Scott David Brennan

Published: September 16, 2015

A friend recently participated in a self improvement class. Each student was asked to interview someone, a stranger, who had reached some level of financial success. The goal was to learn about some of the paths to success and what it took. I was flattered that my friend recommended me to a young student in the class named Spencer. Here are the questions he asked me:

1. To become financially successful, what was called forth in you to accomplish this goal?
2. What was your biggest challenge and breakthrough in accomplishing this goal?
3. What coaching and wisdom would you offer to people who see you as a role model given your success?
4. Who is your hero and why?

I took a few days to answer the questions he asked. I tried to reply as honestly and openly as possible.

After reflecting on my answers, I decided to share them on my blog. Not to brag, or boast, or gloat, but to share them with anyone who might benefit from reading one bumpy path toward achieving life goals. Reflecting on my path thus far gives me inspiration that I can do so much more. I have long way to go, but that is the fun in life. The journey is the destination, as my wife likes to say.

Dear Spencer,

First, financial success is just one part of my overall goal. I think the most important goals in life are self acceptance, being at peace, love, expression, playfulness, exploration and wisdom. Financial success is also a goal, just not as important.

I am a work in progress and have a long way to go to reach my goals. There are many far more successful people you should model before me, but I am happy to share my thoughts.

1. To become financially successful, what was called forth in you to accomplish this goal?

I dreamed of being a millionaire from a young age. It created a drive and ambition deep within me that I still carry. I thought that “being a millionaire” is what being a success meant. That thought drove me to read, study, learn, experiment and ask lots of questions. Over the years I came to realize that success is so much more than money. I realized the goals above are what matter most and what brings me happiness.

I’ve always felt like an entrepreneur

When I was young, I picked vegetables out of our family garden and went door-to-door with a wagon selling tomatoes, zucchini and eggplants. My mother was not so happy about that.

When I was a Cub Scout our troop sold lightbulbs every year as a fundraiser. I took great pride in walking door-to-door selling them and won an award for selling more than anyone else.

When I was 10, I hand-wrote a book on the care and feeding of mice and rats. My dad photocopied it for me and I stapled it together. I tried to sell it to neighborhood kids. I raised mice and rats and sold them to the local pet store.

At Boy Scout summer camp one year, I brought a locked wooden box filled with candies and sold them to the other kids.

At 13, I started an Olympic Pin collecting business. I would buy, sell and trade pins on tables at shopping malls. I would also sell lists of corporate Olympic sponsors that would send you a free Olympic pin if you wrote them a letter. That was one of my first experiences learning that knowledge is power and that you could profit from it.

At 17, I started a vending machine business with my best friend. We would buy old vending machines, fix them up, and place them at hotels and businesses. We eventually worked our way up to 20 machines and bought a van. The company lasted for a few years and we had a lot of fun. Eventually, I did the math and realized we would need hundreds of machines to get rich at it. We were both in college and ready to move on to other jobs and sold the machines off.

At 18, I bought an Eagle Snacks distribution territory for $40,000, plus a delivery van for $35,000. The company financed both for me. It was like a Frito-Lay snack delivery service, except I owned the territory. I would buy the snacks wholesale from the company and sell them to supermarkets and liquor stores. It was a great experience but labor intensive At the time, I was going to college full time. I got involved in student government and was elected an ASB senator and then ASB president. Being so busy, I sold the route after a year and made a $10,000 profit.

At 20, I worked as a telemarketer at a stock brokerage firm. I decided I wanted to be a stock broker. I needed to finish college first, through. After about six months I was promoted to manager of a group of ten cold callers. I hired and directed the telemarketing team for three years. It was a great experience. I watched new stock brokers come in to the firm, work hard and get chewed up. Basically, the company would hire 10 new guys, and by the end of the year one or two were still there. The company set very high goals for them and it seemed like the ones who made it had family money or worked insane hours. I learned that I didn’t want to be a stock broker after that experience. I also learned some great skills: how to cold call, how to create effective presentations, a little bit about management and managing money.

My first real job out of college was as a newspaper reporter. The pay was really low, but I loved it. I learned quickly and asked for promotions. I moved up to city editor, news editor and managing editor. Then I asked my boss for a promotion to become a publisher of one of the company’s other newspapers. I wrote out a resume and a list of reasons why I would make a great publisher. He said no. The publisher’s position came open again, so I asked again. He said no. The publisher’s position came open again. This time he said yes. This was a great job where I learned how to run a business from some very shrewd people.

I made my real financial success in real estate in 2005.

My wife Beth and I rode the real estate boom buying small rental properties, fixing some of them up and selling them. They were mostly 2-bed, 1-bath houses, selling between $50,000 to $100,000 in the Central Valley. Yes, you can find houses that cheap in California.

I had a great day job as a newspaper publisher of small weekly papers, so the work on rentals was on weekends and in our free time.

What it took to achieve that first financial milestone

• Having a great life partner in Beth. She shares my dreams and works hard with me.
• Postponing having children so we had time to work, invest, enjoy life and travel.
• Studying, reading, educating myself and looking for opportunities.
• Making new friends with people who could guide me: Realtors, mortgage brokers, finance people, attorneys, accountants, and successful business people in general.
• Having a good job that paid my bills and allowed me to save and invest.
• Living below our means and with very little debt. The first two homes we lived in were mobile homes.
• Staying focused on my goals and enjoying the work along the way.

We worked our way up to over a dozen small rentals and other real estate investments at one point.

Going out on our own

After running businesses for other people, I still had the itch to break out and do something on my own. We decided to buy a business. It was a little scary, but everything we had been doing to this point had prepared us for the next step. One of the most profitable parts of the newspaper business I ran was the yellow pages. We had made friends with the owners of a local printing company. They owned a yellow page book in Paso Robles, but didn’t like the hassle of selling advertising. They just liked printing them.

Just before the real estate market crash of the mid 2000s, we sold a few properties to raise a substantial down payment for the business. The printing company financed the balance and I am very proud to say we will make our final payment to them next month and be debt free.

It was very exciting to start working full time for our own company, North County Access.

Slowly but surely, we have grown it to be a successful business. In less than 10 years we quadrupled gross revenue at the business and have grown from one to 10 employees.

To succeed, we had to re-invent ourselves

To start with, we rebranded as Access Publishing. We also launched several new print publications: Heritage Ranch Directory, San Luis Obispo County Visitors Guide, South County Magazine (folded), Central Coast Active magazine (folded), Templeton Community Guide. We folded the ones that were only break even and not profitable.

When we first began in the 2000s, it was hard to see that yellow pages were becoming a dinosaur. In fact, our yellow pages grew every year up until 2011. That was the same year I saw the power of the Internet in replacing yellow pages. So, I went back to study Internet Marketing at the University of San Francisco. I earned the college’s “Master Certificate of Internet Marketing.”

We launched a new Internet marketing service for our clients called “Local Search”. It optimized their online listings and helped them ranked higher in Google search for keywords important to their business. We used it to move our clients from traditional print yellow pages into online marketing. A year later we started offering web design and more advanced Search Engine Optimization.

The past five years have been tumultuous. Print advertising revenue, which has always been our bread and butter, and very profitable, has been declining since 2011; yet we have still grown the company by transitioning into an online marketing company.

At the end of 2012, I decided to get back into the news business. It was my first love. I launched the Paso Robles Daily News as an online only publication. We’ve grown it to 4,000 daily email subscribers and 200,000 views per month, but it still has a way to go. The website is profitable and doing well, but it could be doing a lot more.

This is where we are at now, but there is still so much more to do.

Lessons I learned getting here

• Think ahead.
• Expect disruption.
• Be prepared to change directions.
• Don’t take anything for granted.
• Recognize that employees are a tremendous asset, a force multiplier.
• Plan ahead
• Don’t worry, take action instead.
• Be thankful everyday
• Never stop learning
• Make more friends
• Position yourself as an expert
• Enjoy life

2. What was your biggest challenge and breakthrough in accomplishing this goal?

I think the biggest challenge has been surfing the wave of disruption the Internet has brought us. It has been challenging and rewarding to shift from print revenue to digital revenue.

It is challenging for a company to launch new products that compete with it’s existing products, especially when the new products are less profitable than the old ones. This is why so many newspapers and media companies are failing right now. They are clinging to the old way of doing things and they fear the change that has already arrived. This has created huge opportunities for start ups. There is a great little book on learning to embrace the change: Who Moved My Cheese.

The breakthrough was learning to move with the change rather than fight it.

3. What coaching and wisdom would you offer to people who see you as a role model given your success?

Here are a few thoughts:

• Always do what you love.
• Make time for physical fitness.
• Find peace of mind. 
• Read and improve yourself regularly.
• Fake it till you make.
• Know your weaknesses, but don’t let them slow you down.
• Put your best face forward and avoid negative self talk.
• What you think about yourself on the inside manifests itself on the outside.
• Make friends everywhere you go, you never know who you’ll meet.
• The more people you meet, the more successful you will be.
• Take more chances and try more crazy ideas.
• Tackle your limiting beliefs

Thoughts on business:

• Go niche and go national
• Keep your business model simple
• Spend your time dreaming, creating ideas, building systems
• Don’t do work you can pay someone else to do
• Make recurring revenue part of your business plan

4. Who is your hero and why?

My hero will always be my dad. He taught me how to have fun, be kind to people, save money, and work hard. He taught me about numbers, business and rental properties. He’s an amazing man, quite a success, and I am very fortunate to have him in my life.

Besides my dad, the most important person who has influenced my thinking and outlook on life is Ayn Rand. While I don’t agree with her on everything, she was an inspiration and opened my eyes.

What I learned from Ayn Rand

• Follow reason, not whims or faith.
• Work hard to achieve a life of purpose and productiveness.
• Earn genuine self-esteem.
• Pursue your own happiness as your highest moral aim.
• Prosper by treating others as individuals.

My favorite Ayn Rand quotes

• My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
• From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind.
• Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. 
• Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.
• A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
• I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build. 
• Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.