Maker Manager Money - Entrepreneur & Business Owner Inspiration

Building Foretopia: How David Lindmeir Is Transforming Businesses with NetSuite

• Kyle Ariel Knowles • Season 2 • Episode 59

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Join us in this inspiring episode of the Maker Manager Money podcast as host Kyle Ariel Knowles interviews David Lindmeir, the founder and CEO of Foretopia. David shares his entrepreneurial journey, from his childhood experiences in his family's candy store to launching his first business, eWatches, and eventually founding Foretopia, an IT services consulting firm specializing in the Oracle NetSuite ERP platform.

KEY LEARNINGS

Embrace the Entrepreneurial Spirit Early On: David's childhood experience working in his parents' candy store instilled a passion for entrepreneurship. Despite witnessing the business's challenges and exhaustion, he recognized the value of hard work and customer service. This early exposure shaped his future ventures, reminding us that the entrepreneurial spirit can be nurtured from a young age.

The Importance of Scaling with the Right Tools: One of David's pivotal decisions at eWatches was implementing NetSuite as their ERP system, even when it seemed overpowered for their initial needs. This foresight allowed the business to scale effectively and manage inventory seamlessly. David emphasizes that having the right processes and systems in place is crucial for growth, a lesson that resonates with any business looking to expand.

Value-Driven Consulting: With the launch of Foretopia, David aims to provide more than just standard consulting services. He focuses on understanding clients' long-term visions and helping them achieve their goals through tailored solutions. This approach builds trust and empowers clients to think beyond day-to-day operations, fostering innovation and growth within their organizations.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

  • David's early entrepreneurial influences and experiences working in his family's business.
  • His transition from a career in product management to starting eWatches and the challenges he faced along the way.
  • Key lessons learned from scaling eWatches to over $7 million in sales and successfully exiting the business.
  • Insights into the importance of implementing effective systems and processes for business growth.
  • The founding of Foretopia and its mission to help companies achieve their full potential on the NetSuite platform.
  • An exciting sneak peek into DubSuite, a new app and services marketplace for NetSuite that David is launching.

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business leader, this episode is packed with valuable insights and practical advice. 

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Kyle Ariel Knowles: Hello there, welcome to the Maker-Manager Money podcast, which inspires entrepreneurs to keep going and entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Ariel Knowles and today's guest is David Lindmeier. David is the founder and CEO of Foretopia, an IT services consulting firm specializing in the Oracle NetSuite ERP platform. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and French from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. David began his journey with NetSuite in 2003 during his first entrepreneurial venture, eWatches.com. He's a seasoned business and technology leader who helps businesses of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, solve big problems and improve their operations to grow and prosper. David founded Foretopia in 2023 to help businesses achieve their full potential on the NetSuite platform. Get ready to hear his insights. Welcome to the show, David.

 

David Lindmeir: Thanks, Kyle. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Appreciate it.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So where are you dialing in from today?

 

David Lindmeir: I'm at my home office. We're pretty much a virtual company. We have consultants around the world, so it doesn't make sense necessarily to have a physical office these days, but we do get together on client sites, which is really nice. And we've done that a few times since we started the company. Oh, that's great.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So I want to talk about your childhood a little bit. Were your parents entrepreneurial or did you do anything entrepreneurial when you were younger?

 

David Lindmeir: My parents, my dad worked for IBM, my mom worked for the government and she ended up quitting her job. My dad was born and raised in Germany and they spent some time in Europe and traveled around and they had discovered these really great confections, chocolates and so on, especially in Belgium. And they decided that when she left the government, they wanted to open up a candy store. You wouldn't have thought these two folks that were working, you know, what you would consider very much a white collar day job would start a business, but they did. When I was 12, I was working the counter at the candy store, weighing chocolates. And we also served Häagen-Dazs ice cream. So I learned how to scoop ice cream and take care of customers, count change out at a very young age. And then they decided, Hey, this is going really well. And so they got a lease for a larger retail space down in D.C., just right off of DuPont Circle. And so we moved this little candy parlor out of Gaithersburg, Maryland, into the heart of D.C., right off of Connecticut Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue. And that's what I did all through high school, working for my family business. they added a delicatessen as well. And so every day we'd have lines going out the door in this business area for food. And then during the holidays, just crazy amounts of volume for these great chocolates. And in fact, we carried Jelly Belly jelly beans and Ronald Reagan was a fan of Jelly Belly jelly beans in the day. And there were a couple times when we actually filled orders for the White House, which is kind of funny. It was cool. It was a lot of fun. So I had a great entrepreneurial experience with them, but I also saw them exhaust themselves. There were opportunities to franchise. People would ask, hey, this is a great concept. You have this great high-end deli, great sandwiches, so on. You had great ice cream and then terrific chocolates. And people wanted us to franchise it. And my parents were so exhausted, they couldn't even put their minds around that. And for a long time, I thought, you know, this entrepreneurial thing is kind of a bad idea, but it also, I think it, I was infused, I think, by it as well. So the itch was there still.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Pretty high-end stuff if you were serving Haagen-Dazs and high-end chocolates. So yeah, that's, that's great. And you were just doing everything from inventory and working the counter and

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah, the worst part and this convinced me I never want to do the restaurant business was the cleanup every day. Oh, it's exhausting. Right. So, you know, stainless steel has got to be pristine. We had a yogurt machine that had to be disassembled and reassembled using, you know, edible grease and so on to make sure that, you know, all the parts work together and it was just a lot of work. And that's what I'm saying, you know, even with good, good help, and we had a great staff. It was just hard, you know, they were there from 10 in the morning till 9 at night. Every day, except for Sundays when we were closed. And the only time they got a break was, you know, when I kind of managed to sort of later as a later older teenager, I kind of managed it, you know, for a few hours on Saturdays.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And then, so what happened after high school then? What was your plans and what did you do after high school?

 

David Lindmeir: I came out West to, I went to BYU for my freshman year and then took a couple of years off, served in LDS mission in Quebec, learned to speak French. And then originally I wanted to be an electrical engineer when I started my undergrad. And when I returned from that mission experience, I decided I wanted to go into business and then started accounting, then went on to economics and just loved it. I loved the thought processes around it. Now, economics is a great degree if you want to go on and get a PhD or you want to go to law school, but it's not a great degree if you want to go into industry. because people don't generally hire undergraduate economists. And so that put me in an interesting situation. I was actually selling books door-to-door to put myself through school and had developed these great sales skills and led teams of people. There were summers where I made a lot of money, enough not only to cover my tuition and not have to work while I was going to school, but take girls out to nice restaurants at the same time. So that was great. But it also kind of put me in a box of sales as an undergrad. So anytime I wanted to find a job, you know, with a degree in economics, and this was in the early nineties, it was tough. That led me to want to get an MBA and really kind of launch a career. I loved high tech. As you know, technology was just kind of booming in those days. And so I started applying to business schools and got into the University of Chicago in 1994.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So that was right when the web was being born, basically, and Netscape came out and websites. And that was when you started seeing URLs on buses and in magazines, website addresses, the web was being built. So that was a perfect time for you to be in MBA school for sure.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah, it really was. It was crazy. So in the fall of 94, when I started business school, the internet wasn't, it existed, but nobody was using it. And then, by the time I was ready to do an internship with Qwest, That's all we were doing. I mean, I was using Netscape daily, as you were saying. And I was working on a project for Quest to figure out how to have them distribute the internet, not just via ADSL, but in other methods. And so we were looking at wireless transmission. You sometimes see those wireless antennas, you can get wireless internet today. They had a great application where you could take a position of the tower and then do a certain radius. You could see what areas were covered and what areas were not covered. And that was a lot of fun, but yeah, it was wild. And then, you know, Google was the big search engine and that was close to the time I was graduating. And so it was, it was crazy. You know, and I, I was excited because I wanted to work in high tech product management after I graduated. And there were a ton of opportunities, you know, kind of internet focus to, to do that. After I graduated from business school, I worked for US Robotics, which then got acquired by 3Com.  US Robotics was well known as a company who created really good modems. So when people didn't have DSL available. in their homes, the best they could do would be dial-up internet. And we were about ready to launch a 56K modem. It's called X2. And that was terrific. A lot of fun. That job was back in the Salt Lake City area, where I had a couple of other friends that had returned from graduate school. And we started getting together on Friday mornings at about 6 am, one of the guys had to be at work at like 7:30 every day. So we would get together at six and talk, talking about how we were going to break away from our day jobs and become entrepreneurs. And this was our, we call it the breakfast club. One of the guys had insight into the fact that the Social Security Administration needed a new, a new building. And we actually found a broker, got the building locked up and then sold that contract to another company. So that was one of the outcomes to the Breakfast Club. Somebody had approached us about selling Dino Glows t-shirts, which was dinosaur t-shirts that had bones that glowed in the dark and, you know, fun for kids. We were able to get Fred Meyer to pick those up. That was one of the things we did as part of the Breakfast Club. So we had built up a small pool of cash to do some fun things. But at the end of the day, we all had day jobs. And so as much as we wanted to kind of focus on those fun activities, neither one of those was going to be the one where we could just double down and go crazy on. So we continued on our day jobs and I ended up having a really good career in product management, both with U.S. Robotics and 3Com. And then I moved on to Phillips Electronics and ran, as their director, I ran their product management team here in the Utah area. They were in the broadcast space. And so right in the middle of around 2000, this is when HD started coming out. And so we just had a great time trying to figure out how we take our customers who have these large systems and help them transition to high definition without having to use a forklift to upgrade, you know, essentially junk their old product. And some of our customers were HBO and CNN and ESPN. So it was a, it was really fun to work in that space. Disney was also a client.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: What made you decide to start eWatches then?

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah, well. As well as I was doing with Phillips, that division got acquired by a French company. And then that French company acquired our largest competitor. And as part of the negotiation, the competitor said, we want product management to move to Grass Valley, California. And so they said, David, we love you, but we've got to part ways. And so I was disappointed. You know, but life moves on. I ended up taking a job with another local company here in Salt Lake, ClearOne Communications. They were a small publicly traded company and took a role as their director of product management and was doing great work with them. And, but what I found was, is that operationally they were really struggling in a couple of areas. They had a gap. The CEO had said, “Hey, we really need somebody to step in and kind of fill this gap from an operational perspective.” And I said, well, I can do that. I worked with product management team at Phillips. I was working with the manufacturing team all the time. I was working with inventory, making sure that we could fulfill orders. So I felt like I could step into that role and do a good job. And next thing I know, I'm sitting in the HR office, and I've been asked to leave the company. And this is after like three months. And I was curious. I was like, what in the world is going on? and very upset. And I, you know, I said to myself, I'm done. I'm never going to work for anybody else again. And so I started reaching out to business brokers and trying to figure out what the next step was. But I learned after I got let go from ClearOne, I got a phone call from the vice president of sales at the time and he said, “Hey David, let me tell you why you were let go. Cause I know you weren't satisfied with what happened.” He goes, “I have now, become a whistleblower for the SEC against ClearOne because they were hitting their quarterly numbers based on they were sending inventory to their channel and then bringing that inventory back at the end of the quarter so that they could hit their numbers to keep their stock price elevated.” And essentially the CEO and the CFO spent some time in jail as a result of this. He told me the reason you were let go was simply because they knew that you would detect what was going on and be a whistleblower. And they didn't see me as that whistleblower when I actually was. So they let me go to prevent a potential problem in the future. So that was a relief, but it still didn't distract me from my goal of saying, I never want to work for somebody else again, even though I did later. But yeah, that's, that's what happened.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And that's, that's when you started eWatches then.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah, exactly. At the time we had six young kids and they were all in school and in soccer and all these other programs that were a cash drain. And I was trying to figure out how to cover our nut while we're identifying a business. And that was, that was really tough. I mean, Credit cards, we went into a lot of credit card debt to kind of survive that. I'll never do that again, but I'll tell you that was scary. We found a broker. One of the brokers brought a deal to us for a website called DiamondBlaze. It was owned by a kid that was in law school at the University of Utah. And he had started this business, sold a bunch of watches over the summer. It was DiamondBlaze, he was really just selling watches from Citizen, Seiko, Bulova online. And he'd done well. He had a nice looking site. We said, hey, we'll buy that from you. He couldn't manage it. His family was having to ship watches for him during Christmas because he was in the middle of finals and he couldn't get stuff done. So we bought that. And I say “we” because one of the Breakfast Club members joined me as a partner to do that. He was practicing law here in Salt Lake. So I was going to run it. And sure enough, we bought it and I've got a lifetime table in my bedroom with a printer on it. That's how we started. And a few boxes of inventory that we bought from this kid. Funny story there too is, so we were supposed to close on a Friday and for whatever reason, the docs weren't ready. And so we decided to delay the purchase until the following Monday. This is in March of 2003. And I get a call from the broker Monday morning and he goes, Hey David, you need to turn the TV on. And I go, why, what's going on? He goes, no, dude, you just need to turn the TV on. So I do turn the TV on and the news is showing DiamondBlaze on fire. It was one of the largest fires that had happened in Salt Lake, like five alarm fire. The shop was sitting right next to a laundromat and the laundromat, some of the chemicals had caught on fire and burned everything. So when I said I had a few boxes of inventory is because he had more inventory before we made the deal. But by the time we rescued what was left and didn't smell like smoke, it was, you know, it was, you know, we ended up buying the business for $70,000. It was super cheap. So we have the website and a little bit of inventory. And so we just had to buy, you know, buy inventory from the vendor as opposed to selling what we had in stock at the time. And he was really running a very light stock business. Most of what he was doing, he'd do special order inventory, they'd bring it in and ship it and set expectations on the website that it might take a week or two to get products. So that was fine. But to really grow, you've got to have stock on hand. And so as soon as we acquired it, we acquired some retail space. I moved my office from our bedroom with the lifetime table into a retail space, bought shelving and had a nice little retail storefront in Kaysville, Utah. And then we started growing it. And so in 2003, we did $300,000 in sales. And then in 2004, we did over $600k, 2005, we did $1.2 million. And, you know, we started, you know, we started doing $100,000 a month in sales. And then we just continued to grow until, you know, By the time 2008 rolled around, we were, just on the watch side of the business. We were over $7 million in sales. It was remarkable. During that time, we threw our names in the hat for the Inc. 500 and actually managed to get ranked in the Inc. 500 two years in a row for 2007 and 2008. And then in 2009, The economy's going sideways. We were doing fine because we had so much traffic via SEO that’s search engine optimization that we were able to survive, but it was going to be a survival situation as opposed to a thriving type situation. At the same time, you know, you had rumors that Apple was going to be releasing a watch and a lot of technology. And the last piece was that Amazon was starting to go direct with the brands that I was selling through Amazon, through Seller Central directly. And I thought, oh, it's time to get out. And we found a buyer and we're able to get a deal done where the buyer bought our website assets, all our digital assets. And then we held onto the inventory and consigned the inventory back to that buyer and had a great exit. It wasn't what I envisioned, you know, being a kind of a grand slam kind of exit, but it was certainly a base hit and a great learning experience in the process.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So what were some of the key lessons you learned from starting and selling eWatches?

 

David Lindmeir: I think there are a number of lessons here. One is when you start a business like that, you've got to be thinking about, I've got to scale. And so I've got to be thinking about How do I make sure that I have the processes and systems in place that will allow me to scale rapidly? And that led me to actually acquire NetSuite as our ERP, even though when I first started it, NetSuite was way overpowered for what we needed, but I knew it would allow us to connect our inventory to our website, would allow me to communicate with vendors and time and so on. And so that was one lesson was bringing that ERP in. Another one is,  hire great people, people you can trust. You know, we had at any given time in Bountiful, Utah, which is where we've moved our, our operation. We had a great retail. presence up top, but I had well over $2-$3 million of inventory and during the holidays, as much as five. And so having good people, not only that can make sure that we're taking great care of our customers, but also making sure that the inventory wasn't walking out the door, despite as many security measures as you can make. That was a big deal. Spend money on sales and talent, spend money on driving traffic and revenue. I was spending a $100,000/month on Google. And then making sure that other people are selling your products. And so we syndicated our product data to eBay, to Amazon. At the time there was Buy.com, which is now Rakutan. I don't know if they exist anymore, honestly, but once we created that product data and we had it in NetSuite, we knew we could syndicate it everywhere and we did. And that made a big difference in terms of our ability to scale and scale rapidly.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So how much were you spending a month on Google ads? I guess you were spending money.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. Yeah. Just on AdWords alone, it was over a $100,000 a month.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Wow.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. Yeah. I accumulated a lot of, a lot of miles.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: What kind of return would you get on that then for every dollar you spent?

 

David Lindmeir: On a hundred thousand dollar a month spend, we were doing five or $600,000 a month in sales. And, and what would happen is, is, you know, that would cascade. So that would, I would get about $150,000 to $300,000 a month just off of SEO and sales. But I wanted that extra $200,000 a month in sales that Google was giving us, even though we were kind of breaking even on those sales, but what happened is, is it would, that would cascade and build over time. So people would return and then they would buy. So you'd have this kind of this. I don't know, you call it kind of a roller coaster or a snowball that was kind of building over time. And so then when the holidays would roll around, that ad spend would really, that same $100K ad spend would provide a substantial return. So I probably spent a little more than I should, but at the same time, I felt like it was really providing us the return that we could, that made sense.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah. And especially back in those days, spending money on placing ads with Google would also help your rankings just in organic search too, I believe.

 

David Lindmeir: They would, they told you that it wouldn't, but the reality is just that I think we all kind of concluded that. If you were spending money on AdWords, they gave you a more favorable position in the organic search. As we grew, I mean, we started implementing additional features in NetSuite. So that's why I bought it. Initially we did inventory and then we started doing EDI connections to some of our vendors and then have automatic drop shipping for brands like Fossil and others. And getting to the point where in some cases I didn't have to carry any inventory at all. And that was, you know, that was amazing. We had a third party help us design a split. So let's say somebody ordered two watches. One was a drop ship and one was one we stocked. It would actually split the order into two. We'd ship the stuff from stock immediately. And then as soon as we got word back from the customer, and then we'd authorize the card for the additional amount. That allowed us to be really effective. And NetSuite did a great job for us there. We were small enough in the early days that I actually self-implemented NetSuite. So I spent probably hundreds of hours on the phone with support at night. So I'd work all day in the business and then at night try to solve some problems so that we could add these new features and so on. It was quite a ride. It was tough and it was fun. We had our kids involved, especially during the holidays, they would come in their school was just down the road. So they'd come in after school. My wife would drop them off and they would make boxes for me for hours so that we'd have enough boxes to ship the next day. And that was a far better use of my team's time. It would not have been a good use of my team's time to make boxes, but it was a great use of my 12-year-old and 13-year-old kids to make boxes for hours for me. And it was a good experience for them. And they made some money in the process.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's great. And in the heyday, how many boxes were you shipping out? Like over Christmas?

 

David Lindmeir: I think, you know, our best days were, you know, around a 1,000-2,000 watches a day, you know, but those are, if you think about it, some of the lower end watches were still around a hundred dollars. And then, you know, uh, our average price point, if you would look across both the lower end brands and the higher end brands, you know, or ASP or kind of the mode was. The median price was around $350. So yeah, it was, we had some pretty good days. Yeah.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah, that's exciting. So that's a lot of fun. And, and, uh, the fact that you self-implemented and I bet your technical skills from being a product manager at technical companies, uh, really played a part in. Being confident enough, at least to, to self-implement that suite.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. I mean, I, I feel fortunate. I, you know, even though I didn't end up with an engineering degree, I spent enough time. with engineers and with systems to feel comfortable that I could take this on. And an MBA helped me understand at least the core financials and so on. I will tell you, though, an MBA doesn't teach you how to manage an accounts payable process. Or it doesn't teach you how to go out and call customers to collect. I didn't really have to do that. We were all online. But figuring out how to use a system to pay your bills, that took me a minute.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: that. And your door-to-door sales training probably helped with you calling customers and things like that, that maybe your MBA didn't teach you.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah, absolutely. You learn how to kind of build, build trust quickly, you know, and I had on the high end side, we had regular customers that would, at one doc in particular, he would get a bonus from the hospital he worked at every quarter and every quarter he'd call me and say, okay, David, what you got? What do you have? And we would talk about high-end watches and he'd end up spending five to 10 grand a quarter with me. It was great, yeah. And those clients I typically managed myself as opposed to my staff, yeah.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Okay. So, and then after you sold eWatches, did you have to stay on for a little bit or what was your next move after eWatches then?

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. Yeah. The beautiful thing about the sale was I didn't because they just bought the website assets and then, you know, but I did have to, I had to dispose. I had a couple million dollars into the inventory. We needed to, to, to move. Uh, we had the retail store. We had to kind of tear down and make available for the next tenant and, uh, you know, I had to do taxes and all kinds of fun stuff to kind of wrap that up. So that took a while. 

 

I'm trying to think. Yeah, I got approached by, about a year after I sold it, I got approached by a venture capital backed company (True Ventures) that was struggling a little bit. They acquired three internet retail businesses. The company was called MRN, Manufacturers Resource Network. And they needed a CEO to come in and see if they could turn that business around. It was kind of languishing. One of their business units was EnableMart, which was a company that sells assistive technology for people with disabilities. And that was their largest entity. This was about a 15 to $20 million internet retail business. And within a year, we got an investment banker that was hired by School Health out of Chicago, reached out to us and said, hey, we're interested in acquiring, potentially acquiring EnableMart. Would you guys be interested in having a conversation? And we said yes, and we ended up selling that business, dispositioning the other two. And I joined School Health as their vice president of marketing for a couple of years, helped with the transition, made sure that Enablemark found a good home and was properly supported within the School Health business. And that was a great family owned company, terrific company, great working with those folks. I really had a lot of admiration for them. you know, the commute to Chicago two weeks a month was a little bit taxing. 

 

And so some friends had approached me about starting a, doing an app that, a social media app that would essentially allow you to kind of contrast, compare opinions on topics and kind of have arguments on those topics. We called it the Soro app. And so I left School Health to join that team. And we realized fairly early on that, it was not going to fly. We just didn't have the capital to really make this thing work. And despite our best efforts to raise the funds. And so in the early days of kind of app development, it was really easy to get funding. And then, you know, in about 2013, 2014, people realized that, hey, you can't just fund an app with nothing. So people were funding it if you had a following. So if you had a following of 100,000 or 200,000 or a million users, then all of a sudden they could value that app properly. And they knew that it had some legs before they were acquired. We didn't have enough funding to kind of get to that point. And so we decided just to kind of abandon it. 

 

Around that same time, a friend of mine who owned a private equity firm here in Salt Lake asked me to essentially start a door company online for them. They owned a door company, a door manufacturer. They were sourcing the doors out of Asia, but they wanted to start selling them online. They'd had some small success with selling a few doors on eBay, and they felt like it might really take off. So I joined them as their founding president of UberDoors. And shortly thereafter, we realized, hey, we need an ERP. And with my experience with NetSuite, both at I said, hey, why don't we, why don't we use NetSuite? And the private equity group had a mission to acquire a bunch more businesses and essentially create a portfolio of companies in the construction space. Doors being one of them, but they were also doing. You know, a number of other things, cabinets, countertops, they owned a design center. And so we needed an ERP to manage that business. And so I took on the role of the CIO. We used NetSuite to rollup all these entities and within four years, we went from zero to over a hundred million in sales and revenue. all built on NetSuite, we were able to kind of scale again relatively comfortably. No ERP is easy. If you were to talk to some of the folks, they would say, well, it was challenging, but we got through it. And it was a great learning experience for me in the process.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And did you have any ownership in that company?

David Lindmeir: I still have a small profits interest in the company. Got a check a few years ago. We sold the landscaping company that was doing the landscaping for the Salt Lake City airport. And that was a nice sale, a nice exit for one of the subsidiaries. And I got to pay out on that. And I think over time, eventually InteriorWorx will have a meaningful exit there. And hopefully I'll, I'll be able to participate in that in a meaningful way too.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Great. And so take me to when, when you started Foretopia then.

 

David Lindmeir: When I was at InteriorWorx, one of the things I did is I engaged some consulting firms to help us do some larger implementations. I had a small team that, you know, we had one implementation required a physical presence in multiple locations. We just couldn't execute that by ourselves. So I brought in an outside firm. And based on the value that they were able to deliver versus the amount of funds that we spent on them, I became kind of disenfranchised a little bit or disillusioned by how good these guys were. And I thought, well, this can be done a lot better. In addition, I'd also spent a lot of time creating point solutions on NetSuite to make NetSuite better or work better for our company. And I noticed that there was really not a good marketplace for apps for NetSuite at the time. And so when I left InteriorWorx, I decided to leave InteriorWorx and do something else. One of the things I wanted to focus on was really doing apps for the NetSuite platform, because I felt like there would be a great opportunity there. I reached out to a couple of friends who then referred me to another friend, and I encountered a company called Appficiency. I was introduced to Johnny Than at Appficiency. He had, at the time, a fairly small I guess the lower end of the mid-sized consulting firm for NetSuite, we ended up talking and I ended up joining them and essentially ran their US delivery operations, so ran all their consultants for the U.S. We started with three people, ended up growing the team in a four-year period, to about 40. We were loss-making, less than a million in sales and delivered hours. When I joined, we were over 8 million in sales and very profitable when I left. And when I left, I was thinking, gosh, I can do this. I know how to build teams. I know how to, I know the tech and I know how to talk to customers. So all the large customers that we won, in the US, I was brought in to help close the deal because the sales team wanted the customer to see the team and the leadership that would be delivering those products for them. So I met companies like Clorox and a number of others in that process. We did an NFL team, an MLB team, and had the good fortune of being involved in all of those implementations. 

 

And so four years down the road, I'm still an entrepreneur at heart. And did not feel like I could be as entrepreneurial as I wanted to be at Appficiency. And so hence there comes Foretopia. So I left in April and August after I settled all my partnership agreements with Appficiency at Greenlight to essentially start my own company. And that's what we did. Having known what it was like to do eWatches, there was a lot of trepidation. And, you know, stars are hard. The good news is we're from a cash perspective, we were in a much better position than I was. You know, I didn't have six kids at home playing soccer every week and needing clothes, you know, new clothes every other day. And so, um, you know, our, our needs were, our cash needs were lower and, and we had a good bit of money put away. So it was a lot easier to do this one. 

 

I launched the business in August of 2000, 2023, we landed our first customer in January. On the last day of January, January 30th, January 31st, I can't remember which, but I was able to send an invoice out for January for the first time. And then, you know, since then we've grown the business remarkably by word of mouth, some little bit of gorilla marketing, some social media marketing and referrals. And it's been great. You know, I now have a team. We have 15 to 20 of us around the world. And I say 15 to 20, I have a few partners that I work with. that particularly in Latin America, where, you know, they do some SuiteCommerce, e-commerce stuff for me and their team is growing. So we have a good size team and it's been a lot of fun and we're making money. I mean, we're profitable. We were profitable in the first eight months and, and it's been a great ride since.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Where does the name Foretopia come from?

 

David Lindmeir: Trying to come up with a name for a business today that you can buy a URL for, as you know, it's not easy, right? The thing I like about Foretopia, and as I was thinking about it, concepts about names. I was thinking, how do I help a customer with our name kind of visualize how we can really benefit them? I wanted something that would have some meaning, even though it's a created word. So the notion is that every business leader forecasts this kind of utopian future for their business. And Foretopia forecasts utopia. Foretopia helps them. Our mission is to help them realize it. And at the end of the day, we're really doing that today with our clients. And that's what I love. I told you I'd been a little bit disillusioned with the effectiveness of some of these consultants in the past and with my prior role. And I believe we built something special at AppEfficiency. We really added value to our clients. 

 

And part of that was doing things the right way. And a lot of times when you're dealing with tech and consultants, and particularly people who are really tech savvy, they'll say all day long, “I can do that. I can do that. I can do that.” And what we really focus on is what should we be doing? What's the vision? What's our long-term plan for our customers? And so when I talk to prospects about working with us, what I talk about is, what's your roadmap? What's your vision? Where are you going to go in X number of years? And then within the context of that roadmap, then we start talking about, OK, how do we help you achieve that vision? So I feel like we're really doing what Foretopia was destined to do, which is really delivering value and helping customers kind of achieve their goals and objectives. And, you know, some examples I can share and some I can't, but I had a CFO the other day of a very large and very rapidly growing accounting firm. They're growing through acquisition and also organically. He just said, you know, David, you guys are much more than just a consulting firm that will do what we ask them to do. We really appreciate the value you're adding. This is in an area of just essentially collecting. It's an accounting firm, so they do taxes for companies and individuals all in April and throughout the year, and then they've got to collect. And they were, their AR was getting bigger and bigger as they're acquiring businesses. We needed to really solve that problem. We came up with some strategies to help them do it. And then some thought processes around, Hey, we don't have to be aggressive. We can be nice and we're still going to collect funds rapidly. And, and that's part of the analysis that our team and I provided to them. It's funny when you talk to some of the individuals who are grinding stuff out every day and it's painful for them. Some of those folks don't want to have improvements because they're worried about job security. And when I talk to the CFO or the CEO of the company, they're going, my people are secure because we're growing. What I need them to do is start using their brains more instead of doing the same rote tasks over and over again. And what we find often is when a client will implement NetSuite, it's just really a bare bones implementation, but to really get to the point where people are free to actually use their brains to make meaningful contributions to business outside of just kind of grinding the day-to-day  processes out. 

When we get them to that level, then the client gets a lot more value out of their folks as well. And the folks are, you know, some of them, don't mind the monotony and some of them are ready to move on from the monotony. So it works out really well.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Can you just give us an overview of some of the services that Foretopia provides?

 

David Lindmeir: We provide implementation services. So if a client is on QuickBooks, they're outgrowing that or any other platform, they're planning to go public and they need a platform that will, the market will look favorably, favorably upon. QuickBooks generally isn't going to get it done. Some of these smaller platforms won't, Odoo and others. And so they'll come to us to do an implementation. And so we'll start at the requirements, that whole vision, where they want to go, understand their business, and then make sure that we implement that suite solidly so that when they flip the switch and they're no longer on QuickBooks, they can run their business. So we call that an implementation. 

 

And then a lot of our clients are former customers of other competing consulting firms, and they've just said, hey, we've had enough. We're ready to make a change or we need to make a change. We're just not satisfied for a number of reasons. Maybe the folks just focus on implementations and they need postcode life support. And we're really, they're not getting that from their implementation firm. They have a vision of what they want to do with their business. They've been running on NetSuite for a period of time, and now it's time for them to grow the NetSuite footprint and do more in the platform. They're spending a lot of money on it. So we do that. We provide a managed services offering, and through that managed services offering, we also do integrations with third-party systems, EDI. all that. And also we provide custom applications to automate processes that become mundane or are well defined, but very rote. And so the simple automation can save a company hundreds of hours, a month or a year. And that's a lot of value. So we do those kinds of things as well.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And you're working in just about every vertical then?

David Lindmeir: We are, yeah. I mean, I've got clients in the food and beverage space. We have medical clients, we have clients in the services. One of our clients provides a social media marketing firm and their clients are Disney and Netflix. And what's that kids cartoon program, Nickelodeon, video game, social media stuff as well. It's a lot of fun. We have a large tire distribution. a master distributor as well as a client. So it's across the board. A lot of fun. And this is the thing, this, you know, when I was at InteriorWorx, I was getting a little bored because it was kind of the same thing over and over again. This is fun because I'm working, you know, with the CEOs and CFOs of these, these firms that are very diverse and it’s really, it's very enriching.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah. A lot of different challenges.

 

David Lindmeir: Exactly.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So what, what's something exciting that you're working on at Foretopia?

 

David Lindmeir: It's been a secret for a little bit, and we've been working on it kind of on the down low. But remember, I talked to you about when I joined Appficiency, I was looking to create an app marketplace for apps for NetSuite. And so we are actually soft launching DubSuite, which is an apps marketplace for NetSuite. And we have a number of vendors that have already listed their items. I'm not ready to kind of do a full on media campaign and press release there, but so you're the first person I'm really talking to that might have a public presence. But we're excited. So this is a marketplace where people can buy apps that have been designed and implemented by firms like ours. And instead of having to spend the full price of re-implementing, they could spend a fraction of what it would cost them to implement themselves on Dub Suite. In addition, firms like ourselves can list their services for sale as well. So it's kind of a marketplace for both apps and services. It's not an official NetSuite sanctioned site. 

 

NetSuite has their own app marketplace. It's called suiteapp.com. But they're very restrictive in terms of the number of apps that are there, price points, that kind of thing. Our goal is to be more like AppExchange, which is the Salesforce's equivalent, where you can buy a $99 point solution to a $10,000 solution and where NetSuite is more on only on that $10,000 range.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And where did you get the name DubSuite then? 

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. Well, you know, again, trying to come up with a URL that would make sense. If you think about my son, one of my sons really liked dubstep music. And then, and then you think about dubbing is you kind of layer in sounds, but think about NetSuite as the core. And we're layering in apps on top of NetSuite. So it really kind of works. And, uh, you know, we're really, we think that URL is, is good. It makes sense.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And are you going to provide, uh, do you have some apps that you have in mind that you're going to create specifically for the dub suite?

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah, we actually, we have, uh, several apps on the platform already. NetSuite is a great platform, but it's not perfect and there are gaps. And so we've created a few point solutions to resolve those gaps. One is, if you want to send an email to multiple, a transaction email to multiple contacts, you can't do that natively in NetSuite. You can only send it to the main, the primary email address of the customer. So we've created an app that will allow you to send an email to all the contacts you want. a transaction email of any kind to the contacts you want to send it to and with a simple button push. So that can save, think about the amount of time that would save somebody instead of clicking one invoice at a time and then adding a CC because when you send a purchase order, you need to send it to the purchase order desk, but the sales rep that manages your account also wants to get the PO so they can shepherd it through. You can't do that natively, today, but now you can with what we call FT mail. So that's an example.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: That's exciting. When do you plan to launch a dub suite?

 

David Lindmeir: Well, officially, uh, you know, within the next couple of months. Yeah. I, my goal is to get a critical mass of apps and vendors on the site. We're getting closer. And once we have that, then I'll start, you know, start teasing it out, uh, and, and letting people know. And we, we put together a nice, like part of the deal is, is. Vendors can list their apps for free on the platform, but the deal is they've got to promote their apps via social media and point people back to the apps that they've listed. So they can list for free, but they've got to promote the platform as a marketplace. So I've got essentially a package for them to start using so they can promote their own apps via social media, very cool views and that kind of thing. 

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Being a second time founder of a technology company, basically a tech company, what are the biggest lessons you've learned from the second time around of starting Foretopia?

 

David Lindmeir: eWatches has provided kind of a roadmap, you know, how to navigate just, you know, setting up an entity and, you know, a business registration and all of the kind of the fundamentals. that eWatches has provided a cool learning there. And then, you know, there are a lot more tools today that are digital than there were when I started eWatches. Some of those we were using in my prior firm, but, you know, Gusto for payroll. Oh, don't ever deal with payroll. Just, you know, get a tool like Gusto or, you know, there are tons of others. Using tools like, tools, answering service tools, website tools to build a site very rapidly. None of that existed when I started watching. So you can spin up a company quite rapidly. AI is really beneficial, particularly when you're building a site. You'd spin up a site in minutes and you give it themes and topics and AI will write it. And then I spent some time rewriting a lot of the content. And I have somebody helping me manage the content today, but, but it at least got me off the ground. I was able to launch, you know, the Foretopia site and platform very, very quickly.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: And so what are some of the other tools? So if you're a project based right with each of your clients, what's your project management tool?

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. So we use NetSuite. Okay. We are a NetSuite Alliance partner based on our years long relationship with NetSuite. They, they allowed us to be a partner very quickly, even though we were Didn't have any customers, we were brand new. So that was great. But we use NetSuite. Part of that partnership agreement is we pay for a license to the platform. So we manage our projects there and timekeeping is handled in NetSuite and then all the invoices is handled there. We use Freshdesk for our ticketing system. It's very affordable. In fact, it's free for a certain number of users. It's terrific. We're looking at ClickUp. as a way of managing tasks, that's a Utah-based company. We think that's probably going to be a unicorn here. We use ClickUp to manage the tasks that our folks are doing. And we're actually in the process of implementing that. So we'll have, think about NetSuite is the core, you create the projects there, they flow to ClickUp. And then Freshdesk tasks also flow to ClickUp, and then people log time against both the project task and a ticket task. And essentially then that flows in and I can invoice customers and have better detail to the customers as to what the folks were working. So really nice, kind of nice flow of, of solutions.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So you mentioned AI and, and some tools that you've used for maybe content creation and spinning up a website and things like that. Any other uses of AI that you're using for Foretopia?

David Lindmeir: Yeah. I mean, at times you use it for some image generation. And also for various content sections of our site, we're a new company. And so think about some of the things that you have to do in a company, like doing reviews for employees. You need a non-disclosure agreement. You need a master services agreement. You can guide ChatGBT with some certain topics, and then it won't give you the full agreement, but then you can say, I need language that talks about work product and whose work product is what and it'll spit out a paragraph for you. And so I've been able to create a lot of the core docs, process docs, and so on were using what were generated via AI. And then tweaked, you know, once, once they were produced, I had a good vision of what I wanted. And then I make adjustments from there, but saves me saving countless hours.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I appreciate that. It's always fun to talk AI and see how different companies are using it. I just want to end with some personal questions. The first question I have for you, David, is who has had the most significant impact on your life?

 

David Lindmeir: Outside of my parents who essentially put me on this entrepreneurial journey, for which I'm profoundly grateful, I'd have to say my wife. It takes a lot for a spouse to tolerate the level of risk that we brought in. And some days not knowing if we're going to have money to buy groceries. And I'll be candid, that's how it was in the early days of eWatches. When you're making minimum payments at some point, that debt mounts up to be pretty significant. It's hard to make ends meet. So very grateful for her to her willingness to be on that journey with me. And we've had a lot of fun along the way, but the challenge is there. 

 

When I told you I was selling books door to door, the founder of the company that did that was Steve Schallenberger. He's out of Orem and he is just a great guy. He taught me how, in a lot of ways, how to lead. really manage people, how to be inspiring. When you're leading people, you want to elevate them and he was great at that. 

 

Another one was my former mission president when I was on an LDS mission. He was a former VP at Boeing, had led countless numbers of people and I looked up to him as you know, no matter how stupid of a thing. And when you're a 19 year old kid, you do some pretty stupid stuff. He would just look at you and laugh and then encourage you to do better and do it in such a way that you just felt like, Oh, I've got another chance and another chance to be great. And he was just fantastic. 

 

I also grew up in the DC area and was surrounded by, you know, some terrific leaders, people that were business owners and those people were terrific as well. Again, very inspiring. They only saw the best in you and they helped you see the best in yourself. And I've tried to some extent, and I'm not nearly as good at it as them, to emulate them and try to help others feel inspired and lifted.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I'm glad you mentioned your spouse. You know, I've interviewed over 50 entrepreneurs on Maker Manager Money and behind just about every one of them, there is some supportive partner, spouse, significant other that's, you know, been in the trenches with them. And it takes someone like that by your side to get through the tough times for sure.

 

David Lindmeir: Yeah. Yeah. And she has been there. She's been terrific.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: So thanks. All right. So what, what book do you recommend the most to people?

 

David Lindmeir: Depending on where you are in your career. And, you know, if you're ready to become a manager and you're rough, and I was rough as a young man, when I started leading people, I was very rough. My salvation was “How to Wun Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. I mean, that, that book helped me understand better how to treat people, how to manage people and get the most out of the people I was working with in a positive way, in an honest and sincere way. It wasn't like how to get them to do something, but really how to help them be inspired, similar to what I was feeling from the folks that inspired me. So that is one. 

 

Then later in life, more current, as I think about this business and also about DubSuite, “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries is really a great book. And I'm also looking at “Blue Ocean Strategy” for how do we, as a firm that's competing with a lot of other firms who have a much larger footprint than us, how do we win? And that blue ocean strategy notion is go where there's not a shark infested waters, but go where there's fewer competitors and kind of focus on what your strengths are within a blue ocean as opposed to a red, bloody, shark infested ocean that has all these competitors in it. I think that's a good one. 

 

On a personal level, I play pickleball a lot and I'm reading “The Inner Game of Tennis” because I find that I get in my own head, like I can hit a ball and I can get it over the net. but sometimes I get in my head and then all of a sudden I choke, I get the yips. My partners will look at me and go, dude, what is wrong with you? So, “The Inner Game of Tennis” is a book I'm reading for myself right now. 

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Those are great. Those are great suggestions. Well, just to find a lightning round of questions, your favorite candy bar?

 

David Lindmeir: Oh, it's gotta be a Reese's. Maybe Heath too, but Reese's for sure.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Favorite music artist?

David Lindmeir: Rush. Although I was just  at a Metallica concert last week. But Rush was, would be my all-time fav.

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Favorite cereal?

 

David Lindmeir: Honey Bunches of Oats.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Mac or PC?

 

David Lindmeir: I think I would like Macs better, but I am a PC guy today.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Google or Microsoft?

 

David Lindmeir: Sadly, I like the Google products, but I'm also a Microsoft guy. Yeah, we use teams and it's a great, Microsoft has a great suite of tools for businesses.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Dogs or cats?

 

David Lindmeir: Love dogs, love cats, but we’re cat owners and we have three of them.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Phantom or Les Mis?

 

David Lindmeir: Les Mis.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: Final question for you, David, what's the worst thing about being an entrepreneur and what's the best thing about being an entrepreneur?

 

David Lindmeir: The worst thing is, is that there's always something to do. Your day doesn't end at five o'clock. And, you know, last night's an example. I was solving problems from three in the morning just in my head while I'm laying in bed saying, you really need to get to sleep, dude. You really need to get some sleep. And I'm solving problems for clients and the business and so on. remembering that, oh, I've got to get this done and this done. So that's the downside. 

 

The upside is that your capacity to contribute is significant. Your capacity to earn is significant. Your capacity to manage your own time and do things at your own pace are significant. And those are all things that are difficult or more difficult, I think, when you're working for somebody else.

 

Kyle Ariel Knowles: I love it. I love the answers. And thanks so much, David, for being so generous with your time today. I think the listeners will learn so much about your two times being a startup founder and getting a business off the ground and keeping it going. It's really unheard of these days. And so I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and your knowledge with us today.

 

David Lindmeir: Well, thanks Kyle. I appreciate it. Delighted to spend some time with you and hopefully we'll connect on a personal note since we're almost neighbors here in Utah. Thank you again, appreciate it.

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Kyle Ariel Knowles

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David Lindmeir

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