How The Mentor Method CEO Joseph Kopser grew The Mentor Method to $720K revenue and 3 customers in 2021.

hey folks my guest today is joseph kopser he serves as an executive in residence at the mccombs school of business prior to his company ride scout uh prior to that is coming right scout was acquired by mercedes he served in the army for 20 years after graduating from west point in harvard and was recognized as the white house champion of changing clean energy and won the u.s dot a data innovation award he's co-author of catalyst he's an advisor to clean texas and is now building the mentormethod.com joseph are you ready to take us to the top yeah nathan thanks for having me on heck of a background man thanks first off thanks for your service and tell me more what came first did you start at mccombs first and then develop the mentor method or did you develop a mentor method and then they want to bring you a minute mccombs well no so janice omadeki really gets all the credit for the mentor method as the founder and ceo of it so where i come into this is helping companies grow so mccombs really was a stopover uh after i actually had ran for congress here in texas i'm a builder a problem solver so when i see big ideas with cool people that i think i can help and add value that's where i jump on board so i've created an endowment at mccombs about six seven years ago when i sold my company in mercedes and so uh bennett mccombs here and there actually now the bio can be updated i'm at the president's office helping him with all things military veterans and their families at the university of texas you can't help with football can you uh no not right now we have a new coach for that let's see what we can do there let's let's hope and pray i'm in austin so let's let's open breaks all right um tell me more about the the the first company what was ride scout and when did you sell that to mercedes yeah so ride scout was a at its simplest form a two-sided marketplace an aggregation play it was created because i was tired of being stuck in traffic in my background i'm an aerospace engineer and so i know there's lots of different ways to solve problems and what i wanted to do is try to create the perfect set of combinations and permutations of the different modes of transportation to get me to and from work every day and out of it i started nights and weekends while i was still in the army studying mobility and transportation simultaneously learning how to build a business then found the smart people around me raised the money that i needed and before we knew it uber and lyft got huge all the car companies freaked out for good reason in this new mobility space we're in and they went on a buying spree and so mercedes bought my company bmw bought some others ford got into that play and it's just the classic build or buy scenario that young entrepreneurs face themselves with all the time how'd you use that to your advantage to maximize the exit price well you know the the idea behind reiscout was really timeless everybody wants to spend less time in traffic and more time with family and friends and then if you can introduce a really elegant way to show them all their options what i was able to do better faster than some of my peers perhaps was get those strategic relationships with the big cities big companies big uh other players and partners in this space trying to do all modes of transportation while simultaneously running a really positive message i mean we were all about reducing carbon footprints we're all about making life and quality life better for people and that combination of technology team and then of course the messaging that went along with it uh just appealed to mercedes a lot more than a lot of their choices and they had a lot of choices yeah but they did now were you the founder of ride scout and if so whenever you launch it yeah no so we launched it in well founders can appreciate it started its genesis was in 2010 it wasn't really incorporated as an llc until 2011-12 time frame and we didn't really go full speed till i left the army in 2013 and then we sold it about a year and a half later in september september 2nd 2014 but not you know not that i remember those dates is this specific but you might imagine why yeah of course now you mentioned you guys raised a bit there how much did you raise so by the time we got into the acquisition talks we raised about 2.1 million dollars i jokingly refer to that in today's dollars about five or six million dollars because cost of talent was a lot less ten years ago than it is now uh and you know i feel for founders that are having to raise what they are today that's why i love actually working with founders and multiple startups like the mentor method well and we'll pivot to mentor method in a second but i imagine those investors that put in that capital i mean how did you get them over the hump of them saying joseph build let's go beat uber and lyft let's not sell too early go go build a billion dollar company every founder will be faced hopefully with that dilemma which is we've got traction we've got a whole lot of users we can see growth you know at one point i think we had several hundred thousand downloads and we knew we had a nice trajectory but we also knew uber was out there and lyft was out there and ironically at the time they were just single mode ride for hire if you go into their apps now you can see they do so many different modes of transportation which is where our vision was but i didn't have the the the the financial capital to go underwater uh like they have had to do for many years without really turning a profit so for us at the time in 2014 first startup out the gate an opportunity to create wealth for a lot of the original team members and investors we made that decision uh you know as a group and as a family and then you know we've got uh seven years to look back on it and i don't think anybody regrets selling when we did now were you is craig cummings associated with the company oh absolutely craig cummings was my co-founder okay yeah so this is why i was doing research i was very confused because he's listed as the founder and i'm going where the hell is joseph's name did you come in a little bit later or something no no no we yeah depending on how it was written or who wrote it you know founder co-founder of ride scout so he heard the idea that i was talking about i was still living in washington dc at the time and uh he described and said look but that idea you're describing could be something that a lot of people would want to use not just your own commute and i said yeah but i don't really know how to build a business he said you stick to the idea of fixing this problem and learning how to solve it and he'll and he craig will help me build the business around me and that's exactly what it did which is again what i'm trying to do now to a whole next generation of entrepreneurs and then a subsidy the company that acquired you guys called reach now which mercedes was very much involved in is that accurate yeah you know at a few years later then let's see so cargo north america technically was the buying agent then that's a subset of movable move will then merge with bmw create create reach now it's a hot mess to figure out all right let's talk about mentor method so is his mentor method again what's your relationship there you're not the founder what are you no no no so i'm employee number two however you want to look at it um janice omadeki gets all the credit for the idea and creating the initial momentum behind it and then i came along as an advisor but i was already fascinated by mentorship and leader development it's my dna in terms of helping to build the teams and then as she went through sales meetings and investor calls she'd asked me to be on a few more a little here a little there and after she had raised some money she turned around and said okay no more being an advisor come join the team and i just couldn't say no interesting okay so who's paying for the app today well so right now customers uh that we have you know so here's what we've done we've made a transition from being a one-person show that janice was before now we've signed on names that people recognize like lincoln financial and amazon uh before that her original customers with their original format were companies like deloitte twitter had a run with the program and the format at the time it's evolved quite a bit since then as any learning and growing ceo wants to do we currently have a really cool contract with the department of education as a sub to a larger prime trying to figure out how to inspire that next generation of students in the business and then of course the future uh is looking bright too because we're caught with three things going on simultaneously you have the george floyd uh incident and the reaction to people in america saying this just doesn't sit right you have companies making pledges about dei and trying to do more but they don't have a tool to do it and we provide that tool to provide that mentorship and then thirdly we're in the middle of the great resignation so we have people just hemorrhaging uh talent inside of their large organizations fortune 5000 companies and they're looking for a way to invest in their people so i'm just as excited about being in the mentor method now with this opportunity during the great resignation as i was to be in ride scout 10 years ago at this time and place when...