to do is to talk about business ideas. And if I'm being really honest, it's, you know, it's what I like to consider adventure capital, or at least that's what my investment company does, is adventure capital, where before you have a bank account, before you have a real business plan, I want to talk to and see what you've got, see what it is, and those are the companies I like investing in. And so a logical extension of that was to work with students, not just business students, but students of any kind at a university that were exploring business ideas.

So luckily for me, I had gone to a university in British Columbia called Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, and I was invited back to come speak to the group, to a group of graduates, and— That led to a couple more conversations. You know, my family goes back in Kamloops on my mom's side, five generations, so I've always sort of stayed in touch. And the dean of the School of Business and Economics was very kind. He, in fact, was an Ottawa for business.

He came over for dinner. We had a great conversation. He said, You know, I think we can do something here. He said, We've got a lot of students with a lot of ideas, and I think they'd benefit from hearing from you.

So, you know, we put this together. You know, Michael Henry, the dean, is really a visionary at these sort of new roles and really making them impactful. And I get to speak to classes all the time, you know, and it's always about experience. Like, I'm not here to profess.

I am not an academic, but I can share my experiences. I can share what I learned, mostly through failure, and I get to work one-on-one with students, often even staff. I'll do open office hours at the university, and I remember one time one of the other dean's assistants knocked on the door and she said, Do you have 10 extra minutes? I actually have an idea I've been exploring myself, and it's like, Come on in.

I love that. It's a perfect gig for a guy like me who likes talking about business. Yeah, because we've seen a huge rise of what we call the employeepreneur, the person who is in a job but is passionate about an idea. They've got something they want to do.

And what advice would you give to either someone who's in business today, looking to start a business as an entrepreneur, if there's one piece of advice that you wish you'd had, like 10 years ago, what would it be? Okay, it's clear as day for me. You know, there's nothing wrong with being an employee slash entrepreneur to figure out what that move is for you. But once you've latched onto your idea, the only way to make it work—I'm going to sound really old school here—is to go all in.

And I mean all in. You know, if your mortgage doesn't depend on your business, the odds are against you, right? This isn't mine. This advice is something that was given to me by one of my great mentors.

And I remember I was just a young university student, and he had built many successful companies, and he said exactly that to me: When you find your business, he said, you make damn sure that your mortgage depends on it, and you have to go all in and you work relentlessly. And I think there's this combination that comes from it where if your mortgage or whatever your lifestyle is depends on that business, you will work relentlessly.

I promise you, when you're sleeping or resting or doing something else, your competition is working harder. And I think as an entrepreneur, your mind is always in that. I think that that's the big change. I mean, we've seen during COVID a lot of people who've decided to start up their own businesses.

It's a brave move. If you could give any resources or books or references that you've used in your career that you think would help others, what would they be? Well, I mean, if I'm being honest, I had the pleasure of reviewing your book last night. I think you've been sending it to me.

But I mean, COVID in particular, right, digital marketing has always been incredibly important. But I think it's now all the more important because of COVID that people aren't walking around on the streets. The brick and mortars aren't where they used to be. Like, if you don't have an incredible digital presence, I think that your odds of success diminish by the day.

So, I mean, I really enjoyed what you had in your book, and even the fact that it went just even beyond digital marketing. It was like about time management. It was about everything. You really should have called this, like, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming Successful.

But, you know, I think that is my biggest advice to anyone. If you're going to start a business, there's two things. Really make sure your online presence is everything, because right now that's how businesses live or die. But two, don't be afraid to do some market validation.

People often think that, like, market sampling, testing, validation is something big companies do. If I may, I'd love to share with you a quick anecdote. I had someone reach out to me who had asked for a small investment, 35 grand, because as a photographer and video maker, they realized that, and this was about a year and a half ago, that there's this new technology that was going to revolutionize and everyone was going to be using it. He said, You can't rent it anywhere, and people like me can't all afford to buy it.

So I want to go start to buy some of this equipment, and then we're going to rent it out. And I said, I'll make you a deal. I'll give you the 35 grand that you need to get started if you do one thing for me. For 30 days, I said, what's your go-to-market strategy?

How are you going to advertise this? And he said, honestly, like what we do in our trade, it's mostly Craigslist and Kijiji for this rental stuff. I said, great, even easier. Put up an ad for the next 30 days, both on Craigslist and Kijiji, and offer that you have these for rent.

And every time someone inquires and asks to rent it, say, I'm sorry, we don't have it available just yet. We will in 30 days, and come back to me. And 27 days later, the guy came back to me. He's like, Oh my God, thank you.

He goes, two people reached out, and when I told them what I was thinking about my price, they both immediately, like, turned around. He goes, Thank God we didn't do that. And think about that, like for such a small business, the power of a little market test. I really think that more entrepreneurs could get into that habit of testing their product and service before they invest all this money in to try to make it real.

Yeah, sure. Because coming up with an idea, and it's your idea, you have to understand whether consumers want it, right? So I think the testing thing is something that we all get very excited, don't we, when we come up with something. It's easy to get absorbed into it and think it sounds fundamentally good, and then realize later, once you've invested all your assets and time and whatsoever, that it wasn't the right thing to do.

So if people want to go and find out a little bit more, where can they find you online and where can they find your book? Thank you very much. So, you know, not that anyone would ever have a reason to, but if you are interested, you could go to Adam Miron. That's just my name, A-D-A-M M-I-R-O-N dot com.

The book is called Billion Dollar Startup: The True Story of How Two 29-Year-Olds Turned $35,000 into a Billion Dollar Company. You know, it's billiondollarstartup.com. You can find it online, Amazon, you name it, everywhere.

See, I could talk on here all day. I mean, obviously you've got better things to do in your life, but I would imagine the listeners will have some questions. So we always ask if you're listening to the podcast or one of a new era, then feel free to reach out, connect with Adam, buy a copy of his book, and also feel free just to put questions below. So thank you for doing this today.

And what is the next sort of couple of months holding for you? What's going to be happening? Well, after I retired from Hexo, it was a conscious decision. I never wanted to be a stretcher founder, right?

From the get-go, we said if we don't fill the room with people smarter than us, it's never going to work. And I remember I had a very impactful meeting where we were talking about pallet sizes amongst 10 different centers that we had across the country, and I just thought to myself, this is not what I want to be doing. I'm an entrepreneur that likes to build things, not run things like that. And so I took the big leap.

I retired, I stepped down, and I thought, okay, now I'm going to enjoy myself. I'm going to slow down. And I got very involved in another startup that I had been invested in, and I'm very proud to say that this new startup, Brain Capital... is, you know, has exciting things in its future.

I am working at least 60 hours a week again on this project, so, you know, that whole retirement thing is not true. And I'm enjoying myself being back in the entrepreneurial seat, if I'm being honest. Brilliant. I think it's a fascinating journey, and obviously we'll be following you and finding out more about what you're doing.

And obviously we'll be reading your book. So thank you for today's interview. I just think one of the things that right now, when we're all a bit done with the day-to-day, the groundhog, the monotony of the pandemic has brought, that just to listen to where your story was at and where things can go, it just gives us possibilities. Is there one phrase or saying that you always hold dear to you that we can leave the listeners with?

Fill the room with people smarter than you and get out of the way. Exactly. Well, on that note, we're going to love you and leave you, but thank you so much for that. And it was fantastic to hear your story, and we cannot wait to find out more in your book.

So remember, guys, Billion Dollar Startup is ready to buy right now, and you know where to get it. We'll put the links below, and you can check out Adam Myron's profiles too. Take care, everyone. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, and don't forget I'm going to be with you each and every week. So download and listen on DawnMcGruer.com or on iTunes, and come and join us in our Facebook community too. All the details are on the website, and I'll see you next week.