IN THIS WEEK’S NEWSLETTER:

• 🚀 Two Words That Can Change Your Life…

• ✅ Why Entrepreneurs Feel Fear and Self-Doubt

• 💡 AI Tip of the Month

• 🤐 What Private Equity Isn’t Telling You

• 💰 Time to Sell Index

Watch Today’s Clubhouse!

🎙️Business Networking & Strategizing in the World of AI (with George Dubec) - Today at 2pm ET

George Dubec joins us to explore how networking and strategy are evolving in the age of AI. Discover how to leverage technology to build relationships, sharpen your positioning and create new opportunities for growth.

Listen to this newsletter👇

🚀 Two Words That Can Change Your Life…

Tiny words make a massive difference.

This is not a new strategy.

This is not a 12-step system.

Just two words: And. Happy.

Years ago, we hired George Walther to train our call center teams at Internet Direct and Hostopia. His program, Power Talk, taught something so simple most people miss it: change a few words, and you change the entire conversation.

Replace “but” with “and” and replace “I have to” with “I would be happy to.”

That one change can save a customer, calm a spouse, win a team member, and maybe even keep peace with your twin brother.

Here’s how it works.

1. Replace “I’ll have to” with “I will be happy to”

Bad energy:

“I’ll have to call you back.”

“I’ll have to check on that.”

“I’ll have to come to the wedding.”

Better energy:

“I will be happy to call you back.”

“I will be happy to check on that.”

“I will be happy to be there.”

Same action. Totally different feeling.

Why it works:

• It turns obligation into choice. “I’ll have to” sounds like a burden. “I will be happy to” sounds like service. 

• It tells the other person they matter. Nobody wants to feel like one more task on your list. 

• It changes your own attitude. Sometimes your words lead your feelings, not the other way around. 

• It creates goodwill before the work even starts. People forgive delays when they feel respected. 

• It makes you sound like a leader, not a hostage. Leaders choose. Victims “have to.” 

2. Replace “but” with “and”

Try this:

“I agree with you, but…”

“That’s a good idea, but…”

“I understand, but…”

Now try this:

“I agree with you, and…”

“That’s a good idea, and…”

“I understand, and…”

One word changes the temperature.

Why it works:

• “But” deletes everything before it. The moment people hear “but,” they brace for rejection. 

• “And” keeps the conversation open. It adds instead of attacks. 

• It lowers defensiveness. People are far more likely to listen when they don’t feel shut down. 

• It helps you build on ideas. “But” blocks. “And” moves. 

• It makes disagreement feel like collaboration. You can still say no. You just do it without slamming the door. 

The Wedding Test

I learned this lesson in business, and then life tested me.

In October 2022, my twin brother called. He and his girlfriend of ten years were getting married.

Great news.

One small issue: the wedding was in thirty days.

Another small issue: our company had sponsored a car at NASCAR that same day, and I was really looking forward to going to the race.

My first thought was not exactly brother-of-the-year material. As I admitted in the book: “That selfish prick. He tells me this only thirty days in advance.”

That was the thought. Thankfully, it was not the sentence.

I remembered what George had taught me. Instead of saying, “I guess I’ll have to come,” I said:

“I would be thrilled to come to your event.”

And guess what?

The wedding was fabulous. Everyone had a great time. And I didn’t poison the moment with one careless phrase. I knew I wasn’t getting out of it, so I embraced it.

That’s the power of language. Try it for one week.

Catch yourself before you say:

“I’ll have to…”

“But…”

Replace them with:

“I will be happy to…”

“And…”

Then watch what happens. People soften. Meetings improve. Customers calm down. Family conversations get easier. You start sounding less annoyed by life.

Two words.

And. Happy.

Small words. Big life change…we call that a true minor/major. 

Now don’t be greedy and hold on to these two words, share them with others and get them to sign up to this email list so they can keep improving their founder skills. 

— Colin C. Campbell

Disclaimer: Startup Club and its AI resources are for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Consult a qualified lawyer for legal matters.

📅 This Month’s Clubhouse Schedule!

🎙️ Turning Discipline into Execution With Parker McCumber - Friday May 29th at 2pm ET

Join Parker McCumber, US Army National Guard Captain, as he shares how discipline translates into real-world execution in business and leadership. Learn how to build stronger teams, make better decisions and execute consistently under pressure

 ✅ Why Entrepreneurs Feel Fear and Self-Doubt (And What to Do About It)

The number one reason people never start a business has nothing to do with money, timing, or the idea. It is fear. And most of the advice on how to handle it completely misses the point.

Dr. Rowshanak, a bio-psychologist who studies the nervous system and entrepreneurial resistance, joined Colin C. Campbell and Michele Van Tilborg to break down what is actually happening when a founder freezes, pulls back, or talks themselves out of the next move.

It Is Not Weakness. It Is Biology.

Most people who experience self-doubt assume something is wrong with them. They are not disciplined enough, not confident enough, not ready.

Dr. Rowshanak was direct: that framing is wrong.

“We don’t hold ourselves back because we’re stupid, weak, lazy, or unmotivated,” she said. “In fact, we’re the opposite of all those things.”

The real mechanism is biological. Your nervous system registers risk before your conscious mind has a chance to intervene. Exposure, pressure, judgment, the possibility of letting others down: your body processes all of it as threat. The psychological story, I am not ready, this is not the right time, what if I fail, comes after. It is your mind building a narrative around an activation that already happened.

You cannot think your way out of a nervous system response. That is the core insight most entrepreneurship advice skips entirely.

Fear of Success Is More Common Than Fear of Failure

Everyone understands fear of failure. Almost nobody talks about fear of success, and Dr. Ak argues it is just as prevalent.

Success means visibility. Visibility means more people watching, judging, expecting, and depending on you. The higher you climb, the more exposed you become. As Dr. SI put it, drawing on a Jamaican proverb: the higher the monkey climbs, the more his nakedness shows.

Michele described this dynamic from her own experience leading the paw.com Kickstarter launch. The fear was not about personal embarrassment. It was about letting down the people who had committed to the project, the employees, the contributors, the community.

“It’s not just about me,” Michele said. “I do actually think about the impact it has on everyone else, and that concerns me more.”

Dr. Rowshanak named this as a pattern among heart-centered founders. The self-doubt is not coming from insecurity or selfishness. It is coming from genuine care about the consequences of failure on others. That compassion, while admirable, can shrink your risk tolerance until you stop moving entirely.

The Physiology of Calming Down

The breathing advice you have heard before is incomplete. Dr. Rowshanak explained the actual mechanism.

It is not about breathing deeply. It is about the length of your exhale.

When your exhale is longer than your inhale, it slows your heart rate. A slower heart rate signals to your brain that the threat has passed. That is the physiological brake on your sympathetic nervous system, what most people call fight or flight.

The ratio is simple: exhale twice as long as you inhale. Four seconds in, eight seconds out. Five seconds in, ten seconds out. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth slowly. That is it. No apps, no equipment, no meditation practice required.

Write It Down. Not on a Screen.

The second technique recommended addresses rumination, the 3am thought spiral that Michelle described and that most founders know well.

Writing by hand activates a different part of that same region, the area responsible for considered thought. The act of putting words on paper literally engages a competing neural process that slows the spiral.

You do not need to journal. You just need to write the thought down. That alone begins to shift the brain out of reactivity and into something more useful.

One Step, Not the Whole Plan

Pierre and Jason both reinforced a practical truth that Dr. Rowshanak grounded in neuroscience: you do not need to see the whole path. You need to take the next step.

Breaking the challenge into the smallest possible action, registering a domain, having one conversation, finishing one section, does two things. It removes the overwhelm of eating the whole problem at once. And it activates what Dr. Rowshanak called the competence-confidence cycle, where small wins build neurological evidence that your actions have effects. That evidence reduces anxiety and builds momentum.

👉 Read the full article here 

 💡 AI Tip of the Month

It's time to automate.

The question is no longer whether AI can handle real business operations, it's whether you'll move fast enough to let it.

At Paw.com, we just hired 19 new employees.

Every single one is an AI agent.

Each one has a specific role, a defined scope, and a kill-switch if it goes sideways. We have an Inventory Oracle managing 3PL health and velocity tiers. A Returns & Claims agent auto-filing 3PL claims and reclassifying donations. A Cash Forecaster projecting our 8-week runway. A Night Auditor running silent in the background, 15 modules checking for crashes, semantic staleness, and queue age while we sleep.

The playbook is simple:

1. Map your processes.
   

2. identify the repetitive and rule-based ones.
   

3. Start replacing them. One agent at a time.

You don't need to overhaul everything overnight. You just need to start. The businesses that win the next five years won't be the ones with the most headcount. They'll be the ones who figured out how to scale without it.

🤐 What Private Equity Isn’t Telling You Before You Sign

Most founders spend years building a company and weeks thinking about how to sell it. That gap is where the money gets left on the table.

Alexis Sikorsky has been on both sides of the deal. He built and sold his banking software company to private equity in 2019, and now advises founders on how to exit with maximum leverage. What he shared in this conversation challenges almost everything the standard entrepreneurship playbook says about selling to private equity.

You Are Not Selling to a Villain

The most common complaint Colin hears about private equity is that they bought the company and then changed everything. Alexis had a sharp response to that.

“You sold your car to a guy and you don’t like the way he’s driving it. Not your problem anymore.”

Once you sign, the company is no longer yours. The founders who struggle most post-acquisition are the ones who did not accept that before the deal closed, not after. If maintaining control is non-negotiable for you, private equity is probably not your buyer. If you can make peace with becoming a minority shareholder and an employee of the firm, you may find PE gives you more runway than a strategic buyer ever would.

Strategic Buyers Do Not Always Pay More

The assumption that strategic buyers deliver higher valuations than PE is increasingly outdated, at least below the $150 million deal range.

At that size, you might have three to five potential strategic acquirers in the market for your company. You have an essentially unlimited number of PE funds. If you know how to speak PE language and run a competitive process, the valuation gap disappears, and in some cases inverts.

Dress the Bride Before You Go to Market

Alexis calls the pre-sale preparation process dressing the bride or dressing the groom. It is a list of specific financial, operational, and positioning actions that make your company desirable before any PE firm ever opens a spreadsheet on you.

The work starts two years before you want to sign. Not six months. Not when you feel ready. Two years.

That timeline exists because you need to build the short list of target funds, test your deck on PE firms in other geographies who have no stake in the deal, refine your story based on their feedback, and then approach your actual targets with a competitive process already in motion.

Three Things to Do Before You Are Ready to Sell

Alexis gave Magnificent, a solopreneur in the audience, a framework that applies to any founder thinking about an exit in the next ten to fifteen years.

1. First, identify the tasks only you can do. Take a week and log every action you take. Then separate the ones where you are genuinely irreplaceable from the ones where you just have not hired the right person yet. The list of truly irreplaceable tasks is always smaller than founders expect, and it should shrink as the company grows.
   

2. Second, build systems before you need them. Process documentation, clean financials on a monthly basis, clear procedures. This is boring work that creates real enterprise value.
   

3. Third, know your growth path. Are you selling more to existing customers, expanding to new markets, or building through acquisition? PE wants to see where the next phase of growth comes from. If you cannot answer that question clearly, the valuation reflects it.

The Question You Have to Answer Before Everything Else

Before the EBITDA, before the deck, before the buyer list, Alexis starts every founder engagement with one question.

What is your number? How much do you need in the bank to never have to work again if you choose not to?

Most founders cannot answer it cleanly. They have built a company without knowing what finish line they are running toward. That ambiguity is what lets PE set the terms instead of you.

“If you cannot get where you want to go in five years,” Alexis said, “then don’t go there. Go somewhere else.”

👉 Read the full article here

🚀 Time to Sell Index (TTSI) Increases Slightly to 20.3. 

The Time to Sell Index (TTSI) ticked up slightly this month to 20.3, a modest improvement, but on a scale of 100, we're still firmly in buyer's market territory.

After peaking at 26.8 in 2025 on the back of 347 public listings, the index is now settling into what looks like a stabilization phase rather than a continued climb.

Looking ahead, the 2026 IPO pipeline points to roughly 275 listings, which would put the TTSI closer to 16.8. Sustained higher interest rates and global uncertainty are the main headwinds keeping activity in check.

The one wildcard worth watching: if major AI companies come to market, sentiment could shift quickly.

Until then, the message is the same, we've moved off the bottom, but the real seller's window hasn't opened yet.

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And if you made it this far, thank you for reading.

— Colin C. Campbell

Entrepreneur Fact of the Month: Founders who start more than one company are more likely to succeed.

Data shows second-time founders outperform first-timers because they move faster and avoid predictable mistakes.