Zero To A Hundred – Episode 29: How To Design A Business For A Successful Exit With Brian McNally

Accelerators! 🚀

In this episode, we’re joined by Brian McNally, an entrepreneur who scaled his business from zero to $50 million in just 7 years and sold it for a successful exit. Brian shares how he built a company designed to sell, the importance of leadership rooted in integrity, and the strategies that kept his business thriving—even through adversity. If you’re looking to scale your business, streamline operations, and build a culture of excellence, this episode is a must-listen! 🎯

What’s on the Menu:

💼 Why designing with the end in mind is key to a successful exit.

🏆 Creating a culture of accountability, growth, and excellence.

🔑 How to build systems and processes that maximize efficiency and profit.

Why Tune In?

Brian’s candid advice on leadership, growth, and overcoming challenges will inspire any entrepreneur to focus on profit over revenue and lead with purpose. Learn how to scale a business without losing sight of what truly matters—your people, systems, and goals.

💬 Gem from Brian:

“Hell is getting to the end of your life and meeting the person you could have been. Take action now.”

Get in Touch with Brian:

📧 Visit BrianMcNally.com or connect on Instagram at @thebrianmcnally.

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

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How To Design A Business For A Successful Exit With Brian McNally

In this episode, I am very excited to introduce our guest, Brian McNally, who is the Cofounder and former CEO of Meleeo, a medical staffing business that he and his business partner built from $0 to a $50 million exit valuation. They were also recognized by Inc. 500 four times. He’s also a husband, a father, and a soon-to-be professional MMA fighter, living the dream.

The topics that we’re going to cover are everything that you should be looking at and know on your entrepreneurial journey to success, designing with the exit in mind, and empowering your employees to build a successful company culture. Before you take on that new shiny thing as a business owner exhausted, it’s everything you possibly can in the current marketplace that you’re in and challenge everything. When you challenge everything, it makes you step up your game and truly work at the top of your field.

For those of you who do not know me, I am the Founder of BoxFi. We are the nation’s leading payment consultant, providing business growth solutions through payment processing. I’m excited to share the network that I’ve built as an entrepreneur to help you grow your business and become more profitable. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

Designing A Business For An Exit

Brian McNally, thank you for joining us.

It’s my pleasure to be here. I’m excited to talk to you.

This is going to be a good conversation for the audience because what we’re discussing is how you dress your business up and make it look great to not only send it out on a date but to marry it off and sell it to somebody. You’ve done that successfully with your prior company, Meleeo. That’s what we’re going to cover. Thank you again. Brian, let’s discuss for the audience because they’re business owners and entrepreneurs, some of the key decisions that helped you build this business to be able to exit it.

The most important decision was designing it to be exited. Often, I talk to people and much like ourselves, the company’s born out of frustration. That is why we work for these large bureaucratic organizations. We’re creative entrepreneurial-minded folks. You get frustrated and mired down in the red tape of a day-to-day. You see a problem and you want to fix it. That’s how we’re wired as entrepreneurs.

When you’re working for someone else, sometimes you can’t put your finger on it but that’s what’s making you crazy. My business partner and I worked together for years prior to going out on our own. It was always that frustration and the lack of client focus. We were salespeople so we were always on the front lines, dealing with clients, and trying to address issues. We never felt empowered to make things right. We do what is right for our client to maintain the relationship. It was always about our bottom line and a lack of foresight.

If you treat people the right way, you’re going to be your client forever versus making a couple of extra dollars this quarter. That was the frustration. Ultimately, we wanted freedom in our life. That was our end goal and big why. Let’s be different, enjoy what we’re doing, and live our values a little bit here with the goal of growing something to sell it. The key for us was right from the jump.

We looked at the marketplace and saw a competitor that had gone out and sold a few years before us. We saw their arc. It was about ten years and they grew a certain size. We think 5 to 7 years. If we push it, we could do a $20 million company in an exit. That was our North Star. Everything else to us was irrelevant. It’s important to have a plan. Take stock of what you want your life to look like. Before you start this business, why are you starting it? That was a huge decision for us. We knew exactly where we were going and what we were trying to accomplish.

You went into this knowing that it was going to be something that you wanted to exit. You said 5 to 7 years with $20 million. The question is did you accomplish that?

We exceeded that. If not for COVID, we would have done it in year 5 with $20 million. That was our target. We had done $10 million in 2019. The business started in 2015. Heading into year 5, we did a little over $10 million but our run rate for the year was to exceed $20 million. We had built the whole campaign around 2020 and all this stuff. Everyone was excited. Three months into the year, COVID hits. We’re in healthcare. We supported specifically the revenue cycle of hospitals. With no patients and dollars, my business ground to a halt. We ended up losing 50% of our business in 6 weeks.

Living Your Values As A Leader

I want to come back to losing 50% of the business and having to rebuild, especially in such a trying time. One of the key things that I’m hearing from you is that the success of your business was built around your mindset. Having the experience that you had working with the other bureaucratic companies, how did you create that mindset from the leadership level down so it trickled throughout the entire organization?

As a leader, you need to live your values. I had this massive goal and it was certainly financially based but it was a pursuit of freedom that I was chasing and a certain lifestyle I wanted to live. Moreover, I wanted to be able to put my head on the pillow at night, knowing that I felt good about the decisions I made but I wasn’t going to sacrifice my character for that goal. It’s how I’m wired. I’m a blue-collar. My word is my bond. I’m a handshake kind of guy. That’s important to me.

How I treat people in the course of my day mattered. That frustration with the clients that I was always trying to serve was a big part of my reason for wanting to do that. It’s like the golden rule. Treat others how you would want to be treated. We set out to treat our clients the way we had always wanted to work with them and treat them. We knew we would build strong bonds and relationships that way.

Additionally, we started working with our staff the same way. We created a company and a culture that we would want to work for. It’s a company in a culture that I would want my daughter and son to go work for. I treat people as such. I’m no pushover with my kids or my employees either. It doesn’t mean that it’s a whimsical fairy tale land but it does require a little empathy and vulnerability. You also still have to challenge, push, and try for a goal. We had a saying in the company, “Do what’s right, not what’s common.”

What does that mean for you within the company culture?

One of the small examples was we would empower our team to make desk-level decisions to make things right. In our business, we travel nurses all over the country. At one point, we had close to 300 people deployed all over the country. They’re in rental cars and living in hotels. It’s pretty tough for them out there. It’s not a great existence. They’re living in a hotel for 3 or 4 months at a time. They get a week off. It’s messy.

Mistakes happen. There are a lot of moving parts. Maybe we dropped the ball in a rental car reservation, a stipend, or something that we felt like this was truly in our court. We dropped the ball. My employees had the ability to make it right. This is where the character comes in, even the situations where other companies or ourselves maybe didn’t have to do it. It wasn’t a requirement for us but it was the right thing to do. It was more common for other companies not to make it right in the way that we would. If we dropped the ball with a client, a lot of times we would say, “This one’s on us. Don’t pay us for it.”

Even though in our business, it wasn’t a requirement to do that. I feel strongly that real relationships are built when things are tough and how you respond when things are tough. Anyone could be a great partner when everything’s great. How do you respond to the tough times? Do you own your mistake? Do you make it right? Do you do what’s right even if it hurts the bottom line? In the short term, it did in a lot of cases. What a lot of people lack is when they talk about having a brand. “That was our brand. We were a reliable partner that you could count on.”

Building A Culture Of Excellence

How did you balance that empathy and vulnerability as a leader but still command respect from your employees?

The respect is earned through my ability to admit my failures. We had a culture of excellence. I didn’t look to fail very often. I didn’t want my team to fail very often. It wasn’t rewarded to fail. When it happened, we recognized quickly that this wasn’t about an individual. This is about us and a process. This is an opportunity to improve and get better. If you take that growth mindset in the business into your own, you might have to model these things yourself.

When I would model, if I dropped the ball, I do it in front of everybody. We had a culture where we challenged everything and every one every time, including myself and my business partner. Even though we were leading the company, if we were going down a path and our team saw it and didn’t think it was the best call, it was widely accepted to address it and challenge us to see if that’s the best path.

A lot of times, we avoided that anyway because I’ve engaged my team in most of those decisions prior to me making that call. Most of the time, they’re the ones who are at the desk level dealing with it. They’re going to have better insight into what the real challenge is. We relied on them a lot. We empowered them to bring that to us. It’s this constant improvement model. That’s where it comes from.

Respect is earned because of the vulnerability. If you try and pretend that you were infallible and that you know all from the corner office, first of all, everyone knows it’s bullshit because they know you’re a person and they probably know you personally. They’ve probably seen you mess up but you don’t feel comfortable calling yourself out. How are they ever going to admit their mistakes? How does anyone get better?

Our whole focus was mission over the man, whether it was me, our business partner, or anybody. What’s the best thing for the business to achieve this goal? This goes back to designing with the end in mind, growth, scale, and exit. If we’re squabbling over personalities and who gets blamed for what, that’s slowing us down. It’s not supporting the mission. As a leader, it was like, “We have a problem. How do we fix it and disseminate that information in a way that this doesn’t continue to happen? This is an opportunity to fix a kink, a problem that we’re having.”

The Importance Of A Growth Mindset

Were you always this type of leader in business?

No. I’m a hard-charging guy. I’ve always been this leader in life. I was always the captain of my sports teams and all that stuff. That was mainly because I’m an extremely passionate person. I’m always a driven person and that’s how I’m wired but I wasn’t very empathetic or vulnerable initially. People were widgets to me. I chewed them up and got the job done. If you don’t like it, I’ll replace you with somebody else and get someone else in there who’s going to do the job.

That’s how I was trained in my very first job coming out. That was the environment I came from. I assumed that’s what had to be done. It wasn’t until later that I started working with more tenured employees. In a lot of my early jobs, there were new people out of college. It’s the culture that I came from. As I started becoming more of an actual leader in the organization and owning my company, I realized that get more from people when they’re bought in and not afraid.

They want to have agency in their career. How much money somebody’s making? What cool ping-pong table do you have in the office? They want agency over what’s going on every day. You’re going to lose the best people if you can’t get them engaged in what’s going on in the business and where the business is going. That’s the fulfillment that people are looking for in their careers. People make a lot of money who are unhappy and leave jobs because they don’t feel fulfilled. They’re not part of the decision-making process.

For you to become this leader, was this trial and error? Was it a study? Did you have a mentor? Your mindset, which sounds like you need to be writing a book, is unique. It’s transformative. A lot of us have had that experience. The audience is business owners and entrepreneurs so they might be in that position where they realize the need for a transition. What do you do to develop that skillset? It is a learned skillset.

It’s an evolution over time. It wasn’t some catalyst that drove it. There was a little bit of a catalyst in 2020 with COVID and everything but I had always been on this arc of growth. The real key here for me is a growth mindset and a focus on personal development. Change starts with me. I had to grow as an individual and mature. As I went through different scenarios in life, that was a big part of it. Part of my personal growth development is reading and learning, consuming books constantly. More importantly, disseminate that information down to 1 or 2 things that are important to me from that book and then apply it.

I’m sure plenty of people who listen and read books don’t apply a lot of the stuff. From a leadership perspective, I read Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership. That was one where I was already doing some of these things but this has to be an absolute in everything you do in all aspects of your life. It’s this idea that it begins and ends with me. If there’s a breakdown, it was on me in some way, shape, or form. Stop looking outwardly and always start looking inwardly. That was a big shift for me there but it’s a combination of life experience, personal development, and education.

I’m looking at it on my bookshelf. I’m an avid reader as well. I’m going to put that one. I’ve got two books ahead of it. That’s going to be the next one that I’ll read because it’s interesting. I’m thinking about my company as it’s growing, what I’ve been working on, and some of the challenges that I’ve ever faced over 2023. It has been interesting because when I face a challenge, I put my head down, work as hard as I possibly can to get through or get over that challenge, and set things aside laser focus, which is not always the best thing to do as I’m growing and learning as an entrepreneur and also as a business leader. First of all, even having conversations like what we’re having, did you have mentors and other business leaders that you could turn to that you learned from as well?

A little bit, not so much personally. I didn’t even join a mastermind until after I sold the company. I had an amazing business partner. Both of us didn’t have real-life mentors. There are plenty of business mentors on YouTube and things like that. You don’t need to sit in a room with these people to absorb their information. Getting close to the best possible people in the world is even harder but they’re all putting out free content with detailed information and they’re writing books.

If you invest yourself and stop, don’t just listen to these podcasts for the sake of entertainment on a car ride. Take action from it. I was talking to somebody one day, “Who do you credit for this stuff?” I was like, “Google.” I used to google every problem I ever had. It was the best mentor ever. We would come across problems and the very first thing we would do is to google this issue. It became a thing in the company. A teammate would come to me like, “I don’t know what to do.” I’m like, “Have you googled it yet?”

We’re in the best age ever. You have all the world’s information at your fingertips at any moment. It’s there for you. From putting together shelves in your garage from a YouTube video like I’ve done, understanding EBITDA and what is a good multiple in your marketplace, and all that, it’s all out there for you. You have to take the time. AI is out there. It’s like writing a good prompt. It’s the same concept. You always have to be challenging yourself to ask the right questions.

The study is so important for every single thing in it. I love that you’re talking about that. I’ve read more books in 2023 than I’ve collectively read in four years of my life period. My secret for reading is I have a physical book and a pen in hand. I listen to the audiobook because I have dyslexia and things such as that. I hear very quickly so I can listen to 2.5 hours to 3.5 hours and get through an 8.5 hour-book in 2.5 hours. It’s become fun reading.

I retain more information than I’ve ever retained. I stay awake. I don’t fall asleep like I used to when I would read. I’m very focused on the content. If I like the content, I have my PLAUD.AI recorder. I’ll record the Audible on this device after I’ve read the book. I’ll transcribe it through the AI, put it into Chat, and have Chat give me actionable items that I can take away from that book to incorporate into my business and also give to my team. For the first time in my life, I’m activating what I’m learning in books and it is opening my world. Everything you need to know is in books. That’s so important.

Learning And Applying Lessons From Books

It’s huge. I usually pull out 1 to 3 key concepts from any book. One book I love is Great by Choice by Jim Collins. It’s second from Good to Great. Like the 20 Mile March, fireballs not cannonballs, those were two things. If you were to ask me a bunch of questions about that book, I probably wouldn’t know but those are two things. I’ve actively deployed those in my business.

The bullets, not cannonballs, a good example of that was we wanted to expand into more of a pure consulting service line. This is a combination of designing with the end in mind and also fire bullets, not cannonballs. As entrepreneurs, we always want to follow the shiny object. We had seen a vein that we could run through this consulting angle where we could grow the business. We did successfully do it to a degree but there was a decision that needed to be made. “Do we build this out? Do we chase this shiny object, build out a team, hire people, and all these things?”

I had been listening to the book at the same time. I was like, “Let’s fire a bullet here. Let’s not just fire a cannonball. Let’s test it out and see where this goes.” I viewed it as part of my job as a leadership team. I empowered my team. I would focus on long-term strategy. I joked around saying, “I’m going to the lab.” This is where I would play, call clients, and ask questions. “If we did this, would this be something you’d be interested in? What would it need to look like?”

I pull the market and build networks and relationships with people in that space. It’s a big part of what I did towards the talent of our business before we sold. Ultimately, we looked at that and said, “We’re going to have a certain amount of runway before we go to market to sell. This is the lift. We think there’s an opportunity here from the client but ultimately, we’re going to let this go and choose to partner with consulting firms versus build our consulting business.”

By testing, firing a couple of bullets, and doing some light consulting work, we found partners and realized, “There’s a quicker path here. That quicker path aligns with our exit strategy. We can keep the team, our resources, and energy focused on growing our core business while taking advantage of this other opportunity. Maybe to a lesser degree but we didn’t distract the team either.” That is the concept of staying on that 20 Mile March. Every day, it’s how to be consistent.

I coupled those two things right from that book in a pivot kind of decision within the business about three years before we sold. It helped us stay on track and continue to grow our core, which is ultimately what we sold for but adding the value of this opportunity that we saw. Maybe to a lesser degree than if we build it out ourselves but we already knew how far we wanted to go. We knew where we were getting close to that 5 to 7-year mark. We knew the revenue was getting in that range and it’d be a big distraction. That’s a good example of designing with the end in mind, leveraging the knowledge and the information that I’m bringing in to actively deploy that in the decision-making process of my business.

The Importance Of Staying Focused

You’ve been through that and navigated it successfully. It sounds like the book was a big help for that. What advice would you give to an entrepreneur who is looking to make a pivot or add something to their business that they haven’t done before to make sure that it’s going to add value to the operations?

The first thing I would say is have you exhausted where you’re at? Many times, we hear people say, “There’s not enough opportunity in this space.” I only sold to acute care hospitals, which realistically, maybe had 2,500 to 3,000 targets throughout the entire country to call on. We built a $50 million business. We couldn’t have stuck with it and grown it even further. People say, “There’s not enough opportunity in my marketplace.” You’re probably wrong. There is. You probably don’t need to reinvent the wheel as much as you need to make some minor tweaks as to how you approach it.

Before you do anything, talk to your clients and talk to the marketplace in which you want to enter. I’m very surprised at how few people do that. Ask them, “What does it need to look like?” This is what I’m trying to do. Hopefully, you’re going to make a pivot as a business. You’ve already built up some credibility, customers, and things like that. You should have those relationships that you can lean into and say, “If I were to go down this path, what would it need to look like for you to want to buy it? Moreover, how would this add value to you in your space?”

If you talk to the marketplace, they’re going to tell you what change you need to make and the adjustments you can make. Often, we plan in our office late at night. We’re not listening to people. Look to help people. That was so much of what I did. “Let’s stop for a second. We built this this way. Is this how it works for you? What does it look like from your side, Mr. Client? How is this adding value? What other things could we add value that you’re not seeing?” They would tell us what it needs to look like. That’s how we found the consulting opportunity a lot of times. Seek help.

If you’re an entrepreneur, the way in which you can figure out opportunities in your business is to pull the audience. You have a built-in clientele. If they’re continuing to work with you, they believe in your ability to deliver the product or service. Ask them what they would want to see and that can help you make a very clear decision on what could be saleable in the market that adds real value.

From an operations perspective, I always try and keep it somewhat adjacent to where you’re at. You can use the same team and knowledge. If you go too far and you have to rebuild all the knowledge and experience and you essentially have to create a second whole team, think about the time that’s going to take from your perspective to train and implement all new processes, education, and everything.

If it’s something that you already have a knowledge base, you have that same team, you can leverage your existing team operationally to branch off and take on some more of that work, and you don’t have to redo workflow, training, and all these things, the key is always to make tweaks, not overhaul changes because it’s going to slow you down.

One of the reasons we were able to go from $0 to $50 million in 7 years with no outside capital is because we didn’t make a lot of massive changes. We did constant tweaks. We focused on being excellent at what we did, not doing a bunch of different things. That’s what I would try and tell people first and foremost, “Are you excellent at what you do now? Are you the best at it? If you’re not, why go do something else? Get better at what you’re already doing.” Go out and do something else.

I love the, “Are you excellent at what you do now?” It’s important because entrepreneurs in general go after that next shiny object and completely get distracted. How do you put yourself in the mindset where you’re putting those blinders on and you’re focusing on creating that best-in-class product or service and not getting distracted by all of the potentials that are out there in the marketplace? How would you advise an entrepreneur to put that cap on and stay there?

It’s hard because it requires patience. If you were willing to take the risk to start a business, be willing to take the risk to continue to bet on yourself to be great. That was part of it because you start to get to a point where you get that claustrophobia so to speak. “This is all we’re doing. There are all these untapped things.” To stay there almost seems riskier than going to do something else.

In anything, if you want to get in better shape at the gym, you don’t go sporadically. You keep going. The momentum happens with time. Most people don’t understand truly the amount of time it’s going to take for it to happen. They get impatient. I would focus on being patient, consistent, and getting better every day long before I went and tried to tackle some new challenge. You’re going to be half-assed at two things instead of great at one.

You hear so much online from all these fake gurus and business mentors about creating multiple streams of income and diversifying. I cannot think of one individual who has built success. Even if they have multiple companies, they did it by building that through multiple companies to start. There was one thing that they focused on. Once they executed on that one thing, they moved on to that next thing. I love the idea of patience, consistency, and get better every single day at that one thing before you move on to the next as an entrepreneur.

From X’s and O’s operation, increasing your profitability or profit margin, you want to be able to scale by creating more profitability with less ultimately. When you start to do all these other things, you need more people and resources. You’re increasing your budget. Maybe you’re increasing your revenue but you’re probably not increasing your overall profitability and net income because you have all these investments. How do you grow within where you’re at with less? You’re only going to do that over time once your people get more efficient.

We had recruiters. In the beginning, they’d get to manage 20 or 30 people and they feel maxed out. They’d say, “I need an assistant. I need this. I need more resources to grow my business.” Being the good leader I am, I denied them that. I said, “You’ll find a way. I trust you. You’re going to have to get better with your time.” This is an example of how this works at the desk level. Towards the end, these same folks who a few years before were saying, “I can’t manage more than 30 people. There’s no time in my day,” were managing 50, 60, to 70 people. They created systems, processes, and efficiencies. They got good at what they did because that’s all they did every day. They could do it in half the time.

Building Efficient Business SOPs

Talk to me about how you built out those SOPs for your business. Time, as we know, cannot be managed. Everybody gets 24 hours a day. To be honest, you don’t have 24 hours a day. The only thing you can manage is your activities. In your field, you weren’t an expert at every single job that you had employed for your business. How did you build out the efficiencies and those SOPs so those same reps could go from 30, 50, to 70 different individuals that they were managing?

Some of it was investments from us but the investments came after working with the team to fine tune the process. The first thing we would do is reverse engineer all of our stakeholders. The people we deployed were our consultants. We’d send consultants out to client sites. Our recruiters manage that relationship. They also had some interaction with our operations team who would handle their onboarding, background checks, and all these things. We need it for them to physically go into a hospital. There are a lot of health screenings and things like that.

We had salespeople who would manage the client relationships. They find and manage clients. There’s a crossover between those all those groups. Essentially, we reverse-engineered every step in the process from invoicing to the client reach out, consultant onboarding, and all those things. We work with those teams and say, “Where are you getting the most challenges? What are the most questions? Where are the problems coming in at?”

A good example would be, “We’re getting drug testing back too late, which is causing delayed starts. It makes the client and consultant upset.” I’ve got three stakeholders who were all upset. We need to find a way to expedite this drug screening process. We would rank. “What’s the biggest problem? What’s the biggest bang for our buck?” That’s where I would come in as the leader. I’m going to go shop new vendors who can solve that problem. We need it back quicker. We need a reliable partner. I can solve for that but they’re bringing that to me.

Steps in process. Whenever we had a breakdown, we’d go over these challenges once a week in our team huddle. If we had a breakdown, we’d stop and ask about it. “What led to this? Why did it go on?” This goes back to my earlier point. “Who messed up?” It wasn’t a blame game. It was a diagnosis. “Where did this problem come from? This is a symptom of a problem. How do we fix the root cause of this?”

Sometimes it couldn’t be fixed. Sometimes it’s an anomaly and it happens but if you see a pattern, this goes back to creating fulfillment for your employees. Your job as a leader is to remove the roadblocks to make their job easier and make them more efficient and effective at their job. If they keep running into a problem and they’re making mistakes all the time, instead of you yelling at them because they’re making a mistake, maybe ask why that is happening. They’re probably going to explain to you exactly how they ended up there.

Occasionally, they drop the ball but normally, there’s something wrong in the process that could be fixed or that you could remove. That’s typically what we would do. We work with them. We had them create the SOPs based on that. I would review that with them in the process and say, “Walk me through it.” It’s almost like an outside consultant. I would come into my business as if I were the business analyst or the consultant and say, “Walk me through everything in the process.” They would do that. I would challenge, “What about this? Could we remove that? What’s the hold up here? Why is that there?” We would figure out how to remove it quickly.

An open channel of communication is key to building out successful SOPs for your employees to operate the business to add some level of efficiency.

Also, having them actively engaged in the creation of it. This goes back to the agency. When we ended up selling the company and we had a tech technology integration with the new company, the CRM, I wasn’t involved in any of those meetings. The company that acquired us had a consulting firm come in and ask us, “Don’t you want to be in these meetings?” I’m like, “I have no clue about any of it. I don’t want to know. I wasn’t involved in the creation of it.”

They came back later and said, “We’ve never worked with a team that knew this so well. Your team is all over.” I’m like, “Yeah, because they created it. It’s their baby. They made it. They’re passionate about it.” They were arguing with the consultants like, “No, you can’t do it that way. That’s not going to work.” That was our culture. We had a culture of challenging everything to make sure that it was the best. Personalities and feelings were not important to us. It was the mission above everything.

Would you say that challenging everything within your business is one of the key things that helped you recover from the 2020 50$ loss in revenue?

It gave us an opportunity to dive deeper into where the problems were. Our business dried up. While we were out there scrounging for anything we can get our hands on and fight tooth and nail for business, in the very beginning, we’re like, “We’ve got time. Why don’t we use this time to slow down and take a look at what’s not working? What were all these problems and headaches that we kept saying we wanted to fix that we couldn’t find the time or didn’t make it a priority to do?”

We worked on that. It opened our eyes up a lot to the opportunity that was there. “Why aren’t we doing this more often? This is great.” We cleaned out a bunch of problems and then it positioned us for when things rebounded to be even better. We didn’t waste that time that when our business was slow, we utilize it to clean the house and make ourselves better and more efficient, which was great because when things rebounded, we were able to go and focus on delivery.

The Value Of Personal Development And Growth

You built a big successful business, exceeded your target, and exited. What are you doing next? How are you giving back to the entrepreneurial community?

Honestly, I promised my family and myself some time off to relax. I wouldn’t even call it relaxing. I set a personal goal to do an amateur MMA fight. I trained full-time. It’s fifteen hours of actual training a week generally. It’s between eating, recovery, and driving all over the place. It’s a full-time job that I’m doing. It’s a bold move. The way I looked at it was I get the rest of my life to work, be an entrepreneur, and do those things.

I read amazing books and take action on them. I forget the author’s name but there’s an amazing book called Die with Zero. He talks about these stages in your life. I’m not going to have the kind of health that I have. I’m taking this opportunity to invest in these physical pursuits that are important to me. My physical health was foundational and my ability to be a successful entrepreneur. I like to challenge myself. I’m like, “How far can I take this?” I started training in jujitsu. I’m like, “Maybe I can do a fight.”

I’m pushing into that uncharted waters and doing that for myself. At the same time, I did start a coaching consulting business. I’m slowly growing it. I don’t want to take up a lot of my time and be judicious as to who I take on. X’s and O’s of business is going to be part of it but moreover, I want to make great leaders and people who are happy with their life. I went through the challenge of being unhealthy, unhappy, and overly focused on success in business. I ultimately found that I wasn’t happy, which meant I wasn’t successful at all.

I made that shift. While still growing my business and exiting, I got healthy. I repaired the relationships in my life and things like that. It’s all possible personal development. I want to help entrepreneurs who are struggling with that. Not just in one aspect of life but in all aspects of their lives and be successful. That’s going to be different for everybody. For some people, it might mean you need to give up some of your creature comforts and the financial wealth that you’re chasing. Maybe focus more on your relationships and health. For others, it might be you need to buckle down more and grow your finances. That’s going to get you where you want to be. It’s all different for different folks. That’s where I want to focus.

I’m writing a book to that end. The working title is Dream Design Do, which is the mantra on my website. It’s this whole concept that it doesn’t matter what it is you want to do, whether it’s health, relationships, or business. You can be a 42-year-old and go do an MMA fight. You can do it. Have the dream, believe in yourself that you can do it, and then put a plan in place. That’s the design part. Figure it out. That’s the part where most people get stuck. They spend too much time working on the plan and it’s got to be perfect. Screw that. Start moving, get enough of a plan, get a North Star, and get going. Most importantly, do the work.

I do want to recap the book. It’s called Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. It’s getting all you can from your money and life. That is going on the list. That’s awesome.

It informed me a lot about how I want to model out the last part of my life. I looked at my life in three phases. I don’t come from money. I’m a working-class guy. My dad’s a longshoreman. When I got out of college, I had $1,000 and had to move back into my childhood bedroom. That was in 2005. Years later, I’m in a completely different world. I credit that to growth every day, trying to continue to grow.

Phase one for me was how I created wealth for myself. To your earlier point, focus on one thing. There are a couple of ways to do it. You either build long-term. Some would say either real estate or the stock market. You stay smart and keep a job. You do that inside until it’s able to be your full-time thing. You grow. I don’t have the patience for that but that’s a way to go for sure. Especially if you like your career, you don’t mind working for someone else. You inherit money, win the lotto, or start a business. There are so many ways to do it unless you’re a treasure hunter.

For me, in phase one, I’m eventually going to start a business. I didn’t care what it was. I knew I was going to do something. That was it and that’s what I did. I put all my eggs in that basket. The whole reason me and my partner sold the company was that we wanted to have more freedom. We always viewed it as an asset to sell and get us to this first level.

I’m entering into phase two and that’s adjusted for me a little bit. I want to help serve others more and inspire others to live happier lives. Somewhere along the way, looking to achieve that first phase goal, I did get a little lost. There were lessons learned. I’m hoping to share those with folks but I’m trying to build massive wealth. It’s not just so I can have more shit, to be honest with you. I’m not a materialistic person. I want to have wealth so I can have an impact.

There are far too many people who accumulate wealth and keep it. In this kind of model, and this goes back to Dial with Zero, we get old and save. We try and live the last couple of good years of our lives. We donate it to our kids. Two generations later, it’s gone because they blew it on God knows what. My goal is to create wealth and a money-making machine over time. Through that, help other people change their lives. I know what it did for me.

In our business, we aligned our compensation and part of the business with the company as we grew it. When we sold it, a lot of our teammates earned significant sums of money. They were able to have life-changing events. I want to continue that process. As I go, build, and sell companies, I want to reward team members in a way that they can have life-changing money and can continue to pay that forward. In phase three, I want to be more service-focused.

What does service-focused mean to you?

Community-wise and culturally, that’s partly the reason I’m doing these interviews. I feel like if I’m going to have an impact on the world, I need financial wealth but I need cultural relevance. I feel like there’s a bit of a weakness in society. A woe-is-me mindset is hurting our children and country. People need to get back to a culture of personal accountability and self-belief. That’s some of what I’m trying to teach and preach when I go out and speak to people. That’s what I try to impart to them.

Rapid-Fire Questions With Brian

Brian, I learned a lot and took a lot away from this and was taking extensive notes. This is going to be a fun episode for our audience because you have a great mindset around being an entrepreneur. We’re going to move into the fun section, which is the rapid-fire section, and then tell everybody where they can reach you. Give me quick answers to these questions. Coffee or tea?

Tea.

There is a zombie apocalypse and you have to get out of your house and protect your family. What is your one weapon of choice?

I have got an assault shotgun so I’m taking that.

Favorite business quote or it could be a life quote.

The one I go by is, “Hell is getting to the end of your life and seeing the person you could have been and heaven is seeing your reflection.”

Give me three money-saving things that entrepreneurs can do in 2025 for their businesses.

Replace yourself as fast as possible. It’ll save you money in the long run. It doesn’t sound like it but it will. Outsource when possible and invest in technology early. This sounds like they’re money-spending things but they will save you money in the long run. Focus on profit, not revenue.

Profit first.

I tell revenue on the sale number but we never managed revenue at all. We focused on profit constantly.

What is the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome in your life to build the success that you’ve built?

Hubris.

I love it. You have overcome it and you’ve built a ton of success. Brian McNally, tell the audience where they can connect with you if they’d like to do so.

My Instagram is @TheBrianMcNally. My website is BrianMcNally.com. It has all my social media links and how to contact me there.

Brian, thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Jarrod. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Important Links

• Brian McNally
• BoxFi
• Extreme Ownership
• PLAUD.AI
• Great by Choice
• Good to Great
• Die with Zero
• @TheBrianMcNally – Instagram

About Brian McNally

Brian has created a life of freedom and fulfillment by pursuing his potential in all aspects of life. Through a dedication to personal development, Brian transformed his health, relationships, and business, achieving a successful multi – 8 figure exit in 2022. Frustrated by the fake hustle culture influencers preying on people’s hopes & dreams without having accomplished anything he was compelled to take action. He is now on a mission to help other entrepreneurs accelerate their journey by sharing his experiences, lessons, and strategies for turning dreams into reality. No bullshit, just candor, integrity and a desire to help as many people as possible build their dream life.

Brian’s proven strategy for business success hinges on strong leadership and a positive culture, leading to significant growth, scale, and successful exits. His approach, which propelled Meleeo from zero to a $50 million annually and an exit in seven years with no outside capital, focuses on designing with the end in mind, narrowing focus and aligning incentives with company goals. Brian prioritizes the organization’s mission, empowers team members, and fosters a culture of excellence through flexibility with accountability. This method, demonstrated by Meleeo’s four-time Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 recognition, shows how visionary leadership and a thriving company culture can drive rapid growth and successful exits.