One Question Friday: To Raise or Not To Raise?

**Ben** (0:14)
Hey, guys, producer Ben here. I wanted to introduce this new Friday episode that we're going to be doing. You probably remember that on Fridays we were doing Best of the Week. Well, it turned out no one really liked that. Everyone thought it was filler, everyone thought it was fluff, so we're cutting out the Best of the Week Friday episodes. But we still wanted to do something for Fridays that was short, sweet, got you going for the weekend.
And so what we're doing is called One Question Friday. So you can submit a question and the fellows will answer it. So for this first question, it was about a guy's business and whether he should raise money.
But it can be about anything. It can be about life. It can be about Sean's workout trainer.
It can be about anything. So if you want to submit a question and you want to hear your voice on My First Million, just go to mfmpod.com. It's like My First Million, mfmpod.com. And in the lower right hand corner, you'll see a little circle with a microphone in it. Click there and then you can record a voicemail and leave it for us. And if we select your question, then you'll hear yourself on My First Million. So again, this is just a short Friday episode. One question, one answer.
Let us know what you think and if you like this replacement for best of the week. All right. So without further ado, here is this week's listener question.

**Matt** (1:19)
Hey guys, this is Matt. I left my full-time job February 1st to grow this business full-time.
Since then, we've had some really great growth and we're up to three locations right now. Things are pretty smooth other than the normal kind of day-to-day chaos that happens when we're in the business.
We're shooting for six locations by the end of this year, and then the year after that, we'd like to double it, you know, around 12 or 18 locations. My question comes with growth. You know, I've gotten a lot of different pieces of advice from different people. You know, right now, this is a bootstrap startup, I'm the only founder, and I'm 24, this is my first business running full time. So is it better, and these are kind of the different pieces of advice I've gotten, is it better to run at bootstraps, grow slowly, grow controlled? Is it better to take some money on and grow as fast as possible to get as big of a market as fast as possible? Or is it better to maybe bring on a partner or a co-founder who can sort of help you grow faster and maybe bring some capital or expertise or advice in at the same time? I would love to hear what you guys think and love the show. Thanks. All right.

**Shaan Puri** (2:25)
So we got a question here from, do you remember his name? What was his name?

**Sam Parr** (2:29)
No, I don't even remember his name, but that's okay.
Nice guy from South Carolina. Is that where Raleigh is or North Carolina?

**Shaan Puri** (2:35)
North Carolina. So he's got this business. It's called, yeah.
We'll call him Steve from South Carolina, even though his name is Doug from North Carolina. All right. So he's got this business, Motorboat Mechanics, which is basically a mobile motorboat mechanic business where he'll get, you know, the website says, let's get you back on the water fast. I guess if your boat breaks, they'll fix it for you.
He said he's got three locations and he's thinking about growth. What did he really want help with, Sam? What's the question? What's the actual question?

**Sam Parr** (3:07)
He wanted to know if so he has some some results he goes, should I bootstrap or raise money?
And that's actually a really bad way.
That's not the right question to ask. And let's start with like raising money versus not raising money. And then this guy's specific example. So I think that like raising money versus not raising money, you have to ask yourself, A, what type of lifestyle do you want? And B, what type of business do you have? There's this great blog post that I like and they say that raising money is it's for two different things. One, there's Ben and Jerry's and there's Amazon. If you're Amazon, you want to raise a lot of money and you want to get really big, really fast because it's almost a winner's take all market. I would say social media is like the best example of a winner's take all market where it's like you just got to get big quickly because once everyone's using your product, everyone else continues using your product. And that's like one of those things where it will last a long time and be big, whatever.