Q.1 Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.
Ans. We are a Participation Marketplace®. We are shifting the profits from big business to the individual. When you shop at Amazon, AirBnB, AliExpress, etc…they make the profits. Even if you have referred people to their Marketplaces and helped them gain a new customer. Nobody arrives to our marketplace without being referred by someone else, so in our Participation Marketplace®, everybody participates in the profits. Our goal is to have all the products of the big marketplaces and people will simply re-direct their spending to a marketplace built to share in the profits and make them income.
Our MISSION:
A revolutionary financial movement that is shifting the power and profits from big business to the individual. Through the power of the network we are able to leverage exclusive savings and drive greater income for all who wish to participate.
Q.2 Kindly give us a brief description about yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).
Ans. Trent Walker – CEO
Trent is a highly experienced, successful and well-regarded business leader who has been referred to as a leading payment expert by The Wall Street Journal. He brings 15+ years of multifaceted experience from startup to operational scale in finance and FinTech, working with and for some of the largest technology companies in the world, including Google and Facebook.
Trent has held strategic leadership positions and sat on strategy boards of organizations like Arvato, the $6 billion per year division of Bertlesmann, where he helped to shape their global strategy. Most recently, he was the Founder and CEO of a successful FinTech company that built intelligent payment technology and automation for the financial operations of businesses and banks.
Trent easily moves from strategy and design to execution, while focusing on constant improvement and excellence in performance. He is a dynamic and inspirational leader, who’s combination of organization/team leadership experience, drive and culture makes him an ideal fit as the CEO of rNetwork.
Troy Muhlestein – COO
Troy spent the first 20 years of his working career in the manufacturing segment of Corporate America with a Fortune 500 company as a production manager, project engineer, and executive management. Tony founded one successful company in 2009 and then another in 2016, based on the idea that a company can be a win, win, win—that by making the members the primary focus, the member, the strategic partners, and the company all win.
Roger Taylor – CMO
Roger has 23 years in Executive Management and Marketing. With a Master’s Degree in 1995, he began his career with a Fortune 500 company, as a Regional Director overseeing 14 facilities and 150+ employees. For 15 years as an entrepreneur, running 3 successful business. Most recently working with NASCAR sports marketing as a Senior VP of Marketing and Strategic Alliances. At NASCAR he worked directly with Fortune 100 and 500 companies developing with TV Networks FOX and NBC and developed large charitable strategic alliances with the Boy Scouts of America, Stand Up 2 Cancer, and the American Cancer Society
Kevin Wiscombe – CRO
Kevin spent 18 years in the mortgage and finance industries, Owned mortgage company for 5 years with offices in seven states and over 150 employees. He has extensive experience in Business Development and Capital Acquisition. Kevin managed an in-house private money lending program with over $100 Million in loans on the books and secured a $28.3 Million warehouse line of credit for the company. In 2015 he founded inMarketiQ, a big data company providing custom audience data and analytics to fortune 500 companies.
In his leadership roles he is thorough and decisive and believes that the difference between a good company and a great company lies in how well and fast they can implement company strategies. He enjoys the creative process and helping others succeed.
Q.3 What inspired you to (start a new business venture) or (to make significant changes in an existing business)? How did the idea for your business come about?
Ans. 5 Businessmen from 5 different backgrounds came together with unique circumstances and started asking, What if? What if we turned Marketplaces upside down and benefited the consumers instead of the corporations of the world. What if we took it into every aspect of our lives. Take banking profits, retail profits, insurance, food, luxury items, vacations, eating out, everything and shifted the profits to individuals. Those what if’s created the adventure that we are on called rNetwork.
Q.4 What three pieces of advice would you give to budding entrepreneurs?
Ans. More than 3, but a lot of passion behind these principles.
Be ready to work and work a lot. Be honest, do not make promises you can’t deliver on in the timeframes you have suggested. Create a vision statement and make sure every decision you make adheres to that vision statement. Make sure you have passion for what you are trying to accomplish, you will need it to get you through the rough patches. If you have partners, make sure they are people you would trust with your life, because that is in fact what you are doing. Never stop learning and improving yourself, your business can only go as high as you can lift it. No matter what your business is, don’t forget that life goes fast and you need to live life to the fullest along the way, a business venture is a journey to be enjoyed, the destination is unknown and not the goal.
Q.5 What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
Ans. 1. You have to be able to prioritize and organize to maximize every day.
2. You need accounting skills
3. You need networking skills
Q.6 How many hours do you work a day on average?
Ans. We have 5 founders of the company that currently put in a minimum of 6 days a week and average about 12 hours per day.
Q.7 To what do you most attribute your success?
Ans. Perseverance and optimism in the face of adversity
Q.8 How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?
Ans. We chose word of mouth as our primary form of marketing because it fit our Participation Marketplace concept the best. We have enjoyed wild success with this and we look to branch out into different forms of marketing strategies in the coming years.
Q.9 Where did your organizations funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it? How did you obtain investors for your venture?
Ans. We started on a shoestring, with capital put in by the 5 partners. We have had a lot of success and are now engaging in additional funding through a private round, then a Reg. A round, and eventually this year we are going Public on a US exchange and will do a public round of investment.
Q.10 What is the best way to achieve long-term success?
Ans. Work with the customer in mind. Your success will come if you are really taking care of and thinking about the customers first.
Q.11 Where you see yourself and your business in 5 – 10 years?
Ans. We think we can be a fortune 500 company. All of the current founders will likely move up to board positions and hire more experienced, traditional, non-entrepreneur executives to take us to the next levels of business success.
Q.12 Excluding yours, what company or business do you admire the most?
Ans. Probably Amazon, not because of the success, but because they have really cornered the market on logistics. The efficiencies from order to delivery, sometimes same day, but most times next day are awe-inspiring.
Q.13 How important have good employees been to your success?
Ans. It’s very difficult to have success without great employees. But we as a group feel like it is up to us to create an environment at rNetwork where the employees buy in to the concept, that they view it as more than a job. We want them to care about the success in their individual departments and overall. All key employees at rNetwork are given are giving ownership in the company with increased ownership available by hitting and exceeding key benchmarks and objects. When our employees create wins in their area of stewardship, then rNetwork wins.
Q.14 How long do you stick with an idea before giving up?
Ans. That depends. It is easy to love ideas that you come up with. But ideas must generate results. We make sure that before we launch any new ideas, we have metrics to measure the success of that idea. If it isn’t producing, it will get tweaked and tweaked until the data shows success. If after multiple attempts and tweaks, it does not produce, it is easily discarded.
Q.15 What motivates you?
Ans. There are 5 unique personalities that ultimately run this company and we are all motivated by different things. We want to build a legacy, we want to make a difference in the world, we want to have the freedom to spend time with family and loved ones, and we want all our Charter Members to be able to achieve their personal life goals through rNetwork.
Q.16 What are your ideals?
Ans. Lose your life in the betterment of others.
Make more money than you spend…Financial stability and responsibility.
Make sure every decision we make is aligned with the vision of the company.
Q.17 How do you generate new ideas?
Ans. Usually in strategy sessions away from work and purposeful retreats with the partners. But some have come just through open and honest discussion on obstacles we are facing. When we can take the time to get out of the minutia of business, that is when the ideas flow.
Q.18 How do you define success?
Ans. We outline what are weekly “wins” are and when we achieve those “wins” that is success. It may be cliché, but the destination of success is a fallacy, it is setting goals, achieving them and moving on to new goals, new dreams. A journey or path build upon small successes every week is success!
Q.19 How do you build a successful customer base?
Ans. Making sure you give them what they want, what they need. It’s not about you, it is about them. If you put them first, your customer base will grow and take care of itself. It is our focus at rNetwork, every decision we make has our Charter Members and FANN’s as the focus.
Q.20 What is your favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur?
Ans. 3 things.
1) The ability to create something new and special.
2) The challenge of overcoming obstacles.
3) The satisfaction you feel when what you have created has appeal to others and is aiding in making their life better.
Q.21 What do you feel is the major difference between entrepreneurs and those who work for someone else?
Ans. Entrepreneurs don’t like to have someone to answer to. They like to work on their own dreams and not the dreams of others. Security doesn’t drive us. Being an entrepreneur pretty much eliminates security, but if we fail, we have only ourselves to blame and we like that. We don’t relying on others for our success.
Q.22 What kind of culture exists in your organization? How did you establish this tone and why did you institute this particular type of culture?
Ans. We are just starting to drive our culture. But we aren’t interested in a timeclock, suit and tie culture. We are objective driven. You don’t have to work 40 hours, you have to get your objectives accomplished. If someone is accomplishing their objectives in 20 hours, good for them, but that also tells us that we need to set the objectives higher and stretch this person because they obviously have skills and are efficient with their time.
Q.23 In one word, characterize your life as an entrepreneur.
Ans. Enjoyable.
Q.24 If you had the chance to start your career over again, what would you do differently?
Ans. None of are the type to look back and say I wish we would have done this differently. We are here at this moment in time because of the decisions we have made, both good and bad and we like this moment in time and what we are doing so we wouldn’t change a thing.
Q.25 How has being an entrepreneur affected your family life?
Ans. Our wives have had to live through a lot of famine and feast cycles. That has made them all very strong women. As an entrepreneur, you never have time off, really, you might take a vacation, but if you are needed, you have to be available. Kids adapt, learn patience, and overall, it has had positive effects on our families in our opinions.
Q.26 What is your greatest fear, and how do you manage fear?
Ans. I’ve never made a good decision in a state of fear, it used to be part of my life, but I honestly don’t feel fear much ever.
Q.27 How did you decide on the location for your business?
Ans. It is where the majority of the partners lived.
Q.28 Do you believe there is some sort of pattern or formula to becoming a successful entrepreneur?
Ans. Yes. Persistence, hard work, and the always adapting to the situations thrown at you.
Q.29 Who has been your greatest inspiration?
Ans. We all have specific personal mentors that have been wildly successful and those are the people we look up to in business. Outside of business those people are different. Fathers, Grandfathers, Platoon members in the military, wives, children.
Q.30 What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made?
Ans. Too many to list.
Q.31 How can you prevent mistakes or do damage control?
Ans. Plan well, execute the plan with precision. And all damage control is best fixed with honesty.
Q.32 What are your hobbies? What do you do in your non-work time?
Ans. Sailing, surfing, anything ocean or outdoors with friends and family for Roger
Golf spending time with family and friends for Troy
Offroading and rock-crawling and time with family for Kevin
Coaching kids in sports and time with friends and family for Trent
Snowshoeing and watching sports with family for Richard
Q.33 What sacrifices have you had to make to be a successful entrepreneur?
Ans. Time. There is always something to do and you have a tendency to fill the void. Even when sometimes the best thing for you to do is take time off and recharge and do what you love. It is easy to lose the big picture.
Q.34 If you were conducting this interview, what question would you ask?
Ans. Tell me what drives you, what is your “WHY?”
for more information visit us https://www.rnetwork.io/