Adam Torres and Emil Barr discuss Flashpass.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to become a successful entrepreneur? In this episode, Adam Torres and Emil Barr, Founder and CEO at Flashpass, explore Emil’s journey as an entrepreneur and Flashpass.
About Flashpass
Flashpass partners with seasoned government relations experts to uncover both existing and emerging funding opportunities, ensuring clients never have to compromise between affordability and excellence. By bridging innovation with accessibility, Flashpass helps organizations achieve their goals with sustainable financial support and strategic insight.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be Our Guest to Apply. All right, today I have Emil Barr on the line and he is a two time founder and today we’re gonna be talking about a flash pass, which he’s the founder and CEO of Flashpass.
And first thing, first, I just wanna say, Emil, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. Thanks for having me on. So this is a big topic. Building a million dollar business in college. Like, that’s insane. That’s amazing. When I think about what I was doing in college, man, I wish you would’ve been one of my friends back then ’cause I was not building a million dollar business.
I wanna get into that and, and more into your story, but before we get into the college years and, building that business, I’m just curious. So is that one of your first businesses or were you like, as a kid of business, much younger, how did that start for you?
Yeah, totally. So it definitely wasn’t the first business. I think it’s the second business. But it was also you know, , I wasn’t a serial entrepreneur, I as a kid or anything like that. I grew up in a small town in Ohio. My mom was a teacher. My dad was sort of an insurance guy. And I don’t think we really had any entrepreneurs when I grew up, to be honest.
But first, where’d it come from you then? What was that? , how’d you get the bug? Well, I, I think it’s actually this story kind of begets itself to that point. But what I did do is my senior year after graduating high school I worked sort of, I wanted to go to college for tennis. I wasn’t nearly good enough to go to college for tennis.
But at the time I had sort of started a kid’s summer tennis camp. Essentially the idea was that it would be a fun place. We did it at the local park, you know, it was like, hey, you could send your kid there, you know, send $10 and get rid of them for half a day. They’ll play tennis with their friends and teach them how to play tennis.
Well in that three months period between sort of graduating high school in May and starting college in August sort of through word of mouth, we had actually grown that camp from, at our start it was just four kids and me to, I hired the entire girls Var tennis team, and we were doing 10 courts around the city.
We were running about a hundred kids through the program every single day. So I was making in that sort of three month period, I made about $70,000 going into college in total cash. So I’d like go to the bank, the local commu credit union and deposit like $70,000 in cash. And they definitely thought I was doing something else.
I was living kids tennis. But along the way we learned a lot about business, but then I got to college, right? And I went to a school and they were kind of like, you know, if you work really hard and you’re top of your class, which I was never top of my class, but I didn’t know how to work hard. They’re like, you know, you could get, I.
One of these prestigious jobs at a company like Deloitte or KPMG and be an accountant, you know, sort of an auditor and you could make almost $70,000 a year right outta college. And I was like, wait, I just made $70,000 in cash, you know, over the last two and a half months teaching tennis outta the back of my Volkswagen.
You know, you’re telling me that if I work really hard, I’ll get paid $70,000 over the period of a year. If I’m top of my class. So at that point I started reading about entrepreneurship. You know, started reading various books, you know really went on a binge, read Steve Jobs autobiography, read Warren Buffet, kind of read Elon, all these kind of great entrepreneurs, and realized that if I kind of wanted to set myself on this path of financial independence to do something maybe a little bit bigger than what many of my peers or the people I grew up with were kind of wanted to do I would have to be not have nowhere to accomplish that mission.
And What were your next steps there? So you have this realization like, do you stay in school, do you stop? Do you like what happens next for you? Yeah, I stayed in school. I actually graduated in May of last year. So I’m now nine months outta school. Across the two companies, we probably employ about 50 people.
Parttime 150 people. So I was in school the entire time, but no. So after that, what we went out is I. We saw a market opportunity with TikTok and by we, I guess it was just me. I learned to say we, because it made it seem bigger than just me in a laptop, in a dorm room, but I kind of saw that everyone around campus was starting to use this new social media app called TikTok, and I didn’t really see any companies on TikTok.
So what I did is I would reach out to brands via email and some that were in person. You know, I drive two hours into a city and kind of like. Walk into the lobby and they think I was crazy and kick me out, you know? But trying to pitch them on, Hey, your company should be on TikTok. This is kind of be kind of the new big social media revolution.
And we slowly sort of inched ourselves up and started picking up clients. And then from there, you know, really our big unlock is we found that a lot of TikTok creators were part-time and not monetizing their audience. So what we did is we built a platform that would connect brands looking to get on TikTok with their TikTok content.
Creators that were oftentimes college students or high school students, you know that were just posting videos for fun. They had never really thought of it as a way to actually make money. And then suddenly offering these creators, you know, the ability to make a couple thousand dollars a month from their dorm room, just making videos for our clients.
So from there, the business really exploded as TikTok grew, but also as Instagram started pushing Instagram reels and Facebook reels and YouTube shorts we’re able to grow that business into a company that did while I was still at college. I think within our first 18 months, we hit a million dollars a year in revenue.
I. And by the time I graduated, you know, a company that was valued at over $10 million and learned a lot along the way, hired a full-time team and actually started buying other agencies while we were doing it. So I would go to geology class in the morning, you know, and like they take my test in rocks and then hop on a plane and go buy a marketing agency with like 10 people at work there, you know, outta New York that afternoon.
So that was a lot of fun.
And so, where’s that business at today? Like, where’s that at today? I’m still very involved in the business, you know about six months ago we received a private equity offer and we were planning on taking it, and so that business was going to be sold. Ultimately the PE firm decided that they had some sort of internal struggles where they fired the CEO that was working the deal, and we were doing some weird stuff with the deal, so we decided not to go with them, and now sort of refocused on just growing that business.
But we’re in the process of doing another acquisition. We’re buying an agency that does video game marketing. Which I’m personally very excited about and I am still involved in the day-to-day. Mm-hmm. You know, running that business. And really our goal is to make it, you know, a 2020 $5 million business and then sell it here in the next sort of 18 to 24 months.
Hmm. It’s amazing. And tell me about Flash Pass, like, talk to me a little bit more about Flash Pass as well. Absolutely. So Flash Pass was a new company. I actually started only about a year and a half ago, and I started it out of my college dorm room. And the thesis there was I would go to all of these classes and we would take these textbooks on things like social media or AI or cybersecurity, and we’d work off these textbooks that were 10 years old.
A lot of the information wasn’t really relevant or made sense. The business thesis for Flash Pass is it was like a textbook that people would buy for schools, but it would automatically update every semester, but the most up-to-date information well fairly quickly, we learned that it was very, very hard to sell to schools.
So even though it was a good business idea. Potentially it was actually, you know, very, very difficult to sell. And so along the way, what Flash Pass evolved into, but we had these great courses and material that we developed, is we actually evolved into a platform that’s solving unemployment at scale.
So if you Oh, wow. Live. Yeah. So if you go to a place like Ohio, where I grew up in, you’ll see these huge towns that were manufac, booming manufacturing hubs, and now all those jobs have left, you know, and they’ve sort of become economically depressed compared to where they were, you know? Mm-hmm. 30, 40, 50 years ago.
What Flash class does is any resident in the state of Ohio, if they’ve lost their job, or even if they’re looking for a job, you know, they’re a community college students. They’re growing up, they’re going to a training center. They’re a high school student, can actually go sign up for a platform. They can go get certified in sort of the skills of the 21st century.
So think they can get certified as AI developers. We partner with great partners like Intel, you know, and they can get an AI readiness certificate from Intel. They can go get certified at Microsoft Excel to get jobs at data entry or at businesses. They can go get certified as cybersecurity specialists.
They can go get certified to work in the oil and gas industry. That’s a new initiative we just rolled out, and essentially can go pick up these skills that make them competitive for jobs in the 21st century. And then we’ll actually go one step further and through our online platform we’ll connect them to jobs and employers looking for people for work.
And so it’s free for the actual end user. But it’s also free for the employer. Employers can list jobs on our platform for free. We function as basically a no cost staffing agency for them. Mm-hmm. And provide them with source candidates and a source full of labor. And what we do is we actually contract directly with the government.
So through a series of grants and contracts directly with the state. What we’re seeing is we’re an economic development initiative where if we can lower unemployment levels by even a fraction of a percent of the amount of people dependent on food stamps or sort of the amount of people that don’t have housing.
The gross economic impact is an a hundred multiple higher than what the state is spending with us to sort of facilitate the statewide service, if that makes sense. Hmm. It does. And what’s been the response so far on this? what’s been the market? It’s been positive, you know? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
I think it’s been very positive actually. I think that sometimes people think it’s too good to be true, mm-hmm. On kind of the employer and the individual side, but once we get awareness out there and people realize that, hey, this is a real resource it’s been fantastic. I mean, our economic impact has been higher than I even anticipated.
We’ve started to track participants job data using LinkedIn, a few other sources. The economic impact of our courses. You know, we’re generating almost $200,000 in economic value for every $2 that states spend on the platform with us. Mm-hmm. So the return has just been fantastic. But I think the other aspect is it’s been really a powerful tool for states to attract employers into their industry.
Because what these sort of larger contractors are concerned about is if you’re Android and you’re gonna build a huge drone factory, for example, right? Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of states that are interested in offering you tax credits or different incentive programs to go there. But what Ohio can do is we can turn around and say, Hey, we actually have 3000 people that are already certified in the basics of aerospace and drone technology that are looking for jobs in your sector.
So what happens is these employers now have a guarantee that there’s gonna be an actual workforce and enough people looking to work in the facilities that they’re building. So it becomes a massive sort of economic development pool for that state. Hmm. Wow. it’s really first off, refreshing and fun to listen to your stories as an entrepreneur, the way your mind works, and also the way you’re building companies.
I just, I’m just throwing this out there. What are your goals in the next five years? Like, I, this man, you motivate me. I’m like, I gotta get to work over here doing these podcast interviews. Come on, man. What, are your goals over the next five years? I appreciate that. You know I think that it’s a little bit.
Sort of idealistic, but I really do think that technology can solve this sort of unemployment and economic issue America is facing. So I think our goal in the next five years is we want to use technology to make, I know we can’t economically eliminate unemployment, but to increase the wages of all Americans and essentially upscale and nearshore.
Tech industry within America to make America one of the most advanced sort of employment and technically advanced employment centers in the world, which we have been for a long time until about 30 to 40 years ago. Mm-hmm. So if we could make this something that’s nationally available, and anyone that’s looking for a job to go on a flash pass and they could go get certified at an AI and then go get a job as an AI developer right outta community college, making a hundred thousand dollars a year.
That would make me very happy. Coincidentally, that would make me, I think, a business with that much, you know, economic and social impact is a company that should be valued in the billions, so, you know. Mm-hmm. Coincidentally, I think as a result of the impact we’re having on the country, I envision flash fasts becoming a company that’s worth a couple billion dollars in the next five years.
Love it. Emil, this has been great. If somebody’s watching and or listening to this and they wanna follow up, they wanna follow your journey, they want to connect, how do they do that? Follow me on LinkedIn. I’ve been committed to, it’s a little bit new for me, but I’m putting out content twice a week.
And I’m trying to put out content that’s a little bit more unique than what you’ll typically see. So things like live transcripts of, you know, selling a company for $10 million or recordings of investor calls, or even just, you know, tactical kind of insights into like, hey, when know when we were selling some equity in flash pass, how I was able to get things like a free Porsche nine 11 out of the deal.
So if you’re interested in that, would really appreciate a follow on LinkedIn and kind of to stay connected there. Love it. And I gotta throw in a bonus question here for the audience, because I’m all about the bonuses. Emil, is it true you got to work with and or connect with some like, like Hulk Hogan, and I understand you got these like connections, man, like throw, throw that out there.
I can’t, I can’t leave that one on the table. Hulk ilk from way back. Come on man. Oh, that’s all to me. That’s Oh, good to know. I’ll send you a signed case of beer. No. So we Candid Network, our social media agency, we helped launch Hulk Hogan’s beer brand, which he launched about six months ago. Wow. So that was though the referral, there was actually a referral from a guest speaker at my college class.
This guy came in and his whole gig was making product companies with celebrities. He would leverage their personal brand and their connections, and he was an ex LA guy that would kind of build these companies and incubate them with celebrities. Well, what I did was I really wanted to work with celebrities.
I thought that was cool, you know, gonna school in Ohio. And so I followed up with this guy 43 times. And on the 43rd message he replied and said, Hey, I actually would love to meet with you. I’ve been watching some of the stuff you’re doing on LinkedIn. I think it’s pretty cool how quickly you guys have grown.
We flew out that same day. Next day I met with him and we signed what became a half a million dollar piece of business with us and got to work with Hulk Hogan and launched his beer brand all across the country. So. Wow, there’s probably two up there, which is right time, right place. But also, if you think you’re being too annoying, trying to follow up with people that sometimes it’s that 43rd follow up that makes the difference.
Yeah. That’s awesome. I’m a fan. I like that whole camp. Darren Prince I know is Hulk’s Hulk’s guy. And we’ve been working with him for years. He, we published him in one of our, books. And I got to hear a lot about the Hulk Hogan story and everything else. Man, it’s so big. Shout out to Darren Prince if you’re listening to this as well.
But man, I love it. I love the hustle. I love the drive. I know a lot of people are gonna listen to this and be like, come on man. Gotta get to work. So Emil, it’s. Been great having you on the show and, and to the audience. All those ways to contact il. We’re gonna put some links in the show notes so you can go check out il, connect with him on LinkedIn, send some messages, get the conversation going and speaking to the audience.
If this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet. Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day I’m bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And Amil, thanks again for coming on. Thanks again for having me, Adam.