The Action Catalyst
Venturing Boldly, with Priit Martin (Sales, Estonia, Entrepreneurship, Careers)
Tue, 30 Jul 2024
President of Southwestern Ventures, Priit Martin, shares the mission of creating career and entrepreneurial opportunities for young people in Europe, reflects on the dream job of making money playing computer games, talks about weathering Covid, why simple isn't always easy, and new and different isn't always effective, why success boils down to the basics, and why Ventures’ real product isn’t a product at all.Mentioned in this episode:Learn more at SouthwesternConsulting.com/Coaching/StudentsSouthwestern Student CoachingApply for an inspiring career at SouthwesternVentures.com/Careers. Elevate your business and create global impact by partnering with Southwestern Ventures at SouthwesternVentures.com/Partners.Southwestern Ventures
It is easy to not understand what makes you successful at something. People tend to think that what makes you successful is the fancy stuff. It's this my special joke or my special clothes I have. It's the way that I always leave office at 3.30, whatever it is. And it is my job to remind them that on average, what makes you good is doing the basics.
People run into this trouble that they don't like being uncomfortable. There's this feeling that it must be the wrong thing I'm doing. But it's not most of the times it can be the right thing. Just need to go through the uncomfortable part, right?
Top leaders. Meaningful conversation. Actionable advice. Bulldoze complacency. Ignite inspiration. Create impact. Produced by Southwestern family of companies. This is the Action Catalyst.
Southwestern Ventures is one of Europe's premier cultural, career, and entrepreneurial opportunities for young people. With a focus on offering inspiring careers in a growth-oriented environment, Southwestern Ventures provides a chance to earn, learn, and serve through sales and leadership.
With divisions covering everything from finance to insurance, fundraising, and home services, Ventures serves Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. and they believe it takes great people to deliver great products, leveraging proven methods and principles from Southwestern's over 160 years in the business. Sound like the opportunity you're looking for?
Browse openings and apply today at southwesternventures.com careers. Have a great product and want to create global impact? Elevate your business to the next level by partnering with Southwestern Ventures. Learn more at southwesternventures.com partners. Southwestern Ventures, a member of Southwestern family of companies.
Welcome, Action Catalyst listeners. Today, we have Preet Martin. Preet now serves as the president of Southwestern Ventures, formerly E1 Ventures, founded as part of the Southwestern family of companies to create career and entrepreneurial opportunities for young people across Europe. Preet, welcome to the show.
Hello, Adam. Your equipment is way fancier than mine. I really haven't done any podcast recordings like this before. I'm open to anything. We can just talk and see what comes out of it.
We want at least a couple of embarrassing stories from your youth.
Yeah, I've had a very vanilla life. I hope I have something interesting to share.
Yeah, perfect. So give me a little bit of your story. How did you find the role and position that you're in today with Southwestern Ventures?
The journey, as it often is, was a little unexpected. So if you go way back to the early 90s in elementary school, never even once did I consider that I would end up in the field of sales or leadership or anything like that. So if you imagine that 50 pound geeky boy with, you know, the pot cut hair with a little ponytail.
And every time I had to like read a poem in front of the classroom or something, sometimes I got nosebleeds because I was so scared and afraid of talking in public. My face would always, always turn red. So yeah, like sales, not for me. But, you know, as I got older, I got a little bit more confidence. I was at least able to speak to people, right? But when I was in college, my older brother,
kind of by accident went to sell books in USA. So once I had done it for a couple of years, I figured that, hey, if you can do it, I should probably do it as well. I always had this feeling that, you know, I was a good kid. My grandmother said that you're a nice boy. I got good grades in school and so on. But I never really had the feeling that I had tested myself.
And as the years went by, it started to bother me more and more. So I saw this chance to go to the States. and sell educational books door to door, kind of as a test to see if I really was who I thought I was. And I was still scared. I actually was supposed to go the first year I got into college, but I didn't.
I had many excuses of all the great things I would be doing back in my home country in Estonia. And what I ended up doing is I ended up playing a lot of games, computer games over the summer. I actually made money like that. So it was the first serious money I made in my life playing computer games. So I figured I would do it next year.
And when next year came, I figured I would do it next year because I had new excuses. So I caught myself that if I always think I'm going to do the scary things next year, soon I'll be older than dead and I will have done nothing.
You got paused for a second. How did you make money playing video games?
Yeah. It was not poker or anything. It was this new kind of concept that was like an online world where you could be whoever, like, I don't know, a hunter or whatever. And the in-game money was convertible to actual money and vice versa. Wow. So my last year of high school and first couple of years of college, I made, I think, $20,000 or $30,000, which back in that time was a lot.
Well, anytime if you're still in school, that's amazing.
I didn't do anything smart with that money, apart from paying for the tickets and visa and everything that I got to go to the States. And of course I bought myself a really rad car with extra added lights and chameleon color and very stupid.
So you knew maybe being a financial advisor was not your path? Not in the past, yeah.
Yeah.
Any nosebleeds the first time you sold books?
I was just as scared, so that part didn't go away. But by that time, I had somehow developed my discipline muscle a lot. I had done sports and pushed myself to, I don't know, run laps sometimes. During summer breaks around my house and silly stuff like that. So one thing I was very good at, I was good at following a plan.
And one of the good lessons that I got from my first summer is that experience is valuable and it makes sense to listen to somebody who has done well at what you want to do. So going into my first year, I had a plan. I had a plan that I would do everything 100%. If everything would go smoothly, nice, right? I have a good summer. And if it would be a disaster, I could blame my brother.
So it was a very solid plan. You know, work like crazy, do your demos in sales, you know, all of those things. And I did everything by the book exactly. And I actually ended up being number one first year from Europe.
Wow. That's fantastic. That also does positive things for your confidence in this arena of sales and working with people, right?
Yeah. It taught me that communication, you know, being good with people, it is not something that you either have or you don't, that it's some sort of magic skill. But if you practice it, you get better, number one, and you lose the fear as it is with everything, right? Yeah.
So then jump to Southwestern Ventures. When did that transition happen between selling books and this initiative?
I never stopped selling books. I was on the book field myself for, I think it was eight years. And then I became a district sales leader. And up until 2020, when COVID hit, I was a DSL. But 2020 was a very tragic year for very many people. It changed a lot of lives and it changed a lot of ways we do things. But honestly, I have to say that for me, looking back, it was a very, very good year.
I had some personal changes that I went through. I actually had a divorce, which I thought that would never happen to me. And that was very, very hard, but it was also absolutely a positive thing in the end. And having gone through that, I just got to figure that it is a good year for change. So this other opportunity of joining Ventures presented itself and it wasn't a very big change.
I changed the country where I operated in and I changed like the product, but everything else kind of stayed the same. Like most of the people around me stay the same, the values that we have, a lot of the methods. And so it was like a safe way to get myself on a new track.
And for our listeners, I guess, some perspective is in 2020 when COVID hit, one of the challenges for your organization, continuing to lead students from Europe coming to the States to sell, that became a much more difficult proposition.
By much more difficult, if you mean impossible, then yes, that was accurate. There were, I think it was... even more than 500 people in our organization. So students from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, who had trained for the whole year, paid for the visa and the work permit and everything already. And then COVID hit in March, April.
So suddenly they had no outlet to do the thing they were selected to do. So the challenge for us was to find something to do for, you know, four, five, 600 people in the span of one month. So that's kind of how Ventures, what it is today, got like its first real boost.
A lot of the students, they switched from selling books to doing fundraising or selling these smart local arm service to families in Europe. And it was a lot of work. And I was asked to help out with that just in the beginning. And I started putting more and more time. And by the fall of that year, so after the summer, I had actually made a transition to ventures out of the book selling business.
Talk about taking lemons and turning them into lemonade.
Yeah, definitely. Southwestern family of companies as a whole. And it's definitely true about Ventures, what we're building. We are values and methods and people-based company, not a product or a service-based company or a business. So it doesn't really matter what the product is or how it's going to change in the future.
The way we do things is all proof enough that it's going to survive drastic changes. And I think that's what happened in 2020 and during the COVID times.
Absolutely. So how do we define Southwestern Ventures today? It's a combination of a number of businesses in and of itself. Is that correct?
Kind of fair. We call them divisions. The dream is to, in about 10, 15, 20 years, kind of build like a mini Southwestern family of companies, but in Europe. So back when it started, it was actually created in 2018 by Jaak Roosaere. Because Jaak back then was also ready to move on from the book sales business.
And quite literally the first month or two, Jaak had an office and a whiteboard and he was like sitting around and coming up with ideas what to do. Five years later, we don't do any of those ideas. We do something totally different, but that's okay. So what we do now, yes, we are like a little collection of divisions or companies and we plan to grow a lot in the future.
So to the outside world, it's very simple. We sell things. To the other businesses, other partners, we help them sell stuff. Currently, we sell insurance, accident insurance and life insurance, different products with an investment portion. We do fundraising for many different smaller organizations. We do a little bit of business to business sales that we are just starting.
We sell these smart connected smoke alarms to families, some home security. In the five years, we had about 100,000 customers either face to face or by calling them up on the phone. So that's what we do for our partners. We help them grow their businesses by bringing in new customers often. But that's not our main product.
Our main product really is not for our partners or the other businesses, but it's to our own people. So the real product of Ventures is a cool career. It's a cool career opportunity. And I know career is almost like a dirty word on social media in the past 10, 15 years.
There's so much about keep trying new things and move around and you should never stay put more than two years in one place and all that stuff. But I believe there is great value in building something, in building your skill. in a particular area, in building relationships with the people you work with and your partners and so on.
On the other hand, I understand the challenge that nobody wants to do the same thing for 20 years. The half life of a job currently is what, 40 years now? So 50% of the occupations didn't even exist back in the 90s that there are today. So the idea of ventures is that you are not tied to a specific partner or a product. You don't need to sell insurance for 50 years.
All you are tied to is the family of companies, like the values we have and the methods we do things. A bonus is that whatever you earn during your career, so if you become a company owner, because we are a privately owned company, right? everybody become a stock owner. Or if you build a customer base, like life insurance, you have customers paying for 10, 15, 20, 30 years.
Even if you move around within the ventures or you even start something totally new, you get to keep all the benefits. That's the dream.
Stig Brodersen And Preet, for you, what are the muscles that you get to exercise as president of Southwestern Ventures? What are the new muscles?
The first part of my career, when I was selling books, it is simple, but not easy. So people have done it for more than a hundred years. Literally, I think more than 250,000 people have done it by now, right? So you don't need to invent anything. There is a method to everything and there is a manual to everything, right? So it is your job to use it to the best of your skill.
And now in the last five years, I found myself many times in a situation where there is no manual. All you have is kind of the idea or the direction where you want to push it to. And then you start not from zero, but you start from like 25% instead of from 75% complete. And one thing we have at Ventures is an absolutely wonderful team. We mostly come from the same background.
Most of us have sold books before. And that core team has worked really well trying to figure out new ways of doing things. So selling is the same. Selling is successful communication, but there are nuances, whether you sell books in America to moms with families, or you sell some sort of B2B service type product to a company in Estonia. And figuring that out has been a lot of fun.
Any new business, we have done things in stupid ways and we have changed that. We have this running joke that whenever we feel that, aha, finally we have it, like whether it's a compensation plan or whatever that we have finished now, big changes are just around the corner. That has always been true. I'm selling different things to different people.
One thing that I am selling myself is the idea that you don't need to reinvent everything just because it feels cool or looks cool or sounds different. The pendulum can swing too far, right? As I was just saying that it's been fun figuring out how to do things differently. But the challenge sometimes also has been that how to make sure that the core things are the same.
The things you learn that schedule is important, right? Having good goals and clarity is important. Making sure that it doesn't matter if it's a business meeting or you're talking to whoever it is, doing good and consistent self-talk and self-motivation is important. So that's one of the ideas that I'm selling to myself and also to all of our salespeople.
Because with them as well, it is easy to not understand what makes you successful at something. In sales, at least, people tend to think that what makes you successful is the fancy stuff. It's this my special joke or my special clothes I have. It's the way that I always leave office at 3.30 because then I am whatever it is. And it is my job to remind them that...
On average, what makes you good is doing the basics. And sometimes it's a challenge. I am selling the idea of thinking long-term to my own team and to our salespeople. Because when you are young, when you are in your early 20s, there's this common feeling that by the time you are 30 or 35, your life should be complete.
However much money you want to make, you need to have your 10 million by 35, and then it's time to retire. Yes. And then you're done. Truth is, when you are 35, you have probably had 15 good years where you're actually productive and creative and adding value to society. And, you know, people live to like 90 or 100 now.
So even if we looked at you, you stayed productive until you are 80 or so, 35, you have 45 more years to go. That's a hell of a long time. So sometimes it's a challenge to sell the idea of thinking and planning longer than six months ahead or one year ahead. Especially in sales, people run into this trouble that they don't like being uncomfortable. And if you start selling something new, if
The first six months are hard. There's this feeling that it must be the wrong thing I'm doing. And it's not. Most of the times it can be the right thing. Just need to go through the uncomfortable part, right? And learn. Have enough patience and learn.
Yeah, really well said. You know, one question that's somewhat related to this is you had a name change from E1 to Southwestern Ventures. What spurred that and what's the significance in changing that name?
There is an organization called Europe One. Basically, it's like a big part of the Europeans that sell books. And when Ventures was first started, the name simply came from that. Even the logo and everything came from that. It was E1 Ventures. And at some point, we figured that our vision, same if we think 2020, or 30 years into the future, it was going to grow too far apart.
And having E1 always tied to our name doesn't really represent the scope of what we want to accomplish. So if the goal is to become a collection of companies in Europe, as we have in the States, then just being Southwestern Ventures represents that better.
So we want to emphasize the fact that any new businesses or things that come to us, it's a part of Southwestern, not only part of that E1 organization.
I love it. Kind of the vision that there's more scale than what the initial name implied.
And also luckily, at least in these parts of the Eastern Europe where we operate, Southwestern, it's a positive name. In the early 2000s, when first people really went to sell books, there's not really much high quality sales training here. A lot of it actually came from Southwestern, at least in Estonia, and people were like, Wow, what great ideas.
So Southwestern as a name also has at least some power here.
Embrace that. Yeah, I love it. Well, just as we tie up here, we always like to do a little lightning round of questions. Just very quick answers, but interesting things for our listeners to hear. Sure. All right. What's the one habit or practice that saves you the most time each day?
I have a list of small habits that I go through every morning. I have this self-talk written out. It's about a page and I update it every once in a while and every day I read it. So that describes the ideal. I am not like that, but that's what I work towards. And then I go through the list of my yearly goals just to remind myself if I'm on the right track.
And then I also think what I'm grateful for, what I did well yesterday. Every morning I give myself a little pat on the back and then I write down like one or two things that I want to get done, you know, that day. And I've done it for so many years now, not every day, but honestly about 250 to 270 days out of every year I go through my list.
I feel it helps me keep my focus pretty well, you know, keep focus on what I need to accomplish that day, but also, you know, what's going on in my life as a whole and if I'm moving in the right direction.
Good way to start your day and get your head on right before you tackle all the things that maybe you can't control. What about success? What does success mean to you today?
I think success to me means a trend because everything is relative, right? You're going to have a billion dollars and feel super bad because somebody has more. everything's right. People lived 10,000 ago and they were miserable people and they were happy people and they had totally different lives.
And in 10,000 years in the future, it'll be absolutely different, but I bet you there will be miserable people and really happy people. So to me, success, I don't need X amount of money or house that has that kind of square footage or whatever, but it is the trend. So as long as I am getting slightly more, let's say, wealthy, Every year, I'm really happy about that.
As long as I, you know, my health, I'm always doing something to improve it. I feel happy about it. And the good thing is that a trend can be small, right? It can be just, you know, one, two, three percentage every month or year or whatever it is. And to have that small positive trend just comes down to those little habits. And luckily those are controllable. Those are absolutely controllable.
So to me, success is moving in the positive direction and the speed or my current location doesn't matter at all. It's the direction I'm in.
It's making the little progress. That's great. And then any book or podcast you've listened to recently that stuck with you?
I listen to podcasts all the time.
Besides the Action Catalyst. I mean, I know that's your number, but besides that one.
You know what? I'm such a strong advocate and believer in exposing yourself to stuff like that. So whenever I am moving from point A to point B and I am alone, I am listening to some podcasts. It doesn't really matter what it is. My strategy is that if I expose myself to so much stuff, eventually something is going to stick, right?
So listening to as many different types of podcasts as possible, I think is one of those things that has kept me growing in the past couple of years as a person. not only in business, but also as a parent and just as a well-rounded, interesting person. I listen to Action Catalyst, Freakonomics Radio, Huberman Lab, People I Mostly Admire by Steve Levitt, and the Jordan Harbinger show.
Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. That's great. This has been a great episode. Thanks for sharing some of your wisdom with us, your journey and what's happening at Southwestern Ventures. I appreciate your time.
Thank you for having me.
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This is your host, Adam Outland. And outside of this podcast, I'm also the leader for a division of our company, Southwestern Consulting, and our division is the Southwestern Student Coaching Program. And that division, we started back in 2020 because the desire we had was to take all these skills that we've equipped executives with for
Over a decade, I've coached executives and managers and sales professionals on the skills, the habits, the motivation, and the systems to be successful in their job and in life.
And what we realized from working with 30, 40, 50 year olds was if we could have gotten to them when they were in ninth grade, in middle school, in high school, and equipped them with the same things we're teaching them now, the ripple effects would be huge.
And so back in 2020, we decided to formulate a coaching program for youth, equipping youth with the same types of skill development that we typically work on with adults. We just apply it to their world.
And what that looks like is teaching them the study skills, the communication skills that they can use every day in the classroom and outside the classroom, coaching them on the mindset and the motivation of someone who's a top performer. And what does that mean? It means helping a young teenager create and craft a vision for themselves. Because without a vision, we perish.
But with a vision, we can be equipped with the motivation to dig into our study habits. We can see the connection between our future and the excellence that we have to form in run. And we also work on the emotional intelligence.
It's how we balance our emotions and manage those emotions when they come up in a way that allows us to communicate effectively with others and to communicate with ourselves. It's about equipping young people with self-talk. That means equipping them with the language that they can use to better direct their thoughts and their mind to accomplish their goals and their aims.
And lastly, we equip them with the systems. That means for us, the tools, the time management, and the organization strategies are to not just work hard in life, but to work smart. And when we combine all these different areas that we work with our teens on, what we find is that they form the habits early in life that allows them to achieve their goals later in life and even right now.
And so our passion is to equip as many young people across this world as we can. And we're doing pretty good so far. We've got teens in seven different countries who have been through our coaching program to date. We've worked with over 400 teens, and we would love to be able to serve you as well. Here's how it works. If you want to investigate coaching, we start with a parent consultation.
That's a free call to discuss your students' particular needs and our program details. We work with Olympic athletes all the way down to teens that are just struggling to motivate themselves to do the daily work necessary in their class. So wherever your teen is, we'll meet them where they are and get them to the next level. And that starts with a parent consultation with you.
A student planning session, that's the next step. If we agree that the value that coaching can bring matches your team, then we will move to a student planning session. It's basically a free one-on-one coaching session with your team. And that is designed to support them, but it's also designed to ask a lot of questions to help explore whether or not they want to be coached.
Because at the end of the day, they ultimately have to be the one that pulls the trigger. And then after your student planning session, We get them paired with the right coach for them. We have an amazing staff of coaches from ex-division one athletes, people who've come from the Ivy League system.
We have coaches who have come from entrepreneurial backgrounds and acting backgrounds, so we can pair them with the right fit for them. And then once they partner with their coach, they'll benefit from two coaching sessions a month to really zone in on their personal growth and their skill development.
So if you're ready to give your student the tools they need to be successful, click the link in the show notes. for more information and to make sure you can schedule your free parent consultation today.