Episode 94 - Losers are Winners: Paul Cramer Built the Dream… Then It Fell Apart
Episode #94 | Losers Are Winners | Paul Cramer Built the Dream… Then It Fell Apart
What happens when the entrepreneur dream becomes the thing quietly eating you alive? In this episode of Losers Are Winners, Mark sits down with author and recovering entrepreneur Paul Cramer to unpack startup highs, brutal lows, identity loss, therapy, and the emotional cost of building something from nothing. It’s equal parts business therapy session, cautionary tale, and “oh crap… that sounds familiar” moment for every business owner who’s ever brought work stress to the dinner table.
About The Curious Builder
The host of the Curious Builder Posdast is Mark D. Williams, the founder of Mark D. Williams Custom Homes Inc. They are an award-winning Twin Cities-based home builder, creating quality custom homes and remodels — one-of-a-kind dream homes of all styles and scopes. Whether you’re looking to reimagine your current space or start fresh with a new construction, we build homes that reflect how you live your everyday life.
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Paul Cramer 00:04
I was very successful as a salesperson, and one decision one day pissed me off. I quit, and I'm like, I'm gonna start a company, and my wife, God love her, she's like, go for it, and I'm like, what? She's like, yeah, go for it, and I'm like, all right, I had no idea what I was doing it really, and we just went for
Mark D. Williams 00:27
it. Welcome to Curious Builder Podcast. Welcome to the stories of the scars, or as you know it, losers or winners. Today I'm joined with Paul Kramer out of Minnesota. What's up, Paul?
Paul Cramer 00:39
Nothing.
Mark D. Williams 00:40
Not
Paul Cramer 00:40
just excited to be here.
Mark D. Williams 00:41
I am too. We, you're an author, which is pretty cool. You've got a cool book we'll talk about a little bit here in a bit, but why don't we dive straight into it? Give us a quick intro on who you are and why you're here, and we'll get into some of these lost stories.
Paul Cramer 00:58
Yeah, one, thank you for having me. To Paul Kramer. I am, as Mark and I were just talking, I'm a recovering entrepreneur and individual contributor all at the same time, and an author, but writing is my hobby, so I really enjoy it. But prior to that, I owned a software company, and now I'm currently a growth architect for a digital consulting firm.
Mark D. Williams 01:20
Interesting, I like that growth architect. So, basically scaling,
Paul Cramer 01:24
basically
Mark D. Williams 01:25
a better storytelling. I like the way you say it's a
Paul Cramer 01:27
sexy word of saying I'm in sales, like that's the inferiority complex in me. You're in sales, and everyone's like, that's a nothing burger, it's not very interesting. I
Mark D. Williams 01:35
like the architecture, and especially for the audience, this is way better. Well, I, it's funny, I have a friend of mine who's writing a book, he's a teacher, called it's something about the quiz, we'll have him on at some point too, but I like a lot of people, a lot of people say they want to write a book, but most people then stop and like, well, what am I going to write about? Let's talk a little bit about the book real quick, and then let's talk about some of your, because I'd love to know what's hard about writing a book. Okay, so the book that, how long have you had the book out?
Paul Cramer 02:01
The book I originally wrote and published in 2022 and just kind of life gotten got going, and kind of forgot about it, self-published it, and then I reread it this fall, really this fall, this winter, and it had a, I had a different perspective as it relates to that, and so I decided to republish it, because I'm writing another book, and they say if you're an author, the best thing you can do for yourself is once you write your first book, start writing your second book. They don't, you shouldn't have a lot of years between books if you want to write multiple books, so I reissued Burnt Peanut Butter Toast, the way you survive something becomes the way you live everything, as an opportunity one to really bring what I was thinking to a broader audience, and then two just build some momentum. I was an accidental author, so I had a software company, we sold it. I was part of the leadership team. That company got sold. They no longer needed me, and I toyed with the idea of retiring, and it was short-lived. I wanted to start another business, and my wife was like, "Oh, hell no, that's not going to happen. We've gone through that. And so I had a couple months between when I was going to start to work again, and I always said I wanted to write a business book, so I sat down to write a business book, and I was really going to talk about the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur. It sounds sexy, but it is a lonely endeavor, and my experience, I can't speak for all entrepreneurs, but the day I sold my business was probably one of the worst days of my life. It was not what I expected. It was very anticlimactic, and really, I think a piece of how I saw myself was gone. Now, who am I? That was kind of the thought. And so I wanted to write this business book, and as I sat down to write, it turned into much more of a memoir. It is a memoir, and really, how my survival patterns that I developed earlier in age, and as, as through, as through adulthood, really started to inform a lot of the decisions that I made, and candidly, handicapped any growth opportunities I had with the company that I had started. In fact, those handicaps probably cost me a lot of money, because I had to do everything myself. If I didn't do it, it wasn't going to be done right, or it wasn't going to be done when I said, you know, when I wanted it done. So it's just really a mirror to I think people in general of we don't realize that experience, how we survive and experience an uncomfortable moment, maybe it's bullying, maybe it's something else, how that starts to inform a lot of the decisions that we make.
Mark D. Williams 04:59
Interesting, I. I just only touch on it real quick here. I had mentioned to you when we were talking about, like, right now on Monday episodes, we're reading the psychology of money. In chapter one, it said the most powerful influence on how we view money is how our parents viewed money. And what reason I'm bringing up right now in relation to put to what you just said is, you know, the things that we go through, obviously it's common sense. It informs our decision making. If you, I was just running this morning, I was talking about confidence, but if you aren't in a household where confidence is sort of instilled in you as a kid, you is it self-esteem? Are you, you know, is that bullying at school? Whatever it might be, like it takes longer to discover that, and entrepreneurship is like a, is like a, you know, it is a, is a very abusive sport, in the sense of, like, and nobody is harder on it on you than yourself. Entrepreneurs are brutal to themselves.
Paul Cramer 05:48
Oh, I can remember, I was trying to raise money, and my wife would know who you meeting with today. What are you talking about? And every day I'd come home, and she's like, "How'd the meeting go? I'm like, "It was a meeting, we had a good meeting. She's like, and, and she was always so excited, and each meeting was just one more hit to my self-esteem. Raising many money in for a software startup with no revenue to show is not for the faint at heart. And we started Barometer, that was the name of the company, in 2008 right after Bear Stearns went bankrupt, so trying to raise money was an act of God, and literally she saw me just fall apart in that six month period of time. It was,
Mark D. Williams 06:33
it was that the company you eventually sold, it
Paul Cramer 06:34
was the company that
Mark D. Williams 06:36
was successful. Give us just a quick high notes, we don't have time to go in the whole story. What did you grow it to, and when did you sell it? Because what I'm really after is this feeling of when you sold it, that feeling that you felt like a part of you was gone. I'd love to really talk more about
Paul Cramer 06:50
that. Yeah, so we tried to raise money, we raised a little bit of money, and we came to the realization. I had a business partner at the time. We came to the realization that managing all this, this little amount of money, but it ended up being about 10 people, was just not worth the rub. I would have been spending all my time managing the few 1000, you know, a couple $100,000 that we raised, and so we didn't take any money, and we decided to bootstrap it. We consulted during the day, worked on it at night, hired people, any money that we made, we put right back into the business. And then we got our first client, and they essentially were our venture fund. They were very gracious. I remember when we presented to them, they asked us to present to their leadership team, and I'm like, you realize we don't have software, and they're like, just do whatever you need to do. So, we've.. we.. I thought we were going to fake it. We actually made the whole software in a couple of weeks' period of time, presented, and just by dumb luck, they continued to want to see investments, different features, and we were able to build that, continue, continue to consult, and then one client led to another, me and my partner ended up parting ways, and I stayed on, we grew it, I think at our peak we're at 45 people, and
Mark D. Williams 08:14
oh my,
Paul Cramer 08:15
so it got pretty big,
Mark D. Williams 08:16
we're what did Barometer solve, what was the software, what did it
Paul Cramer 08:19
do, the best way to look at it is we were in the enterprise architecture space, so we could show how things would be impacted, so if you were going to make a change to let's say a process within our product barometer, you could see how that change would have a ripple effect, not only through the business,
Mark D. Williams 08:39
what a
Mark D. Williams 08:39
great name
Paul Cramer 08:40
it was a great, actually, and we had to be called Barometer, it because barometer.com I don't know who owned it, but they wanted $250,000 of course, we don't have $250,000 so we grew to 45 and it was sailing along, and you know, I made every entrepreneurial mistake that you could make, and then our biggest client one day said, you know, what, we've invested a lot, we're kind of done investing, we're going to pay, you know, it was a subscription-based software, so we'll continue to pay our subscription, but these big fees that we, that you are charging right now from a consulting standpoint, we're just going to put those to bed, and that's really how we funded the business. So,
Mark D. Williams 09:23
how many years did that go for?
Paul Cramer 09:24
We started in 2008 We were at 45 at our peak in 2013 and then we went down to one employee. I kept.. I had to lay.. so
Mark D. Williams 09:37
basically, you built it for whatever they needed. Yeah, and then once the ship got up to planning speed. They're like, okay, we're not building the ship anymore, you just need to drive it,
Paul Cramer 09:44
correct?
Mark D. Williams 09:45
All right,
Paul Cramer 09:45
correct. Very reasonable decision. You know, the big mistake I made in that context, I put all our eggs in one basket
Mark D. Williams 09:52
in one client,
Paul Cramer 09:53
in one client, definitely. And we had, I mean, we are lucky of, we had 10 of the Fortune 100 Companies were our customers, but a subscription-based software company, you need to grow really, really fast, and you know, acquire cost customers way faster than we were doing it, and we made the lion's share of our revenue from a consulting standpoint. So, when those dollars went away, I had to quickly make a decision. We did one layoff. First mistake is, you know, I should have cut deeper. I had team members saying we should probably cut deeper, because we had plenty of runway, and I didn't. I didn't want to. I think I let seven people go on our first laugh, and if I would have let probably half the company go, we probably would have gone a lot longer. It wouldn't have had to have gone from 45 less seven, less everyone. else, and just keep one.
Mark D. Williams 10:44
You cut the knee down, you should have just cut off the whole
Mark D. Williams 10:45
leg. I
Paul Cramer 10:46
should have just cut the whole leg off.
Mark D. Williams 10:47
You know, it's funny you say that. My dad, maybe about two, three years ago, we had a big project, things were really lean, and we had a client put a $4 million project on hold, that was really the lifeblood that we needed for cash flow for about an eight month period, and I was going to let one person go, and my dad had been a builder for 40 years, and he said cut deeper than that, and I was like, really, because the person I cut was someone I didn't think I could afford to leave, like he was so talented, so it was also my most expensive person on the payroll, and I did, and it was the best decision I ever made, but I wouldn't have gotten that had someone not well in this case, my dad, but a big reason why we have the podcast, why we're sharing your story, why we have the Cures Collectives and Contractor Coalition, things that you're not aware of, but the audience is, is to talk owner to owner, because entrepreneurship is like lonely, because nobody talks to each other, and I feel like the generation right now that we're currently in is much more vocal, social media allows you to be more vocal with it, but you know, in the.. it's not like 2008 didn't have internet, and all the social media was just starting to begin right then, but people were much more private with their information. Now it's like I feel like the currency is share everything, because we're growing and exchanging ideas so quickly that I feel like if you're not, you're kind of a dinosaur, in my opinion.
Paul Cramer 12:01
Yeah, I would say when you're an entrepreneur, you always have to have that facade on that everything is great, it's going well, don't ask for help, and don't give too much away, because you don't want to give the illusion that things are falling apart, and then someone won't recommend you, and so everything is always rosy colored glasses, and you're right, people are much more vocal. They'll post about it on LinkedIn, or there's a lot more services out there. But even in that context, I'm still curious as to really, how much are people sharing? Is it really more surfacey level? You know, cash flow is tight. We're having struck, we're struggling with sales, like I'm really more interested from an emotional standpoint, like as an entrepreneur I feel like I'm surviving, not surviving like financially, but just from a life standpoint. I get home, I'm tired, I'm not the person I want to be when I'm sitting across the table talking to my wife, I barely am present when my kids are around, I'm confusing, like being present with being present, proximity with being present.
Mark D. Williams 13:08
That's well said.
Paul Cramer 13:09
And I feel like that's the stuff a lot of really just people in general don't talk about. We're surviving, and we don't even really realize that, that really at the end of the day, we're doing those things that have gotten us ahead, but may not - those may not necessarily be the things that really drive us or we're passionate about at the end of the day.
Mark D. Williams 13:38
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Paul Cramer 15:49
One, that's the premise of burnt peanut butter toast. The way you survive something becomes the way you live everything. For me, the moment was my wake-up call was my wife. She went down to my office and was trying to find something just for her to write on a notebook, and I had a notebook out there, and I just had a bunch of scribblings that she was just surprised, like this is what I was thinking, this is how I felt, and she came up, she came up, and quickly thereafter, fast forward a few days, we're in couples therapy, and you know, good for you. I'm starting to share things that are going on, and she's oblivious to all of it, because on the outside, well, at this, at this point in time, I thought I looked good, I looked like a piece of shit, I was 30 pounds light, I had greasy hair, like I was just, I had just fallen apart emotionally, and I was just getting, I was eating myself from the inside out.
Mark D. Williams 16:45
Yeah, when you.. I think that's amazing, that I mean, it is our spouses, the people around us, it's a friend, it's.. you know, I just found out we talk a lot about mental health on the podcast, and just in general, because I think it's.. I think, our age is much more - we're much more open about it, you know. Back to the 80s and 90s, like mental health - are you kidding me? Buck up, buttercup, you gotta, you know, be tough, you know that kind of. Plus, I'm in an industry of building and construction. There's even more stereotypes that that's not acceptable, and honestly, they need it more than anybody. For my opinion,
Paul Cramer 17:16
I grew up like you pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you don't ask for help. I remember my wife at one point in time, we were sitting in a session, and the therapist said, "Describe how you feel when you wake up, and I described it. My wife looked at me, and she goes, "I think they call that depression. I, that's how I thought my entire life, from as long as I could remember, like the world was falling apart. Like, my first five seconds of the day was, where's that deal? What's going to happen with that deal? If that deal doesn't happen, what am I going to do? How do I go back and tell my wife, and that we didn't get that deal, and we're not getting groceries, or whatever it is. I mean, that is just how I thought my entire life.
Mark D. Williams 17:54
I mean, I've never thought about this before, but like, the was that fight or fight flight, fight, flight. I mean, you essentially were in that complete dopamine adrenaline survival instinct for probably sounds like a decade.
Paul Cramer 18:06
Oh, I lived in.. I have lived in fear for a long, long time, and that's the reality - is I learned different survival mechanisms to avoid that fear, to really go head had into really what's going on here? It's not necessarily fear is my reaction, but what's the thing I'm fearful of, and it's crazy, the survival patterns that I created to avoid difficult conversations, uncomfortable feelings, disappointing others. It's just insane.
Mark D. Williams 18:39
You know, and I'm not, I'm not trained in this, but, well, you know what? In some ways, you're describing it's like coping mechanisms for, like, drugs, almost. Like, I think entrepreneurship is a drug of choice. I've never thought about this before, but I think it's actually pretty accurate.
Paul Cramer 18:50
Oh, make no doubt about it. I was an arch, I was a reluctant entrepreneur. My dad, I grew up, my father was an entrepreneur, he owned a couple businesses, one did well, one failed miserably, and you know they lost the house and everything, and you know I was very successful as a salesperson at a company that I worked with, and one decision one day pissed me off, I quit, and I'm like I'm gonna start a company. I mean, I never built a software.
Mark D. Williams 19:24
How old were you when that happened?
Paul Cramer 19:25
I think you know what I was
Mark D. Williams 19:28
27 years.
Paul Cramer 19:29
No, no, actually I was old enough to know better. I was 40. I was a really.. I was an old entrepreneur. Wow, yes,
Mark D. Williams 19:37
that's awesome. I love this. Was Barometer was your first?
Paul Cramer 19:42
Yes, I mean, I a bunch of stuff through teens and early 20s that were just nothing burgers, but yes, barometer was the first where I'm like, I put it all on the line, and my wife, God love her, she's like, go for it, and I'm like, what, she's like, yeah, go for it, you know, we had three kids. Lived on in Lyndhurst at the time, and I'm like, all right, I had no idea what I was doing, really, and we just went for it, and we learned I don't, we made every mistake that you could possibly make. Here's the good news: you get through them, number one, two, they're not really as painful as you think they are, in fact, they're kind of a relief once you encounter that mistake, and you're like, "Oh, all right, at least I'm glad that one's done. There's going to be another one down the road, but yeah, my wife, Anne, was just.. she was the greatest cheerleader in the world. Now, we did do one thing that was kind of stupid, she had a startup at the same time, so she started a clothing. She's gonna be next week. She'll be like, "He's insane. But she started a clothing line, and it's very similar to building in a lot of ways. She did very, very well, was in glamor, in style, but it requires so much cash. The amount of cash to support a clothing line was mind-boggling to me. At least, when we had Barometer, we can consult and throw the money right back into the business and take a little bit. So, we had two startups, three boys, they're very far apart. So, we had an infant, and then one in high school, and one in grade school. It was just. it was freaking crazy. It was a blast looking back that those survival, that surviving was actually fun, but I, you know, my internal survival mechanisms were a freaking nightmare for to be around, whether you were my business partner, a client, an employee, and God loved my wife, she had to, she had to sit through all of it, and the kids,
Mark D. Williams 21:44
amazing that she was doing at the same time. I get so much credit and guts for those that I mean, at 40, to be an entrepreneur, that's super impressive. Just because, like, I mean, when I started, I was, well, I had a little business in high school, so what did I know? And then, but then for me it was 23 and this is like, you didn't know what you didn't know. In some ways, I realized that, like, not realizing how much risk you're taking is like a huge blessing.
Mark D. Williams 22:07
Oh, it's
Paul Cramer 22:07
a total blow,
Mark D. Williams 22:07
because you're not even aware of it. It's like, you have no idea there's a train coming behind you. You're like, oh, what train? You know that noise is just kind of a tune you're whistling to. And those that you know go later, you've got a family. I just, my hat's off.
Paul Cramer 22:19
That's all credit said. And my wife, yeah, she is like, so what, it's money, big deal. Well, you'll recover, we'll recover, what we'll get through it. If that's,
Mark D. Williams 22:29
were you happy? Do you recall being in, were you happy in terms when I say happy, were did you love what you do, even though it was a hustle? And did you love it? Did you enjoy?
Paul Cramer 22:38
I really believed in what we were doing. It was super, super exciting. It
Mark D. Williams 22:41
was passion. The
Paul Cramer 22:42
difficulty we ran into is we were probably five years too early, that we were just way ahead of the curve in what, how people were thinking. But yeah, I was passionate about
Mark D. Williams 22:54
just because I'm going to talk to you forever. I love this story. When you sold the company, what year was that?
Paul Cramer 23:02
We sold it april 2 of 2014
Mark D. Williams 23:05
2014 Okay, so it ran for about six years. What you said when you sold it early in the podcast, that you kind of felt like a part of you was gone. Let's talk a little bit about that. What did that feel like when you sold it, and why wasn't there joy? Walk us through the emotions of that?
Paul Cramer 23:22
Yeah, I, and I write about the my book, actually opens up with this, the scene
Mark D. Williams 23:27
I'm reading this book now. I can't wait to read it. You'll
Paul Cramer 23:30
get a kick. I'll put only because you know me now, you like, ah, I can hear Kramer's voice, and now I can't get it out of my head. The reason that it was probably one of the worst days of my life. Is I sold it out of fear, literally out of fear. I had just,
Mark D. Williams 23:47
because you'd gone from 45 down to one,
Paul Cramer 23:49
down to one.
Mark D. Williams 23:50
How long was that gap that you were at one before you sold
Mark D. Williams 23:52
it? The
Paul Cramer 23:53
gap between, so we went down to one, and then we started a higher back. So I think when I, we sold, we had eight people at that point in time, and you know, we had just been put on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which in technology is the holy grail, and we were, you know, a self-funded startup, made it in a very good position in the magic quadrant, and without that incident, we, I probably would have gone out of business, but all of a sudden we were on people's radars, and we were starting to get calls from it from an acquisition standpoint, and things were moving in the right direction, but we were also running out of money again, and we had one offer that I said no to, actually paused, took a deep breath, you know, didn't react. Most of my decisions are reactions, they're not decisions. And decided to pass on it, and then another company came around with a very good offer. Know, I
Mark D. Williams 25:00
assume this
Mark D. Williams 25:00
is one of your clients.
Paul Cramer 25:02
No, it was a private equity firm. Came around, and you know, after we did the math, if we were to go to raise money and you know, do all the things that software companies want to do, we would have made about the same amount of money. So I'm like, yep, you know what, this is a good, this is it made sense, but that was short-lived, because it was really.. again, it was.. I was afraid to.. we were going to run out of money, and I didn't.. I didn't really.. I don't know if I had it in me to go in and do all the things that you needed to do to get to the next level, series A, series B, VC.. I didn't want anyone telling me what to do. I just wanted to be done with it, and it was more money than Ian and I thought we would ever have or make, and I'm like, all right, this seems like a good idea, but to your point, all of a sudden I don't want to say my identity was gone, I had nothing, I didn't have an excuse to be the asshole that I started to become, you know. If I was being a dick or an asshole, I could say I'm running a business, it's a startup.
Mark D. Williams 26:11
Basically, you change your personality into being someone you didn't like or want to be, and yet without the crutch of sort of that addiction being gone, you still were the person you didn't want to be
Paul Cramer 26:20
totally, I didn't have the crutch anymore, like I couldn't be the crabby dad at dinner, thinking, you know, coming in, you're right, coming in hot on the phone trying to close a deal, you know, everyone's waiting to eat, and I'm like one more minute, one more minute, and the call goes for like a half hour, and then you sit down, and I'm the first one done, and I'm sitting there, patient, like, come on, everyone, get done. I have, like, dad's got stuff to do, and I didn't have that crutch anymore. And I think I realized that very quick, like, within days after selling, like, oh my goodness, I'm still all the reasons that I said I was crabby and stuff was because I had a business, now I had nothing to worry about, no personal guarantees. We had way big enough big account, we could do all the things we wanted to do, but I was still the guy trying to manage and control and orchestrate every little thing, and you know it. Just
Mark D. Williams 27:17
so, you're 46 at this time. Yes. How did you? So, what did the next couple years look like that undo some of that? Because you don't seem like a dick now. No,
Paul Cramer 27:30
you know, I would say that the next few years I probably got worse. I was really, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, yes.
Mark D. Williams 27:38
Were you.. was it just because you had time? Like, what? Looking back now,
Paul Cramer 27:41
I had a lot. I had a lot of white - I call it white space - at a lot of white space. And I was the kind of guy that if I, my calendar showed open and there were no other meetings, and then someone put a meeting on my calendar, I'd be like, what the fuck, don't you see, there's no meetings on this day? Like, give me the space, put it next to all the other meetings I started to unravel, and really, that's the premise of Burnt Peanut Butter Toast, is I just started to become undone. It's crazy, but I imploded three years. I'm sitting in a therapist, marriage therapist couch, and my wife's looking at me like, who is this guy? This is not the guy I married, and I slowly but surely unravel and start to see that really how I was showing up were old survival patterns from things that happened a long, long time ago, and just stuff that I never said I would tell anyone, all of a sudden started to come out, and you know, based as a result of having a fantastic therapist, so we went to marriage counseling, and they're like, you know, your wife, Anne, doesn't have a problem, but you, you got a lot of problems, so I spent a lot of time with who I call Nate in my book, and it was, it was an eye-opening experience. It was like, it was like, I will say this, it's dramatic. It was life-changing.
Mark D. Williams 29:15
I mean, honestly, I would love if you're.. I mean, I think the audience would love this. I know I am. We'll probably break this episode into two, if you're good. Totally, to keep talking, I would love to. I would love to talk about therapy, if you're open to it, for sure. Because I think so many people, it's a taboo, they don't understand it. And I have a lot of peers that are in it, but I've never had someone that's quite from an entrepreneurial standpoint, especially because they're like, no, Ian's doing pretty good. You actually need to work on yourself, and I assume the way I understand it. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'll just make a note here to no one to split this 20. Hang on one second, audience, this is too good. We got to make sure we come back for a second week. So, if you like this episode, we'll see you next week to conclude this episode.
Mark D. Williams 29:59
Hmm.
Mark D. Williams 30:01
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