An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Build your physical grit: Having physical strength takes mental strength and vice versa. The body wants to quit all the time, but it’s the mind that tells us to keep going. Working out is a good way to test and (for lack of a better term) exercise your mental toughness.
As a part of my series about “Grit: The Most Overlooked Ingredient of Success” I had the pleasure of interviewing Blake Garrett.
Blake is the Founder and CEO of Aceable. Aceable’s mission is to empower people to achieve their goals through delightful and convenient license and training courses. To accomplish this, our team of experts and educators have created an approach to online learning that’s effective, accessible, and engaging. Since founding Aceable in 2012, the company and its family of brands has educated over 13 million customers and has raised more than $100 million dollars. Blake was recently named Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2021 Central Texas and holds a B.S. in Management with a concentration in Accounting from Boston College.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what events have drawn you to this specific career path?
I grew up in Silicon Valley and my dad worked in startups. So from a young age, I saw people starting companies, bringing people together to form teams, working incredibly hard to solve problems for customers — and ultimately creating companies in which people feel like they get to reach their own dreams.
I “officially” started my career in 2006 as a systems integration consultant for Ernst & Young. While at EY, I developed a passion for education when founding the EY Austin college MAP program that helps high school juniors and seniors get through graduation and into college. I’ve always had a natural curiosity and an inventiveness to solve problems (whether my solutions were any good or not is a different topic.)
I was also blessed with generous parents who had the means to provide whatever education I needed to be successful. Once you have time to turn around in life, you realize that’s an anomaly. With that in mind, I started thinking about how I could be more intentional about helping those who might not have the support systems that I had. After six years at EY, I decided to follow my passion for education and my entrepreneurial instincts to start Aceable. Now, a decade later, Aceable helps millions of people get driver’s licenses to go drive to their first jobs, and those who don’t have college degrees get real estate certifications. I see it as an interesting, more scalable way to help others really achieve their dreams.
Can you share your story about “Grit and Success”? First can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey?
In 2012, before even leaving Ernst and Young, I raised about $50,000 from friends. I used that money to go through literally five different business ideas. Eventually, in October of 2012, I left Ernst & Young, but by July of 2013, I still did not have a scalable business. At the time, Aceable was making mobile app trivia games for books and only making about $5 a day. I’d raised about $75,000 total at this point but was down to $2,000 in a bank account and about $50,000 in credit card debt.
Knowing this was make or break, I went to a dinner to raise money. One guy said he would invest if the other guy did at that dinner. The other guy basically told me what I had was a business that was not investable. At the end of that dinner, the investor said, “Hey, you know, you’re not a complete idiot.” He told me the idea of mobile and education, game mechanics and social mechanics that all makes sense and proposed that I just go do it for things that people have to learn. Really, I had two options: listen to his advice or go back to my job back at Ernst & Young.
That dinner was held on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday I got a phone call from the Men’s Health Network (a non-profit in DC) that I pitched that spring to make a trivia game for men’s health topics. There’s only one reason I believe I got that contract: the very first time I talked to the man who ran it, he told me that his favorite place to eat was the Texas Chili Parlor. So I went there, got a bunch of chili, froze it and overnighted it to him and his team. I’m convinced that’s the only reason he bought my trivial trivia app, but if that didn’t happen, I don’t know if this would have continued because I would have been out of money. Talk about grit and luck all colliding at the same time.
Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
I didn’t want to admit failure, both about myself and in business. Former coworkers thought I was crazy for leaving Ernst & Young. At first, even my mom said, “I don’t know if you should do this”, but I always wanted to be the person that started a business. I also had friends who were financially investing in me that I didn’t want to have to go back to and say, “Hey, I lost your money” or “I didn’t have what it takes.” I would think I would have validated a lot of people’s fears and to me, that’s BS. So thank God I didn’t give up.
So how did Grit lead to your eventual success? How did Grit turn things around?
There’s been unimaginable grit that our staff has exhibited throughout the company’s history.
To sit here and tell you it was easy, just wouldn’t be true. A story that comes to mind is from 2016 (when we already had two years of Aceable under our belt). It wasn’t until we were coming off our Series A that year were we planning to offer real estate education. In March of 2017, we launched our Texas real estate continuing education course, which, to say it nicely, flopped. Despite that hiccup, the Aceable team didn’t give up and launched our Texas Pre-License real estate education. After many hours of hard work and effort, Aceable’s Texas pre-licensing course was approved by the Texas Real Estate Commission, and by the end of March 2018, we had generated more sales in the month than we had in 2017 for our Texas continuing education course. #ExhibitGrit is actually one of Aceable’s company values and we continue to do so. This year, Aceable has expanded its C-suite and board, acquired PrepAgent and AKH, broadened our geographic offerings, and has some exciting news coming down the line in 2022.
Based on your experience, can you share 5 pieces of advice about how one can develop Grit? (Please share a story or example for each)
- Build your physical grit: Having physical strength takes mental strength and vice versa. The body wants to quit all the time, but it’s the mind that tells us to keep going. Working out is a good way to test and (for lack of a better term) exercise your mental toughness.
- Set your perspective: Challenge yourself to think about what’s actually hard. If you’re doing something hard, someone out there has had to do something much, much, much harder, and probably more frequently. We start companies at the end of the day, not colonizing the moon.
- Push a little harder each time: There’s a poem by Kipling called “If” that’s pretty meaningful in my life. There’s a line, “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run” that really resonates and motivates me to just get to the next second. Similar to people in the military or marathon runners, it’s just pushing through to that next second, or taking one more step and focusing on the next most important thing.
- Have motivators bigger than yourself: A lot of what I’ve said is not wanting to fail was extrinsically focused. I think the more plates you put in the air or balls in motion — means more and more people depend on you. Having external motivators can help you accomplish some really hard things.
- Reframe your thinking: It’s easy to think “why me?” Instead, reframe the narrative and think “what’s next that I can control?” can help you learn the value of grit.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped you when things were tough? Can you share a story about that?
I’m grateful for the selflessness of dozens, if not hundreds of people. However, as I think back to the early days, I’ll never forget a surprise leadership lesson I learned. There was a senior partner of Ernst & Young named Jerry Nemeroff who I worked for in different capacities. I went to him one day to get advice on if I should stay at EY or if I should leave (which was terrifying for obvious reasons). I told him one of the biggest challenges I had was being at this point where I felt I could leave Ernst & Young to start a tech company, but I couldn’t write a line of code and didn’t have an engineer that could help me write code. Jerry just looked at me and said, “Well, I guess we need to find you an engineer.”
That was the most powerful “we” I’ve ever heard in my life; right when I felt like I was doing something that was so isolated to have this person that could have such an adverse reaction to say “we” was a moment of leadership that I’ll never ever forget. I’m so grateful to him for that. Because it gave me belief that not only was it the right decision, but that I wasn’t in it by myself.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Through Aceable, we have been working towards empowering hundreds of millions of people with the education they need to accomplish their life goals. We understand that people are busy and that they need a solution to receive the life-changing education they need to succeed. Additionally, we have actively made donations to organizations that help support important causes such as social justice efforts and local schools. I’m inspired to give back and bring goodness to our local community because that’s what Aceable is all about. We want to help one another succeed.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Aceable will continue to focus on license and certification training with a focus on career enablement. By expanding our course catalog, exceeding student expectations, and delivering engaging content, Aceable will create a scalable platform with a high-quality, engaging, and convenient product experience in multiple career-oriented verticals. Additionally, Aceable is constantly testing new in-course features in order to improve the student experience.
What advice would you give to other executives or founders to help their employees to thrive?
There are three steps to helping employees thrive. First, understand how they define thrive. Second, give a shit! Third, align your actions (not just your words) with helping them achieve their version of thrive.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I think my movement would address the same challenge that Aceable does, but on an even larger scale and blow it wide open. Let’s break down the dogma around educational institutions being the required path to career and life success. Let’s create and value, as a society and employers, education that is accessible, affordable, and effective at helping people do the work they love and for which they’ll be fairly compensated.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite life lesson quote is “Action expresses priorities” by Gandhi. Another one of Aceable’s core values is #BeAuthentic, in which we state that our team expresses priorities through action. This means that we work hard, but we also expect and trust others to do the same. The reason this resonated with me personally is that for years my words deviated from actions when it came to realizing my dreams. Only when I made sure my actions directly aligned with my stated priorities was I truly able to start achieving my dreams.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Readers can follow me on LinkedIn and stay up to date with Aceable on our website, aceable.com, and on Twitter, @aceable and @AceableAgent.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Blake Garrett of Aceable: Five Ways To Develop More ‘Grit’ was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
