Growing up poor to successful founder with two exits

In the world of sales, you either sink or swim or break through to the next level. My name’s Colin Mitchell. And this is Sales Transformation, a new kind of sales show designed to bring you through the epic life-changing moments of elite sellers, so you can experience your own sales transformation.

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Welcome to today’s episode of Sales Transformation. Today I had on Marko Hozjan and I had a lot of fun having a conversation with Marko and learning about his story. We connected over LinkedIn. I didn’t know a ton about his story, but like myself, he grew up poor and became an entrepreneur and had several successful exits and started two businesses that for some people would be considered pretty successful, but kind of hit a roof and found that they weren’t scalable and walked away from those businesses to start something now that he’s much more passionate about. And you’ll learn about that inside today’s episode, so I hope that you enjoy it. Marko, welcome to Sales Transformation. How are you doing?

Very well. So, I’m calling from Ljubljana, Slovenia, and it’s very hot here, so the temperature gets up to 38 degrees Celsius. Yeah, we count in Celsius, not Fahrenheit. So that means very hot.

I love that calculation. Yeah. I was sitting there as you were saying it, trying to think “okay, how hot is that?”, but yeah, it sounds hot.

It is.

Yeah. What time is it over there right now?

So now it’s five in the evening. Afternoon.

Okay. So, you’re ending your day. I’m starting my day. You’ve had a lot of success. Let’s just kind of start at the beginning. You know, give us your story and kind of what your journey has been like. And we can pull some learning lessons out of there for, you know, everybody that’s tuning in today.

Sure. So, I believe my entrepreneurship path started with me being very poor when I was little. I lived with my mom because my parents divorced, and immediately I realized that money is very important. So, I actually started my entrepreneurship path very early – in high school. And the first serious company when I was a student, it was actually a marketing agency, and then it started from there. So, my first bigger successful business was actually a sailing school. Together we organized party sailing trips here in Europe, mostly in Croatia and Greece. And I sold that business successfully then some other businesses, but the problem actually was that I was seeing over and over again, that I always started a business that I couldn’t really scale big. So, the latest was actually a language school, which again, we realized we couldn’t scale.

Of course, we had three or four transitions then into an online platform like Duolingo or something similar. Those are really unicorn businesses, especially now in Corona times. They’re really blossoming, but we didn’t either way. But it actually all came up to Taia, the business that I’m running now, which is the first business actually that I believe is scalable, and I’m really looking forward to continuing this work.

Alright. So you started early – interesting because we have kind of a similar story. I also grew up very poor with no money, you know, I was raised by a single mom with three brothers. My dad, unfortunately, preferred spending most of his time behind bars in prison, rather than with his family. So, you know, it was a struggle. My mom had to work nights and it was a struggle just to keep food on the table and pay the bills. And you know, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I just kind of, similar to yourself, I knew I didn’t want to be poor and that was it. And nobody was really telling me that school was important or anything like that, so when I got my first sales job, I said “this is my way out”. You know, I put everything I had into that. So, I want to dig into… you know, you started off as an entrepreneur early, I think you said in high school.

Yeah. Those were different times. So, being poor actually means to suffer and out of suffering, in my belief, motivation thrives. So actually at those times, I believe I gained something that I still have today – so, a lot of motivation and especially motivation to grow. So, when I was in high school, at that time Napster was really popular and I had a good internet connection, so I downloaded it. I copied CDs and then sold it to other guys at school and made money with it. So, it wasn’t an actual business, but it was something.

Yeah, I mean, when you have to be creative in finding ways to earn, to just, you know, have simple things that are not so simple for somebody like you and me, you can get pretty creative. You know, I would come up with ideas – not as creative as yours there, I love that idea. But you know, for me, it was like if I wanted new shoes, I had to figure out a way to pay for them, or else it wasn’t happening. But I’m super curious, something that you mentioned with your first two companies is, you know, you had some success, but they weren’t scalable. So, I kind of want to dig into what wasn’t scalable and why that was important?

So, there are businesses that can be great, where you can make a million, couple of million or even a couple of 10 million of revenue, and they’re great businesses and I respect those businessmen, but that’s a totally different business, a totally different mindset than a scalable or a startup business is.

Yeah.

So, at that time, I didn’t understand, I didn’t have any mentor or anyone else to tell me what I really want or even to direct me in the right direction. So, at that time, I just said yes to anything. So, when I found my first partners, I said, “yes, let’s go. Let’s just do it”, you know, which means that we failed many times, but of course I learned a lot. The main thing that’s actually negative is that I know now that I could have done something scalable much sooner. A scalable business in Europe is something different than in the US, even a non-scalable business. All the numbers are always divided by two or more – usually divided by 10. Even when you speak about investments, Europe is much more conservative and the numbers are, even if businesses are lower, which means that when you have a non-scalable business, when you make a million euros of revenue, you’re kind of already successful. You have a successful business. But I knew that that’s not enough for me, that I wanted something much bigger. And when I tried making these businesses scalable, for example, the marketing agency, I didn’t know how. I tried and tried, and I saw I couldn’t. It was the same with the nautical school. For example, the legislation worldwide is so different from country to country. It was almost impossible to do it. I have some ideas now how I could make an online learning platform without the certification and so on, but at that time it was just not successful to make it scalable. So, I decided I needed to let go. And it was very hard to let go of something that you built. But now I see it’s the right decision.

Yeah. Yeah. And that could be tough for entrepreneurs that are, you know, maybe in a business that has sort of hit a ceiling, or it also can be hard for even somebody successful in sales that has maybe hit a ceiling. You know, in order to let go of something that they’re comfortable with, that they know, that, you know, maybe from the outside would be very successful to other people, to let that go and take a step forward or, you know, into a new chapter or to try something new that has more potential, more upside.

Exactly. I totally agree. And this is especially true for people that have ambition. So, if a sales rep or a BDM has ambition, and if they have a ceiling, and if they even have a hat in the system that they work in, it can be really counterproductive.

Yeah. Yeah. And so how did you know it was the right time to sort of walk away from that and try something new?

Actually, I did it the other way. While running this business, I was looking for other opportunities. At that time, I was looking for someone who would buy the business. So, in both cases, actually the business was bought by someone close to the company, not an outside investor. So, in the first case, the business was bought by the other two co co-founders – I sold it to them – while in the second part, the business was sold actually to a partner. So, in this case I was actually lucky that I found a buyer because maybe I couldn’t. In that case, even if the business was making a positive revenue, profit, I would probably close it.

Interesting. Now I’m curious with those first two companies that, you know, had a level of success – did they provide a means for you or were they things that you actually enjoyed or loved doing?

Hmm, difficult to say. At that time, I was so motivated that I actually loved doing it. I was at the steep part of my learning curve so it was great, but long-term of course I would get fed up with it. So, to have an agency of any kind, that’s really repetitive work. Just to have one customer after another, it becomes repetitive. So, it’s really difficult as a marketing agency to invent something new for yourself, a new product. We see that on the market. So now of course everyone’s getting digital and so on. But probably I would get fed up with it. It’s much different in the startup world where I’m at now, where you develop your own product, and the development is actually infinite.

Yeah. I had a feeling that was going to be your answer because if you loved doing it, you would probably still be doing it, right? I think that, you know, typically a lot of entrepreneurs don’t just start one thing. A lot of them, you know, similar to myself – I’ve founded four different companies, three have been successful, you know, seven figures – and I found that, you know, it’s easy to get bored, even if it’s at a level of success that a lot of people would be like, “Man, why are you walking away from that? Why are you leaving that? I would love to be at that place or be at that, you know, phase of entrepreneurship.” And if you get bored with it or if you no longer enjoy, or that passion is not there, it’s no longer fun. And it starts to feel more like work and kind of defeats the whole purpose of being an entrepreneur in the first place.

I agree. There is, though, another concept and it is passive income. I tried, with both of them actually, to create something that would bring me passive income, but it was just not possible. My direct engagement was so important that when I went out, the revenue dropped. So, if I would be able to create an entity that would bring me passive income, I would not close it or maybe would not sell it. But in this case, it was not possible.

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of factors to consider, right? Like how much time does it take for you to be involved in that particular thing? Do you enjoy doing it? Is there any sort of fulfillment that you get out of it? Or is there something else that you’d rather be doing, or is it actually costing you by not focusing on maybe something new, right? If there’s opportunity cost, then it’s actually costing you more money than it’s making you. And I love that kind of place that we’re in with a lot of companies now where, you know, a lot of salespeople are entrepreneurial spirit people, you know. Whether they’re fully taking the plunge or not, they have the required skill set to earn in anything that they do. And you know, more and more companies are okay with them having something else that they do on the side or a side hustle or something that they have passion in that’s, you know, earning that passive income for them. And I love seeing companies fully embracing people on their team to have something else that they love doing that also can earn money for them.

It’s becoming a standard, I think, that everyone that is employed somewhere is doing something on the side. It’s becoming a standard and it’s really funny, and when you’re a manager, it’s really something that you shouldn’t prohibit, because it’s just becoming a part of our culture that anyone that’s employed anywhere has something as a side business.

Yeah, and I think before, a lot of companies, a lot of leaders were scared that, hey, if I let Marko do this thing on the side, you know, he’s going to do it on the clock. He’s going to do it on our time. He’s going to get it to a certain level and leave us. And maybe some of those things are true, maybe not. But, by not allowing people or restricting people or making it hard for people or making it awkward where they feel they have to hide that – that’s going to cost you way more, because then they definitely are going to leave. If they’re not happy, if they don’t have the autonomy to be the best version of their self in and out of the office, you’re not going to have a happy employee and, you know, you’re going to have a high churn rate of people coming in and out of your doors.

Exactly. I believe what we’re talking about, it actually comes down to culture and values within the company. So, when you have a culture with values that embraces this, of course, autonomy and just trust at the end, and people feel good and grow with you, then the risk of them leaving, even if they have a good side business, is low because they just cherish working there. They love the company; they love the values and they grow with it. So, this part is very important. So, I’m a big, big promoter of motivation – I mean, yeah. Motivation 3.0, and these liberal new wave ways how companies are organized and Taia is a company like that.

Yeah. I mean, if you invest more in the people and not just in the skills that are directly tied to the role that they do, you’re going to have happier employees. You’re going to have happier customers. You’re going to have a better culture to drive better results overall.

There is a scientifically proven fact that if your employee learns something new, regardless of which field he learned it in, not something that he works in, the employee is going to get better at what they do at their job.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, tell me a little bit about the work that you’re doing now. You know, the theme that I see here which I really love is that even from beginning, you know, early childhood where you had struggles, like all of that, that shaped and moulded you to get to where you are today. We have similar kind of childhood backgrounds and, you know, as much as a lot of that stuff is tough and hard and you wouldn’t really wish it upon anybody, I don’t regret any of it because it moulded and shaped me into who I am today. And I don’t know if I’d be able to do some of the things that I’ve been able to, if that was not my experience. So, for you, having that experience and driving that motivation, building these businesses, having some success, but not really being able to scale them at the level that you want to, have taught you everything along the way to get where you are today. So, I want to dive into some of that.

Sure. The interesting fact is that I actually consider myself a bit of an experiment because I have five half-brothers and half-sisters, and they were all living with my father who was very wealthy at the time, and you can see the difference how we all turned out. So actually, I’m the only one that strives towards ambition, towards something more, while they are just feeling comfortable where they are and the motivation, it just isn’t there. When I speak to them, we’re like from two different worlds. The question for them is like, “why? Why would I do that? Why would I? I’m comfortable where I am, I have what I need.” So, it’s funny how motivation can come from pain.

Yeah, wow. That’s very interesting. And so, tell me, you know, through these couple of exits that you’ve had, where you’re at today and what you guys are working on and let’s dig into some of that stuff.

So now the company where I’m 100% focused now is called Taia. We’re actually a software technology translation company. We are a translation platform, mostly for B2B sector, but actually anyone can come, which means that we’re a one stop shop for all your translation needs. You come to the application, and you can order any kind of translation. But the whole thing is very much automized, which means, for example, you just drag and drop the document, any kind of document. We support 70 different file types. It can be any kind of office document, a PDF, a code, a json file, whatnot, you drag and drop it and the file is automatically analyzed within seconds. And you get your quote immediately, which means you get how many words there are, how many repetitions and so on. And then you choose within the platform – you choose your quality by choosing the service – all from Machine Translation up to, we call it, TEP – translation, editing and revision, so human translation. You choose your quality, you choose the time, how fast you need it, and you order immediately. And it’s much safer, much faster. So, we’ve been able to automize all this process that is done manually through emails, through sending out and receiving quotes and so on. We’ve managed to automize the whole process. And not only that, within the platform, we actually added our own SaaS product that’s called Catapult, because we’ve identified a big wave coming. More and more companies are translating on their own. How can they do that? By harvesting the power of Machine Translation. Machine Translation is becoming really good – not only the ones that we have, the professional ones, but also the free neural networks such as Google Translate and so on. And how they do it – for example, again, they just drag and drop the document and the whole content is already pre-translated by machine translation within seconds. They just post-edit that document, which means that they just correct what needs to be corrected. They click finish and they download the document in the same formatting, in the same form, which means if you have a 100-page long docx catalogue with the whole formatting there, it’s all kept intact.

Wow. How did you get started in this?

So, we started with a previous company that was a language school. We started getting first – so myself and my partner in the company, Matija – we started getting first demands for translations. And we saw that the whole industry at the time (this was three years ago) is really, really old – people sending files here and there over emails, people doing things in Excel spreadsheets, everything being really old and robust, while a big wave was coming, a wave of automation, a wave of machine translation at the time. It’s coming now, and that’s really killing a lot of companies that don’t want to change, companies within LSPs, which means language service providers, translators that don’t want to change, because the whole automation and machine translation process, the whole tech is really changing the whole industry. So, at the time we saw that, and even now we see it as a big opportunity for us that are tech savvy, that know how to harvest this tech, and we use it to our advantage. So, this is how we are much more efficient than other LSPs or other translation providers. And now we are starting a series of SaaS products where we will just give the power to the people to translate by themselves, using just machine translation or then post-editing that. And the other thing that was interesting for us was the size of the industry. So, the music industry is more than 50 billion in size annually, and it’s growing really fast because of globalization. Everything is being localized and everything will become localized, to the last series, game, app – everything will be localized into all world languages, which means that the market is rising. So, it’s three times the size as the music industry, but it’s not as sexy because no one knows it, because it’s a business service in the background. Translation is something that is not so interesting. So, this is where, at the time, we saw that we found a sweet spot. 

Wow. This is really fascinating stuff. I think that you’re onto something here, and I love your story and your background, and scaling these businesses that have all, you know, led you up to this work that you’re doing now. And I can feel the passion for the work when you’re telling me about it, and that’s always a good sign.

Thank you.

Marko, thanks so much for coming on Sales Transformation today. I really appreciate it. Any final thoughts? What links can we include in the show notes for people to learn more about you and the work that you’re doing or anything else?

I would just include our landing, taia.io, our app is free to use. Anyone can sign up, can test it out. But what I would emphasize is that localization in general is becoming more and more important, and people are starting to notice that it’s a really good sales tool. There is a fundamental rule that if something – if it’s a game, if it’s a product, if it’s an e-commerce site – if it’s localized to a native speaker, there’s a much higher probability of a sale being closed, which means that all e-commerce or any international businesses are getting more and more aware, which means that everything is becoming localized. And if anyone is in that kind of international business, I believe we are the right partner for them.

Fantastic. We’ll include those links in the show notes for everybody. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please write us a review, share the show with your friends and as always, we’re listening for your feedback.

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