Entrepreneurs Archives

Changing the Face of the Marketing Industry with Kelli Williams

April 14, 2023December 13, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Are you a fearless leader? Do you shy away from hard conversations or dive headlong into them? We interview Kelli Williams, who recently took on the Interim CEO role at The BrandLab in Minneapolis. She is changing the face of marketing one person at a time.

Some of the work they do at Brand Labs is what they call fearless work, and it’s all about having fearless conversations. It’s about having conversations that you just started by saying,

“You know what, I have some blind spots. I have some areas of opportunity to learn more to bring additional diverse thinking and to understand areas of bias or areas that I may not be comfortable with so that I can, as a business leader, create opportunities to have conversations and to create safe environments for all people on my team.”

No-Code Commerce with Kaus Manjita

April 14, 2023November 8, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Businesses are going online daily worldwide, and it’s getting easier. But running their businesses requires constant two-way communication with users and customers across channels 24/7, year-round. @kmanjita

Today we interview Kaus Manjita with Mason. Kaus is a no-code evangelist, content nerd, and serial product builder. You’ll find her amid entrepreneurs, brand builders, developers, marketers, and designers over Zoom on Hangouts and on this podcast today.

Mason is Zapier made for commerce. It connects data designs and channels to run your product launches, sales documents, discounts, inventory updates, custom reviews in-app, help, funnels, and more, all on autopilot.

Wealth and Homeownership with Nicole Hamilton

November 27, 2024November 1, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

In interviews with homeowners, 25% say they bought their home first for an investment and second for a place to live. The other 75% say they bought a house simply as a place to live with little expectation for it to be a good investment. You grow wealth through homeownership.

Nicole Hamilton has made a career of helping others with home ownership. She explains REAFE in detail. A Real Estate Asset and Financing Evaluation is about maximizing the returns you get from your real estate.

Her tip for the episode is to think twice if you want to refinance. If you refinance with less than half the time on your mortgage, you start over with your interest payments!

Show Notes

Here are more links that might be of interest to listeners:

A product for people who want to plan for Homeownership: https://www.homeownering.com/the-formula-steps-to-becoming-a-homeowner/

And this is about the financial, real estate analysis I do: https://www.homeownering.com/reafe/

Here is a free equity report we have on our site: https://www.homeownering.com/free-home-equity-report/

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Nicole Hamilton. She is the CEO of Homeowner. Nicole, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in

Nicole: life. Oh, okay. It’s great to be here, Brent. I’m an entrepreneur in the housing industry. I have a company called Homeowner.

Nicole: It’s very pro home ownership and treating your real estate with the same care that you do your other investments. I’ve had other companies in the sector. I’d say the common thread through all of my ventures is an obsession with real estate, finance mortgages, Home equity appreciation.

Nicole: Home is an investment home ownership and intergenerational wealth. My current company home owning. Is dedicated to getting people into home ownership and then getting them good financial outcomes. So it spans the the life cycle of home ownership from buying utilizing and improving your financial situation through home ownership.

Nicole: And then, selling. and my passion, I guess one of my passions right now is weightlifting, . I go really into it.

Brent: Wow. That’s great. Yeah. I definitely need to get more into Weightlift as I’m getting older, I realize that my upper body, I run every day, but my upper body is definitely neglected, especially over time and it, I think as we get into our fifties, which I am, you are it’s harder to gain.

Brent: On your upper bodies, you have to work twice as hard as if we were in our twenties. Anyways, we can, we’ll keep moving out along there, but that’s awesome. That’s good to know. I’ve heard more and more people talking about that, yeah. Alright, so before we jump into our content I have a thing called the free joke project, hashtag free joke.

Brent: And I’m just gonna tell you a joke and all you have to do is tell me if it should be free or if we could charge for it. Do I have to? You do not have to laugh. I would appreciate real real feedback on it. All right. But they’re all fantastic jokes. All right, Ready? Okay. My doctor just diagnosed me with a severe lack of awareness.

Brent: It came out of nowhere.

Nicole: Free .

Brent: Alright. Super

Brent: Thank

Nicole: you. I actually love, another patch of mine actually is standup comedy. Oh, wow. All right. I will listen to any standup comedy. Yeah, so I, I’m interested in the free joke project and I hope to follow that hashtag and learn more.

Brent: Yes. I’ve started publishing on Twitter art on On TikTok, Sorry.

Brent: Sometimes they’re on Twitter, but they’re all on TikTok on my Brent w Peterson TikTok channel Anyways. Free hashtag free joke project. Great. So Nicole homeowner I’m I’m also a homeowner and always interested in the subject. Tell us about how you got into it and what was your journey getting there?

Nicole: Yeah I guess the way I got there was Earlier in my career I was a science major and then I went into technology. And then I got very interested in how technology can make people’s lives better. I know sometimes it makes people’s lives worse, but I know that, for me it was, how can I apply this to really helping people?

Nicole: And then the recession in 2008, housing crisis hit, and I really wanted. Help solve a problem. The problem being that a lot of people got loans that they couldn’t necessarily understand were afford, and that caused a lot of foreclosures and immense pain for economic pain, for many millions of Americans.

Nicole: And so I started a company called Tactile Finance. Tactile Finance, Pronunciation. Pronunciation it. And that was a sort of visualization product for banks to use with their clients or non-profits to use with their clients. And it just provided transparency into the market. And that’s where I got super into the math and.

Nicole: And the consumer need and the consumer approach to housing finance. So it’s been about a 12, 12 year journey to where I am now. Which I would say, I wound that company down in 2015, 16, 2016. And it ran its course and I realized that I really wanted to focus on the consumer, not the inter, B2B business, but focusing on the consumer and the consumer needs.

Nicole: And so I think that journey just gave me a lot of insight. I understand, the, a more sophisticated picture. I understand the bank’s motivation. I understand the role of the non-profits, I understand the mortgage industry as a. . And then I guess one of my superpowers is to take really complicated information and make it digestible for people and an enzyme

Nicole: So that’s where my real passion for homeowner came, which is there’s all this sophisticated knowledge out there, but like people. Regular people like you and me can use it to better their situation and understand the complicated aspects of owning a home, selling a home equity, and things like that actually make an enormous impact on your, ultimate net worth.

Brent: Yeah, I think do. So going back, starting with people with on their first home, how do you help them past rent and getting into their first home? What, Do you have a formula or do Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Nicole: It’s an excellent question. Brent . So I actually have a product, it’s called the Formula, and it’s on our website and it’s like $20.

Nicole: It’s very inexpensive and it’s a system which basically gives you. The ability to see all the diff it’s all the different criteria to be a homeowner. So there’s a lot of different known loans and qualifications to get a loan, and it lets you see where you are in relation to those criteria now, and then plot your way to the quickest, most effective path to being a home.

Nicole: So I’ll just give you an example. If you’re refinancing a house or buying a house the lo what the loan officer is doing in the background is they’re trying to fit you in this formula. It’s called a dti, debt to income ratio. And that’s a blah, blah, blah, gobbly go, industry language, but ultimately they’re taking all the aspects of your financial picture.

Nicole: And they’re trying to fit it into a way in which the bank will say, Brent, you can get this mortgage. But all of that is very opaque to a home buyer. And what this does is it just gives you that information that you can see exactly what criteria they’re using, and there’s ways that you can adjust your goals.

Nicole: If your income is too low and your debt is too. Then the house that you can qualify for is gonna be lower, right? So it’s this formula that you massage and say, Okay, over 12 months, if I can reduce my debt by X and let’s say I pick a house price of, 350,000 then I can get to that goal.

Nicole: That’s a achievable goal for me. Whereas if you don’t have that information, you’re just like, Oh no, poor me. I can’t afford a home. So it’s just empowering people. A lot of people get left out of the housing, out of the home, out of home ownership because they lose faith and they don’t know how they’re gonna get from point A to point B.

Nicole: The real issue is that how, being a homeowner is is a known wealth builder, especially for the middle class. And letting more people get into home ownership is incredibly important. I A lot of, public policies are designed around that. So it’s just like a way to distill this information.

Nicole: Create a plan for yourself and be able to actually see how you can get to that goal. So that’s one of the things that kind of came out of, all this work that I’ve done in the last 12 years is how to make information that’s known in the industry, known by, other people. So it can empower.

Brent: Do you feel as though now what? Home ownership got more difficult after 2008 and are banks getting better at helping people to get into home ownership now compared to right after the crash, the home crash?

Nicole: I think what the crash did is it changed a lot of laws, like the dod Frank laws.

Nicole: It made lending. It made it, it made a lot of good things happen in the industry that prevent consumers from being taken advantage of. So that, I think, was a net positive for everyone, including the banks. In a lot of ways. It made lending safer. It also, we know that we’ve been through very, up until recently, a very, a period of historically low interest rates.

Nicole: We’re not in that right now, hopefully we will be again, sometime I. Yeah, so obviously that made it easier for people to purchase homes and it also drove home prices up too with, demand and everything like that.

Brent: I think my first home was in the nineties and it was, I think we got an arm.

Brent: Or if a five year fix with an arm after. Something like that. Yeah. And at the time it was like 9% interest or something like that, but with the arm it brought it down or something. I don’t know. How you, do you have a formula me, to help people through that? Because I know like my friends in England where every mortgage is an arm and now they’ve said their payments have doubled all of a sudden because of that adjustable rate.

Nicole: Yes. So arms are, I had an. It’s arms, A lot of mortgage people actually get arms, seven year arms and things like that because the interest rate is low in the beginning. But it’s contingent upon the idea that you’re gonna be able to refinance out of that into a better rate. So it’s a, it’s a. So there there’s some risk in that, that you just really need to know what it is. And I actually made a video it’s on my website, but it explains exactly what an arm is. It doesn’t have a lot of viewers cuz a lot of people don’t know, don’t necessarily wanna follow through the whole five minutes.

Nicole: But I do have a video about product, a product review of. Of a ShopVac that, that hits 35,000 views. But the arm video is not as popular as the ShopVac video. .

Brent: Yeah, I have some Jack Russell videos that are far more popular than any videos that I can post on YouTube. So I think it is funny what people tend to watch.

Brent: Alright, so back to finance. If so, one of the hard parts as an entrepreneur, Is getting a mortgage. One of the easy parts before 2008 as an entrepreneur was a stated income mortgage, which they don’t do anymore. How do you have do you have specific help for self-employed people as they’re trying to get a mortgage?

Brent: And maybe is there a certain amount of time that you have to either show a W2 or show your tax returns to a.

Nicole: Yeah, so there’s rules for, so there’s, yeah there’s rules for mortgages. Usually the rule is for W two s is you have to show two years of your income. And it’s two years is really a rule too for business income.

Nicole: So a lot of banks will have you submit. Whatever structure your business is. If you’re, if you’re an LLC or whatever, then you submit that income, to the mc if you’re not getting a paycheck, if you’re taking a draw from the company. So there’s different ways to do it but you touched on a really important thing, which is that, for entrepreneurs, it can be d.

Nicole: If you’re in any of these categories or let’s say an Uber driver, you’re getting income from all these different places and you don’t have a w2, there are formulas that banks use to assess what your income is. So it doesn’t mean that you can’t get a loan. But in business the one thing about business income is that they wanna see that it’s going.

Nicole: So , if you have a year that, you know, so that can be a factor, right? If you have a, if you have, 2021 was a good year and 2022 is a bad year, but 2023 is gonna be a better year. There’s some ease of, getting a loan if you’re showing that your business is improving.

Nicole: And there’s also. There’s always leeway too with in the, these areas where you have to interpret, whether something is improving or not improving. There’s always you can ask for, the manager above the loan officer to take a look at it and see if, if you can submit more documentation.

Nicole: Or provide more information about the industry that you’re in. I know that during the recess, sorry, the pandemic, restaurants, restaurant owners, weren’t a great bet, right? So there’s some industries that really suffer, from declined if you’re getting business income from that.

Nicole: But there’s ways that you can, the more you know about it, the more you can help yourself. Just like anything. .

Brent: Yeah. Especially I think as an entrepreneur, that’s the hardest part is maybe, and I think it’s even harder as a young entrepreneur. So if, let’s just say you’re in your twenties, you’ve started a business and you’re trying to navigate that process of your first purchase because you don’t have a w2 is it better to go to a big bank or a small bank?

Brent: as a new home buyer or as an entrepreneur? Does it

Nicole: matter? I think it’s great to really go to a lot of different types, so I always recommend that people also put a mortgage broker in the mix. , because they have a access to many different types of loans. If you go to a bank they’ll have their own products, but if you go to a broker, they’ll be able to search more broadly and find banks that are more suitable for your particular situation.

Nicole: So it’s just good like anything else to shop around.

Brent: Do you ever talk to people about maybe a sec or investment home or a second home, or somebody that’s buying a home just for Airbnb?

Nicole: So one of the things that home honoring does, which I got into lately, which I think is a really important aspect of investment finance, which is neglected by wealth managers for the most part is analyzing properties for their long term investment potential.

Nicole: in the case of, if you’re someone who’s not getting a mortgage just to get the lowest monthly rate, which is most of us, right? We don’t want to spend a penny more than we need to on our housing, cuz we have a lot of other expenses. But for a lot of people, they do have a little discretion in how they structure their financ.

Nicole: And you can structure it in a way that gives you, a better return based on your goals, on your investment goals. So one of the things that we offer is a, they call it the reef, which is a real estate analysis. It’s like a financial analysis. So in that case, you’re looking at your current houses, if you have more than one or just one, what the financing is, which your overall goals.

Nicole: And then coming up with different scenarios that could, maximize your, the goal that you’re looking for, whether it’s putting more money in play, whether it’s reducing all your expenses, whether it’s looking to buy a second home, whether it’s looking to buy a home for rental purposes, things like that.

Nicole: It’s a financial investment analysis. And I think, too few people go through those steps to understand their real estate as an investment. And if you consider how much we all spend on our housing, really do, and doing little tweaks, like taking a second look at that, helo that you have, is there a better way to structure it so that you’re spending less?

Nicole: What is the interest rate that you’re on? When does it a adjust, taking a more watchful eye to these major expenses that you have. And a lot of people don’t know that they have options, so that’s a really big focus of home owning right now.

Brent: Yeah. I think you, you brought up a really good point about your financial advisor and it’s been my experience that a lot of financial advisors don’t look.

Brent: A rental property as a valid investment, they think somewhat probab. Some do I’m not gonna, I shouldn’t generalize so much, but a lot of them would say you put your money in bonds or stocks or, and properties sometimes, or a property or maybe a real estate fund might be something they would recommend.

Brent: But buying a rental property and then trying to. Is sometimes out of their purview. Maybe it’s more common for entrepreneurs to buy doing something like that. But I Maybe just a quick comment on that. Do you feel as

Nicole: that’s, Yeah, I think that, wealth managers and investment managers, they know their domain very well.

Nicole: And if you think about. There’s a lot to consider already in their domain. They’re not really necessarily trained or equipped to do something, in the real estate realm because real estate investment is itself a large domain. There’s a lot of math and a lot of considerations, tax considerations all kinds of things.

Nicole: Liability considerations. With real estate investment that is, that, I don’t know that you could expect someone to also be an expert in, it’s a different kind of thing. I have a good friend Roger Brown who wrote a book called and I Wish I had it here. He’s a great guy. It’s called Real Estate in.

Nicole: Math or something like that.

Brent: Roger Brown. I’ll put it I’ll do some research and I’ll put it in the show notes.

Nicole: Yeah, no he’s an amazing mathematician and so I, I learned a lot from him. He did a lot of work with me over the years, validating the math that I was doing. , helping me make sure that it was solid.

Nicole: And so I learned a lot about real estate investment from him, and I just know that I’ve read his book. It’s very interesting, but it’s it’s something if you’re gonna get into that field, I just don’t think that an investment, a wealth manager is the right person to maybe help you with.

Brent: Yeah, and I guess I never thought about this. Probably there probably are wealth managers that are focused more on the real estate side rather than the just straight up investment side. That’s an interesting, I, that’s an interesting take on things. Yeah. How about what about recommending if somebody were to buy a, an apartment, just paying cash for it.

Brent: Is there ever a good time to do that

Nicole: right now? Yeah. , I think right now, if you’re a cash buyer, And, you can imagine if the Fed is trying to, slow the economy down and and we know that rates are going up and mortgage rates aren’t tied to that specifically, but they have definitely, the, a lot of relationship to the cost of money being lent, So you know right now you would expect real estate prices to decrease as it’s harder for people to buy homes in this high interest rate environment or high mortgage rate environment.

Nicole: If you’re a cash buyer, you’re, this is your time, Like this is this is in your sweet spot cuz you. If prices are declining and you’re competing against people who have to get a mortgage and you don’t need a mortgage, then you know it’s your

Brent: time. Yeah. Good. Nicole, we have a few minutes left.

Brent: And it always goes by so fast. If if you have one little piece of advice that you could give somebody, what would that be? To get into the housing market right now.

Nicole: I think that you should if you wanna be a homeowner and home ownership is for you, you should make it a goal. And don’t give up on it because it does have a lot of potential to improve your financial situation, but at the same time, obviously you wanna know what you’re getting into.

Brent: Yeah, I like that. I like that concept because if you never set a goal, you’ll never

Nicole: achieve. Exactly. It’s true for everything in life, isn’t it, Brent?

Brent: Yeah, that’s fairly, that’s a really good way to look at it. So Nicole, as we close out the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug, what would you like to plug today?

Nicole: I have a newsletter. It has a lot of subscribers. You can go to my site, homeowner.com/newsletter. You can sign. And also, take a peek at the site. There is the formula, which is for people who want to be aspiring homeowners, and there is what we call the reef, which is financial analysis for getting better returns on your, on the money you spend on home ownership.

Nicole: That’s great. That was really three plugs, . That’s

Brent: perfectly fine. You had to sit through my joke, no, I

Nicole: love you could get it. I wanna hear more of your jokes. Okay.

Brent: You could get extra plugs because of the bad joke. ,

Nicole: the free joke.

Brent: Yes. Thank you so much for being here today. It’s been such a pleasure.

Brent: And just so many more things we could talk about on this subject.

Nicole: Yes, Thank you for having me. Wonderful to be here with you. Thank you.

Bridging the Digital Retail Gap with Leigh Sevin

April 14, 2023October 18, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Remember when shopping, marketing, and brand building were all going digital? Leigh Sevin and Jinesh Shah noticed how little the retail industry had changed its approach to sales. @endearhq

While the rise of online shopping pushed many brands into the next frontier of marketing and customer service, retail salespeople were still confined to the in-store experience. Associates’ limited access to resources and inability to earn credit for online sales highlighted a massive gap in the retail sales model.

We interview Leigh Sevin, the co-founder of Endear. She gives us insight into this ever-changing market and how Endear works to bridge the retail gap.

Endear is the first and only clienteling app certified for Shopify Plus merchants. Its CRM and messaging platform is made especially for retail sales teams and tracks how messages convert into sales in-store and online. Endear empowers retail teams to engage customers over remote channels like email and text. At the same time, the app measures how outreach is performing, including data points like average order value, location of last purchase, and time to convert.

https://endearhq.com

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Leigh seven. She is the co-founder of Endear and Leigh, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Leigh: Sure. So as you said, I’m the co-founder of Endear. Endear is a CRM designed specifically for consumer brands.

Leigh: So we help brands consolidate all of their data and then empower their sales people to use that data to develop really high quality. Relationships with their customers, primarily over email, texts, and of course face to face.

Leigh: In the free time, I do have, I also enjoy exercise and baking.

Brent: Oh, wow. Baking. Good. Are you watching the new series of the great British bakeoff?

Leigh: I didn’t even know it launched. Has it got, is it alive? Is it, Can I launch?

Brent: Yeah, I think there’s, there is two episodes out.

Leigh: This is very big news as I go into fall, so thank you for this.

Brent: Yes, it’ll, it, it’ll be very addictive. Good. And I apologize for cutting you off there. No, not at all. Good. Alright let’s talk about CRMs and if you wanted to just do a brief overview for people who may not know what a CRM is.

Leigh: Yeah, absolutely.

Leigh: CRM is customer relationship management. So really what that means is, when I’m speaking to maybe someone a little bit older or not as familiar with technology, I really describe it as a really high powered grex. So that’s one way to think about it. It’s about taking everything you know about a customer and putting it into one consolidated place.

Leigh: What Endear does in terms of taking it a step beyond that is Basically we try to give you the insight that data is revealing in the aggregate. For example, specific to consumer brands, those things might be what does a customer’s lifetime spend? What’s their average order value? How often are they shopping with you?

Leigh: And these are the things that one of our users would probably try to do on their own, just from the raw data that they might have. And we just wanna take that work off their plate and give it to them in real time.

Brent: Users who are familiar with a CRM would ask then, as a retailer, why would I need a CRM?

Leigh: So CRMs are incredibly popular for the B2B world, right? There is no technical or technology sales person that would spend a day not logging into a CRM. And I think what’s changed about retail, especially for the sales people, is that they used to be able to readily depend on organic foot traffic and therefore not need to do a lot of outbound sales.

Leigh: What came their way was enough to reach their goals and really succeed as a salesperson in a store, atmosphere. But I think what’s changed, especially with eCommerce and obviously with the pandemic and just generally with how much is available to consumers these days, you do need to stand out.

Leigh: You do need to take matters into your own hands, and that’s really what CRMs are there help a salesperson do. It’s about understanding who can I be reaching out to proactively in order to generate a sale, generate a relationship, understand what their needs are, share updates with them, and that all comes from being able to combine the actual data that we’ve consolidated for you with scalable outreach and tracking.

Leigh: So understanding. If I do reach out to this person, how are they responding to that outreach? Are they opening my message? Are they clicking on the products I’m recommending? And I think the insights aspect of endear is what really keeps people motivated to know that, Hey, my, my text message actually converted into a sale.

Leigh: Maybe that customer didn’t come into the store to do that, but that shouldn’t matter. What matters is my efforts led to revenue for the company.

Brent: From a differentiation standpoint do you think Endear makes itself from other platforms that are strictly e-commerce?

Leigh: I would say, when we think about CRM, Omnichannel versus e-com, most of the time CRM is genuinely lacking on the e-commerce side as well.

Leigh: But for the most part, e-com brands tend to compensate by relying on individual departments stand in for CRM. So for marketing teams, a lot of the time that’s their email marketing platform or their SMS marketing platform for support teams. That might be their live chat, right? It’s everyone that’s ever asked them a question over live chat.

Leigh: Maybe there’s a customer profile, maybe there’s not. And to be honest, for us, CRM is just so much of a low hanging fruit in the sales world, and also the department that is right now least saturated with technology, they have really nothing but the terminal. So we wanted to go where the pain was most heavily felt, and that to us was sales.

Leigh: But I would say CRM in general tends to be more oriented towards B2B salespeople, and that’s really where Endear differentiates itself. We are more about the integrations that a consumer brand would need, the KPIs that a consumer brand would need, and the amount of data storage that a consumer brand would need over what a B2B brand or company would need.

Brent: When I, as a user come into a retail store and endear is being used there, is there a way that the user would target me or help understand more about me?

Leigh: It’s a, That’s a checkout. Yeah, I get that question. Did you say after checkout?

Brent: No. During checkout or

Leigh: before or whatever. So I get, if you already know the person time and the funniest part is that question assumes something that you’ve already decided to walk into a store. And actually for retail stores, the hardest part is getting you to do that. Stores for better or worse, actually have an incredibly high conversion rate.

Leigh: The convert, about 30% of the people that walk. The return rate is also dramatically lower than it is on econ, right? Econ faces at this point, probably near 40% return rate, whereas stores probably having the single digits. So you know the, What we have to think about is where is the challenge? Is the challenge, knowing who a customer is once they walk in.

Leigh: Not really. The store does great. So to us, the real pain point is how do I get you to walk in the first place? And that’s why Endear is so much more about what to do with your downtime, what to do to generate foot traffic or generate converting traffic on your website. And that to us comes from really understanding who your customer is, cultivating that relationship, and then extending that relationship beyond face to remote channels like email and text.

Brent: Do you leverage social media and allow the users to leverage some of that social media as well to promote that drive to get people into the.

Leigh: I would say that’s something that we’ve considered and have on our roadmap for later down the line. I think there are incredible conversations going on over Instagram right now, where we see Endear coming in most often for social media is we have this really cool feature called stories.

Leigh: And they’re basically, depending on your platform, they’re completely shop. So it basically allows for salespeople to create a custom or completely, special story just for one customer or a group of customers, and send it only to them. And that’s something that they can share via a simple URL that endear then tracks for you.

Leigh: So we do allow some flexibility over how you’re using some of the assets you’re creating within endear across platforms. But really what we’re after is that really high touch, one to one conversations.

Brent: And you’re looking for customers to repeat at the store and increase that traffic from their existing base, right?

Leigh: Yes. We are only using a, the data that a brand already owns, but we’re making them do more with it. So the, KPIs that we focus on helping a brand improve is how do I extend lifetime value? How do I increase aov, how do I increase loyalty? What most of these brands are dealing with right now is incredibly high customer cost of acquisition.

Leigh: And so the only way to compensate beyond just simply trying to reduce that, which I would say you can do by opening a store in the first place, is by then increasing the lifetime value. And that’s really what Endear is

Brent: all about. Do you see, so you mentioned lifetime value. Do you think that the stores that leverage an online.

Brent: can mix and matched both to get people online and then offline to purchase things as well. Do you see that as part of the puzzle and gaining traffic for the retailer?

Leigh: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a very famous stat sort of floating in the ether that opening a store basically increases your eCommerce traffic by about 37.

Leigh: What a lot of people miss is that they’re talking about traffic. So that’s an easy number to gauge. I think what our customers want to know is what about actual conversions? And that is really where your sales people are such a great resource for not just, working, as I said, face to face, but then motivating customers when they go to buy online, to feel more confident about their purchase, to buy more frequently, and also probably decrease the return rate.

Leigh: They really do know what size they are. They know maybe they’ve actually tried it in store and then only got really convinced to buy it after the fact. But those purchases tend to be a lot stickier than the ones of a customer just shopping on their own. And we’ve actually seen that in our own data that customers who shop with the help of a salesperson, even online actually in one case study, had a 50% higher AOV than the customers who were going at it alone.

Brent: Have you seen a difference pre pandemic to post pandemic on challenges that retailers are facing and getting people into the store? Obviously during pandemic it was impossible to get ’em into the store, but you see a switch in how behavior is now, whereas we’re going into full opening .

Leigh: I think, this sort of ebbs and flows because I think what also happened was Every retailer that was a little resistant to change.

Leigh: Maybe they started brick and mortar, really had to open eCommerce and had to embrace that as a channel during the pandemic. So if anything, eCommerce has gotten way more competitive because anyone who was resistant before now needed to figure it out. And obviously their first move is to do all the most obvious channels.

Leigh: That used to be the reason why e-commerce was so great, you could acquire customers for, not much money compared to the cost of opening a store. And I think those two levers have now completely switched. It’s become actually dramatically more affordable to open a store these days because landlords had to learn 10 year leases are not gonna work, no one’s gonna sign a 10 year lease.

Leigh: And we saw that a little bit with the popup craze. And I think that has found its middle ground of saying, what does a two year lease look like? Is that better for me? How can I make it more appealing for tenants to come into my physical space? So those costs have dramatically dropped while the cost of doing business online has actually skyrocketed because everyone’s using the same tools, everyone’s using the same, acquisition strategies.

Leigh: So it’s really hard to stand out right now online.

Brent: Do you see Paid and organic traffic coming to a store, be it online or in person. Do you see any way that somebody could jump start coming into the store rather than if you just didn’t wanna do paid ads? Is there an advantage somebody has to do organic?

Leigh: I think endear is that organic opportunity. We always joke that a marketing team at a omnichannel brand has so much work on their plate, and they are primarily worried about traffic to the site, conversion on the site, and it’s just not, if you have 12 stores right? That means that they can’t be focused on making sure every single store is optimized or maximizing their opportunity with traffic.

Leigh: So really what you get is you have this huge database of customers and the people who are. Focus on making sure those customers know about the store is the store team themselves. So giving them the power within Deere to actually do their own local marketing, their own local outreach. They are going to be the most motivated to get those customers in the door.

Leigh: And I think that’s really, that’s free. You have to pay for a sales force, whether you like it or not, if you’re gonna open a store. So you might as well maximize their resources to get that ROI on that physical retail.

Brent: Yesterday my podcast was about segmentation and and the person that I had on had mentioned Klaviyo. I know that there, there’s a lot of overlaps from CRM to automated marketing. How do you work with other partners to ensure that you’re maximizing? If somebody has attentive or something, how do you work in Totally making sure that. both are being used effectively.

Leigh: That gets to the whole purpose of CRM. We did an analysis at one point, and I think about 75% of our customers use Klaviyo, and I think another like 40% also use Attentive. And so what that tells us is, A) there’s this thing that we call called the Commerce Stack, and just to even be a proper eCommerce brand, you need about seven different apps cuz you need your email marketing and or SMS marketing.

Leigh: You need your loyalty, you need your support, you need your onsite popups and engagement. And then you also actually need the os, the backbone of the whole thing, which is typically Shopify. So With all these different platforms running, they’re all really good at what they do individually.

Leigh: The question. How do you bring them together from a data perspective? And that’s really what a CRM is out to solve. It’s how do you understand, okay, who is my marketing team touching with Klaviyo and who is my sales team reaching out to via Endear?

Leigh: And Endear works to actually consolidate those two things so that you understand, who’s responding more to one channel or another. And across all these channels, what kind of picture can I get of this customer? What kind of marketing does she respond to? What kind of email does she respond to or text?

Leigh: Does she respond to? Has she used her loyalty points? How do we get her to use those loyalty points? So all of it is about actually using these apps in tandem. And then of course, I think right now people are very concerned with, their overall spend on technology. And so the next question has to be,

Leigh: how can I consolidate how many of these apps actually have overlapping functionality? And I think that’s gonna be the really big challenge that comes next For these e eCom brands or for these omnichannel brands, how do I really make sure that I’m being most efficient with the tech stack that I’ve created?

Brent: Do you see a future in SMS verses email or both? Or? I see SMS happening a lot more, but I also see a lot of now, spam and SMS. Do you see SMS moving forward in what where it’s at? Or do you see it plateauing soon and people are gonna ignore messages in the future?

Leigh: It’s gonna take, it’s not there yet, but it’s gonna take the same toll as email, which is, would I ever not answer an email from a friend just because of how much email marketing I get?

Leigh: No. It doesn’t stop me from finding the ones that are important and of. All of our personal email clients or our phones will help us do some of that filtering automatically. So I think what really it comes down to is what is a brand’s email marketing or SMS marketing strategy. And I think the challenge there is that is also why empowering a sales force of some sort can be truly needle moving.

Leigh: They will break through the numbness that comes with marketing at some point. If I truly know somebody and they’re texting me, I want to respond because they likely, the content of that message is personalized. It’s specific to me, It’s content that I care about.

Leigh: And so it’s just about, everyone will say it, but it really is about personalization. And I think what’s cool about focusing on sales rather than marketing. , it lets you not worry so much about scale. The whole point is it doesn’t have to be all that scalable because you have a huge labor force, you have a huge sales force, so let them just do it properly one to one, and it will convert really high.

Leigh: And if you have 20 to 50 people doing that, you’re gonna see incredible results. And as I said, those people work for you anyway, so why not let them cut through the noise?

Brent: Do you think that the big brands out there that are running retail stores, The challenge is getting people into the stores again, or what do you see as the biggest challenge facing retail today?

Leigh: I think from a growth perspective, it is probably that, you still need to figure out how to drive traffic to your stores if you’ve made that investment. I think the other challenge is still for a lot of brands, especially the big ones, omnichannel, How do I understand? How my online and offline channels are working together.

Leigh: How do I make them work better together? How do I help them be resources and allies talk to each other? Because a lot of the time when we at least launched Endear, there was incredible sort of antagonism between what was happening e-commerce and what was happening in store, and they were considered almost rivals.

Leigh: And I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that a brand can make. It’s more about how can these two channels support each other. I think there are really great examples. , brands that have done that really well. With online, with in-store pickup for online purchases, making sure you can return, something you bought online in a store because A, that drives traffic and b, that’s just logical.

Leigh: Not doing that is gonna really annoy your customers. And so for me it’s looking at the strategies that actually unify those things. One of my favorite sites actually does this very cool thing where you can actually search their website by what’s available local to you. So you can basically browse the store from their e-commerce site and then just go buy it or go reserve it, which, talk about same day delivery.

Leigh: You don’t even need that. You can just walk over and go get it.

Brent: Looking at somebody like Best Buy, certainly they’ve now embraced that. It took ’em a a little bit of time to get there. But you can obviously that features a great way to make sure that people see everything, but then go to the right place to get it.

Brent: The future of. I think it was interesting that Amazon is still opening physical stores today, so it’s like online to physical. Do you still see that happening? Do you think there’s gonna be some strictly e eCommerce brands that are going to do little popup stores to see to see how it works?

Leigh: I think there are different, physical presence formats that are right for different kinds of products. And I think what we’ve really seen over the past couple of years is innovation around what does it mean to have a physical presence, right? It used to be a question of do I do wholesale or do I do retail, like dedicated retail?

Leigh: And even that’s a relatively new concept. So what I love is looking at all these different models for how brands can test what it means to. available in a store, whether it’s their own store or, these new sort of neighborhood goods is a great example, right? It’s not necessarily a wholesale deal, it’s more like I’m leasing or renting shelf space rather than an entire, store.

Leigh: And so all these different models allow different kinds of companies to really test what makes the most sense for them. And I think, the same time that Amazon is opening. Warby Parker is still opening tons of stores and actually doubling down on their retail footprint. So I think if anything, it’s a sign that, physical can work for all different kinds of companies and it’s more about understanding and really testing what makes sense for you, and how do you collaborate with other brands so that you are maybe doing a joint effort and you’re not, taking on the entire cost of leads for yourself if you happen to be at a one type of product or one product business that’s not really gonna make sense to just populate an entire store with one product?

Brent: Yeah. I think if anything, the pandemic reminded us that we do like to go outside every once in a while and visit a store and touch a product and shop around and visit, just get out of the house.

Brent: Do you do you think that a lot of retailers now are moving towards Having something like Endear to help them leverage more of their in store versus versus web traffic to promote specific items. You talked about the one item thing, but is there more of an in, in if you have Overstock or under stock, is there a way, is there more of a push to get a lot of that stuff?

Brent: I know there’s a lot of Target has a ton of extra inventory. So they’re pushing, this inventory online, offline. Is there more of that now coming through on retail?

Leigh: Yes, and I think inventory, especially if your omni channel is one of the hardest nets to crack, and it can get very cumbersome and it’s very detail oriented, very logistics heavy.

Leigh: And that to me is another reason why stores really do benefit when they have something like Endear because they have those products literally right in front of them. And with Endear, they can know exactly who. By the store and who would be interested in this product. So being able to again, be your own best advocate and move product that may even be sold out online.

Leigh: Being able to tell an entire neighborhood, Hey, that thing that’s sold out online is actually available in store in your size, come by and hopefully be the first to get editor. I can reserve it for you, is an incredibly, a huge value prop to your community, but also a really easy optimization considering all the challenges that brands face with inventory so it’s basically taking advantage again of your human capital to solve a very big logistical challenge. And I think, best sellers are always gonna move, and that’s great, but especially if you have those lingering products, being able to target them also without even broadcasting necessarily a huge promotion via a marketing email, Potentially sending it to only a handful of VIP customers or a handful of customers who have bought something similar in the past and just extending a promotion to them.

Leigh: Also helps, this long history of the vicious cycle of, if I discount then everyone’s gonna wait for the discount that if I don’t discount, it’s never gonna move. So avoiding that major sale and just giving a handful of people maybe part again, like you have a loyalty program for a reason.

Leigh: You know, Show your gratitude to those people and give them first access, or give them last access to some of these lingering products is a very easy way to really make the most of the inventory you do have.

Brent: I wanna change gears a little bit and talk about entrepreneurship. What motivated you in your young years to start a new CRM?

Brent: It’s a very competitive space. Tell us your journey on Endear and starting that.

Leigh: Yeah. My co-founder, Jenesh and I really got into this space pretty circuitously, it was not a very linear path towards success, but what we landed on was quickly learning that within the physical space in retail technology was lacking.

Leigh: There was a huge doth in just any sort of innovation whatsoever. And of course what we saw was this boom in econ technology and it made sense, right? It’s already cloud based. It’s already driven by fast movers. People who were excited about the future in retail to a lot of people sounded like this very laggard, slow industry that would never adopt anything new.

Leigh: And I think that was one of the biggest misconceptions because if there’s huge success in econ, obviously retail stores are eventually gonna have to. And so what we saw was this huge white space, especially among the newer, more modern brands who were leaning on physical retail as a new growth channel.

Leigh: And they were so data oriented already, and there were no solutions in the market that sort of looked at what the store was doing as a CRM. I think it. Maybe our exposure as solving this problem for our customers, but also ourselves needing a CRM and having a sales team that we realized they were really one and the same.

Leigh: They were all facing the same problems. And I think it’s our orientation towards data specifically that really sets us apart in the market because we’re just giving our users much more information and ammo to work with. Compared to just letting them, maybe you just have a messaging platform. That messaging platform is only as good as the content that the users are sharing on it.

Leigh: And so I just think that relying only on something that lets you do SMS is never gonna get you the scale or the quality of conversion. That’s something like Endear would. That was the biggest lesson, was getting to talk to users and understanding how much of their business was already driven by cultivating these relationships.

Leigh: Understanding that this behavior already existed. It’s just that no one had really, hypercharged it, No one had really given it the proper attention from a tech perspective that it deserved.

Brent: When you started what was your biggest challenge at getting up off the ground?

Leigh: I would say our biggest challenge was really accepting. Being willing to focus on who it was that needed our product most. I think for a while, and I think it’s normal to go through this, we would take any customer that would have us and we would, do whatever they asked of us. But slowly we realized that, there needed to be a very concrete market that we were going after and we needed to use the customer experiences we already had to pinpoint.

Leigh: Exactly who that customer should be. And I think in almost every conversation with a new founder, every conversation, every interview I give, I talk so much about product market fit because I think it is the hardest part of starting a company is finding the product that satisfies a market doesn’t, worry about how big or how small it is, maybe later.

Leigh: But just building something that an entire audience loves is incredibly gratifying and motivating. And being willing to settle on one audience was something that is really hard for founders.

Brent: Do you think that it’s hard to say no to some customers sometime or even say to that customer, you’re really not a good fit and maybe you’re not gonna be successful with us, so why don’t you use X platform?

Brent: We have problem

Leigh: now. We. Can’t help ourselves from time to time. It’s very tempting when someone wants to use your product and you have to be honest about what it can do for their business or what you’re willing to do to meet them halfway. And I think there’s a saying basically that most startups die of congestion, not starvation.

Leigh: And I think that’s a really good way to think about it, especially at where we are in the seed stage. You have to be able to focus and you have to know why you’re focused. And I think it’s always good to put opportunities on your own radar for investigation and research. But we’re always remembering, your bread and butter customer and why they love you so much because they are the ones that will keep feeding you.

Brent: I’m gonna make a small CRM joke, so I apologize, but when you were looking at how you were gonna design Endear, did you look at SalesForce CRM and think , this 1980s interface is the last thing I’m ever gonna want to do, and we’re gonna make all this great data presentable for people who can actually use it.

Brent: and if anybody’s used Salesforce CRM, they know exactly what I’m talking about.

Leigh: I have to be completely honest, I’ve never seen the Salesforce CRM. I don’t know what it looks like. All right. But you’re very lucky. I’ve heard that, I’ve heard that from so many people. There’s like a I literally think there’s a quote on our website that is basically we have plenty of users who have tried Salesforce and to even think about putting.

Leigh: A retail worker who’s constantly on her feet on Salesforce to use as if she were at a computer all day is absolutely insane. And so we’re very honest about, the way that we’ve built the product, specifically for someone who works in a retail environment, someone who is able to, they have to be able to look up from their phone no matter what they were doing, and work with a customer and then look back at their phone and know exactly where they are in their workflow and pick it up instantly.

Leigh: It’s not no secret that turnover is also incredibly high in retail. And so what we think about in terms of how we build the product is okay, and there needs to be something that the second you hire a salesperson, they can pick it up in 30 minutes. They do not have six months to train on something like Salesforce because they’ll probably be gone in six months.

Leigh: So how do we build something that, A, they can get up and running in 30 minutes and B actually might get them to stay longer because they love the tech. They love that they can track their own progress. They love they get credit for sales online. So how do we make it a reason for someone to actually stick with your brand because of how great, the motivation is through Endear.

Brent: Do you find it harder to. design, something that’s easy for a millennial to use as compared to somebody who’s retired but now has gone back to work and is suddenly in retail. Do you think there’s a challenge in both in that sort of learning phase?

Leigh: So one of our first customers, they actually were a beta customer and they were still with us today, like three years later, they got a version of Endear that we would never want anyone to have to be on.

Leigh: The entire sales course were in like the boomer generation, and I trained every single one of them. Maybe sometimes it took an hour and a half. But what I knew was their willingness to work with me and to get trained and then their ability to use the platform was probably the biggest validation that we were doing something worthwhile because every single one of them got on and said, I absolutely hate technology.

Leigh: I don’t know why we have to use this, and yet somehow three years later here, they are still using it and getting even better at it, and they are incredibly productive. So to be honest, millennials are great at tech and it’s great that they use Endear and they, I think they love it. I think what’s more encouraging is that we have users across all generations and they all seem incredible value.

Leigh: And getting up to speed and actually, finding it pretty easy to use at the end of the day.

Brent: And I can say that I’m old enough to remember when I was working as a waiter that you had to look through a big book to see if this credit card was stolen or not. So it has come a long ways.

Brent: Another good parallel would. Somebody who’s a runner and they log all their miles in a physical book and then they move to a spreadsheet, and now they’ve moved to logging all their miles in Garmin or Strava or something like that. Strava. So that same sort of pathway for the CRM could be seen through how we’re making our lives easier.

Brent: And you don’t have to at checkout or at at the pos or even as somebody walks in there is an opportunity or getting people to walk in, I should say. There’s an opportunity to somewhat know the customer and then to leverage that knowledge to help them understand that there’s something.

Leigh: Totally. I tell every founder, if you ever hear of an industry still relying on Google Sheets, that is the billion dollar idea to go after. It’s always a sign that there’s a problem to be solved. And I know a lot of companies that, they are the Google Sheets alternative. They are, as you’re saying, the Strava to just logging it in a Google sheet or same for us, our users went from little black books to, if they were relatively sophisticated, A, a pretty, color coded Google file and then they found us.

Brent: The the typical customer that you would see or the typical user for Endear, would there be a certain size that would be a right fit? 10 stores, 20 stores?

Leigh: We, when we started, a lot of our customers were smaller. I think more of a mindset. Certainly from a, traditional icp.

Leigh: What are your qualifiers? What do you look for? We look for brands that have, north of three stores. That’s something that we do take into consideration mostly because it shows a level of bullishness on physical retail and eagerness to. We look at their tech stack. Do they use platforms that we already integrate with that we, so that we can deliver that really 360 degree view of the customer?

Leigh: But I think what we’re really excited about that we’re seeing now is, if you did start with Endear when you were relatively small, there is no interest in moving to Salesforce because it’s just, it doesn’t matter how big you are, that product is still not designed for the retail store enviroment.

Leigh: And so we’ve seen customers that, started in the single digits that are now, double and nearing triple digits store fleets. And they are not giving us any signs that they’re interested in leaving because we’re growing with them and we are watching their needs change and become more sophisticated at the same time that the product becomes more sophisticated.

Leigh: We obviously hope that trend sticks around, but that’s what we’ve seen so far.

Brent: I’m doing a terrible job of staying on track here, but if we jump back to entrepreneurship have you found it harder scaling your tech stack or your people stack?

Leigh: That’s a really good question for my co-founder Jinesh and our CTO JP, but I will answer it as best as I can.

Leigh: I would say people stack on some level proves to be more slippery in the sense that I think you know what you’re getting with tech and if you don’t know, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly and you are even aware of the quote unquote like tech debt that you might be taking on at any given moment.

Leigh: And it’s also probably pretty clear to you how to fix it. I think the team growth side is you have all these things that you want to, that you wanna do or that you wanna think about, and finding that balance between hard skills and culture and also, equity and making sure that you’re finding that diversity in the applicant pool that you’re looking at.

Leigh: And then you have to think about we are a distributed team. Do we always wanna be distributed? I think so. What are the drawbacks and what are the advantages of that? And what if there are drawbacks, how do we compensate for those? So I think there are just a lot more unknowns when you’re dealing with humans in general, which is why, tech products are really fun to build.

Leigh: because you can rely on them, but then you realize like there’s a user at the other end of that and you have to think about, how are they going to receive this product? What are they gonna want to see from it? So I’ve just basically bundled your questions still back into endear and the problems that we have on that front.

Leigh: But I would, I hope I answered it at some level.

Brent: When Leigh wakes up in the morning, what drives her to get up and do something better? Stronger. Bolder as the Endear co-founder.

Leigh: Anecdotally and broadly, I would say it’s the customers that we work with.

Leigh: So I absolutely adore this space. I love the customers that I work with. I geek out when I see a brand that I recently shopped at or know or just follow on Instagram, and I see them wanting to use in Endear. And I feel the same way when one of those customers just has an amazing experience or one of their sales people has an amazing experience.

Leigh: And knowing that, as I said, it goes back to product market fit, you get incredible motivation knowing that, hey, even if something is broken, even if you know an employee wants to leave, all of that stuff is totally solvable if your customers love your product and it’s totally worth solving if your customers love your product.

Leigh: I wouldn’t feel the same way if customers didn’t. It’s like, why are you even bothering? Like you have a bigger existential problem if your customers are not huge fans of what you do every day.

Brent: Do you ever buy something from a store that’s using Endear and you wanna say, That’s my product you’re using?

Brent: Yes, all the time. The person that’s selling it , by the way, that’s my product. Yeah.

Leigh: I’ve done it. I’ve done it a few times. I also have a very. Supportive husband who won’t walk into a store that doesn’t use Endear without trying to pitch them on endear, which I also appreciate, but I have also stopped doing.

Leigh: It’s very cool to walk around a lot of neighborhoods in New York and see the brands that we work with. I’ve walked in and it’s just a weird interaction. You’re like, Oh, that’s cool, thanks. But it’s not quite anything, I think it would be pretty weird.

Leigh: A HubSpot person came up to me and was like, I work no, actually I’d appreciate it. I’d be like, That’s cool. We use HubSpot. So I try to keep my cool when that happened. But I would say the other thing that gets me up in the morning is when I have friends who say, I just got a text from a store using you and I, I saw you in the url, or I could tell it was you guys.

Leigh: And I think that is also incredibly inspiring that, we are. Penetrating all these different circles of people that are receiving her product and most of the time not even knowing it.

Brent: I started in the Magento world, which is like Shopify, but it. It’s better. And it’s, No, I’m just, I’m not gonna talk about that. But I can also relate to that. Nobody actually cared at all that I was using Magento to sell stuff or developing on Magento. Anyways, we’ll move on. We have a few minutes left.

Brent: And I promised a free joke. I was gonna do it in the beginning, but then I forgot. And now we’re, because I’m a d today, I don’t know why. So I’m gonna tell you a joke. And this is a joke that could be free or we could pay for, . All I want you to do is just react and tell me what you think.

Brent: Here we go.

Brent: Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns the other and says, Dam!,

Leigh: Okay,

Brent: I’m, make it, I’m, That’s clearly a free joke. I’m gonna say a free

Leigh: joke. I was actually ready for it to be. A different punchline from a different joke, and I was like, Maybe this is a different version. So you actually caught,

Brent: Tell me yours.

Brent: Tell me yours. You know

Leigh: The one where it’s like there are two muffins baking in an oven, and one muffin says, Damn, it’s hot in here. And the other one says, Oh my god, A talking muffin. So I thought that was gonna be the joke, but with two fish ,

Brent: Yeah. How do fish talk underwater? That’s my question. It’s Aquaman, right? They must use some kind of radar thing.

Leigh: Yes. And there’s that very famous David Foster Wallace speech or short story about what is water? And it’s basically like people’s awareness. If you haven’t, that’s also what’s on my mind now, which is, it’s a much more existential philosophical question.

Leigh: So now I’m just in 10 different places like you, so there you go.

Brent: All right. I gotta do one more since I clearly bombed the first joke.

Brent: What is the opposite of a croissant? A happy uncle.

Brent: Okay. Cross an, Yeah. Anyway. I get it. I will stop torching you on the jokes, . I

Leigh: appreciate them.

Leigh: I get it. I’m with you.

Brent: If you were to say to a retailer the thing that they should be paying attention to as we go into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. What would be that something they should be really looking at now, going to quarter four and even into quarter one?

Leigh: That’s a great question. I would say, what are you gonna do differently from last year? And ask yourself, what did I do last year? and what have I done every year that, am I seeing any difference in results? And I think the question becomes, if everyone else is just gonna do the same thing anyway, what is the harm in taking a year to try something that I’ve never done before?

Leigh: And at the end of the day, I’m not a retailer. I only have so many creative ideas that I’ve seen from the brands that use us, but I think. A like getting ahead of the most obvious things. Like you’re gonna send a promotional email the week before and then three days before and then the day of your sale.

Leigh: What doesn’t look like that? Just anything. But that is my advice at this point, because you can always do that. But is there something more creative you can do either on top of that or instead of that, because you know everyone’s gonna do that and we do have that. Have test.

Leigh: We do have an entire webinar from a bunch of other brands speaking about this that I would highly recommend. This doesn’t count as my shameless plug. I wanna clarify that. I would recommend people go listen to if they’re looking for inspiration.

Brent: All right. And we’ll put that in the show notes. So we’ll make sure you get that on the show notes of the podcast.

Brent: So Leigh, as we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?

Leigh: I would like to plug Endear as an app, is that allowed? Can I just plug the company? Absolutely. Okay, great. Yes, one of the great things about Endear sales process is we offer everyone, both we can get a demo on the app and then we also include a free training as part of your trial.

Leigh: So I would encourage everyone to a go check out the website and Endearhq.com and book a demo because there are no strings attached. And you’ll even get a free training if you sign up for a 14 day free trial. So that is my shameless plug.

Brent: Perfect. Leigh Sevin co-founder of Endear. Thank you so much for being here today.

Brent: Thanks so much. Had a

great

Leigh: time.

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Entrepreneurs are aiming at a hundred different things at once. They’re scrambling to accomplish and grow their objectives, but they’re facing a lot of headwinds. And those headwinds come in the form of things like.

How do we prioritize what matters most?

How do we think about using data to manage our business, not just gut feel?

How do we think about the right people and the right seats and make sure that we have the right processes to get those people working effectively and that they’re an excellent match to our culture?

What is our culture?

How do we think about what our long-range vision is versus what we need to do this week, let alone this quarter?

And how do we think about financials versus strategic objectives?

All those things come together in the EOS model.

https://www.eosworldwide.com/matt-beecher

https://www.linkedin.com/in/8matt8/

Entrepreneurial Empathy with Jen McFarland

April 14, 2023September 20, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

Will your employee go a little further when times are tough? Jen McFarland ( @jensmcfarland )talks about entrepreneurship, marketing, and living in Kazakhstan. Listen for the size 45 clown shoes. Are they European sizes, US sizes, or clown sizes?

Mentorship, empathy, marketing, and NOT being a hater! If you are an employer, this episode is for you if you are an employee, this episode is for you.

If there is one theme to hear throughout this podcast, it is this quote from Jen:
“Smart Women in tech leave because of bad management.”

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jensmcfarland

https://www.linkedin.com/company/epiphanycourses

https://www.epiphanycourses.com

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to talk commerce today. I have Jen McFarland coming from Oregon. Did I get that right? Jen, Oregon? Yep. Yep. Jen, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your day to day role and maybe one of your passions in

Jen: life. Oh, wow. Hi my name’s Jen McFarland. I am a marketing coach, even though I don’t like using the word coach.

Jen: It just seems to be what people call me. I also do a lot of hands on work. My favorite thing to do in my role as a marketing agency is I work with the city of Portland’s economic development division through their inclusive business resource network and we help people of color with their marketing so that they can build their businesses.

Jen: And that’s one of my favorite things to do. I’m also passionate about travel. hang out with my friends. It’s lovely here in Portland, because right now it’s summer and I am not originally from here. So when the rain comes, that’s not really my favorite time

Brent: and it never rains on, in, in the west coast, right in Portland.

Brent: It’s always bright and sunny, just like San Diego.

Jen: That’s what I a lot of people get it wrong. See, it only rains once in Portland, it starts in October and it ends in late may.

Brent: Oh, that’s better than starting in October and ending in September.

Jen: well, that’s true. We’ve had that happen before though. That was summer was on a Tuesday and it was pretty fun.

Brent: Yes. I was in Duluth this weekend and summer’s done already there, so no

Jen: way. I can’t okay. Checking that off the list. Not moving to Duluth.

Brent: Yeah. Duluth is very lovely in the summer. So July some parts of August depends which way the wind is blowing. Off the lake or not. How all right. The only thing I know about Portland is Portlandia.

Brent: And so I know that you probably go to one of your local restaurants and get the name of the chicken that when you’re gonna sit down to eat, is that right?

Jen: They don’t always tell us the name of the chicken, but it’s, it’s 50 50, if you get the full lineage of the chicken. So yeah. Portland idea, totally accurate.

Jen: A hundred percent.

Brent: all right. So Jen I know some of the topics we talked about in the green room were around certainly entrepreneurship, but how you went through the peace Corps and then got into entrepreneurship or how the peace Corps helped you get into it. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jen: Yeah. So I love travel. I am a unique person in that I did peace Corps with my husband. He also likes travel. So we went as more mid-career entrepreneurs. So we were both in our thirties and we, so when you go as a couple, you can’t go to as many places as a single person, they have to have a place for two people to live and all kinds of things.

Jen: So we went to Kazakhstan. It is it’s not like Borat he’s, supposedly from Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a country south of Russia. It’s the largest land locked country in the world. And people there are insanely nice. So nice to the point where. It would be considered kidnapping in this country.

Jen: So I was walking, we were teachers and I had a long walk back to the host family. This is when we were training and my husband was ahead of me and somebody saw, it was like, oh, the American is alone. I want my niece to talk to the American. So basically they’re like, come on in. And I’m like I have to get home.

Jen: It’s dinnertime. They bring me in and this, I was so inexperienced that I didn’t know how long this process would be and they start cooking and I’m like, oh no, I’m in deep trouble. I don’t have the phone number to get ahold of my husband, the person I’m supposed to talk to. Isn’t in the house. I don’t know any of these people, what is happening.

Jen: I think I was there for about two hours and about halfway in this woman, young woman comes in and sits down and I can understand enough Russian at that point to understand that this is the person I’m supposed to talk to you. And she speaks English. And that is how I met my best friend in Kazakhstan so we talked, it was awesome.

Jen: We left that training place and then we ended up moving back there and living there for a year and Rahan saw me and was just like, oh my gosh, it’s you? This is so great. And that’s how we met each other. But like in America, these are things that never happened. You’re not walking along the street and somebody’s Hey, come on in.

Jen: Talk to my niece. Like you would never stop. You would never do it. And so that’s how I learned that sometimes you can take these risks that just seem insane and crazy, and it turns out really good. So this was somebody who I was really close to for that time. I miss her all the time, even though I’ve been back for a long time.

Jen: And I think business is a lot like that. Sometimes you have to take that chance. You have to be like, is this for real? I don’t know if this is for real or not. And then you. Yeah, it’s cool. And you take that risk. You take the plunge and it works that way. It just works out. And that’s really what happened.

Jen: I would say then when you fast forward and I’m an executive at the city of Portland and I decide to leave, but I don’t really have a parachute really set for myself. I knew I wanted to have a business, but I hadn’t really set it up. And I was like it’s gonna work out. And it has, it’s just crazy sometimes how.

Jen: works that way. You have to have a certain degree of trust in order for it to really work out and Peace Corp was we loved peace Corp. It was super great.

Brent: Yeah, that’s good. So the peace cor in Kazakhstan. Wow. I have I’ve and you lived there for a year. Tell when was this? When did you do this?

Jen: We lived there for two years.

Jen: Two years. Okay. It was in the early two thousands and it’s cold. it’s really cold there. I would say that the weather is probably similar to Milwaukee Wisconsin, except there’s no central heating. I remember sitting next to, we had, I don’t know what you would call it. It was technically supposed to be a heater, but it was like these bare wires that would just heat up I don’t know.

Jen: It was so cold that I sat so close to it, that I set my pants on fire and I didn’t notice it for a minute and I. I was like, do you smell smoke? It was breakfast. And I was talking to my husband. He’s like something smells funny. And I looked and, but I was like, I also felt warm, so I wasn’t complaining and then I looked down and I.

Jen: oh, I just burned a hole in my pants. I like you just no, it it’s a different experience there because it’s very cold and very snowy and like the vitreous fluid in your eyes freezes, and so you’re blinking a lot and it, it’s just an interesting experience.

Jen: And then it’s like insanely hot in the summer. And I think Milwaukee’s kind of that where, Minneapolis is like that too. Except you have a lot of mosquitoes there compared to Kazakhstan. So it’s a lovely, wonderful place that nobody’s ever heard of. And it was just a wonderful experience and it was very hard and also awesome.

Jen: We only had running water, I think about. we would leave the tap opened, cuz we weren’t sure when the water was gonna come on and we would fill the bathtub and then use the water. We had a water distiller, so it would be clean and everything. So it was an interesting time, an interesting experience.

Jen: And I think that’s why, my husband and I have weathered COVID really well. I weather uncertainty a lot better. I think that’s. I think that’s why people call me a coach, even though I’m really a consultant. And I do a lot of hands on marketing for people. It’s because I have this really grounded oh, it’s gonna be okay.

Jen: And I think after you have some of these experiences, like I’ve had experiences at the enterprise level where like we melted down entire. Servers and everything came to a grinding halt, and we had to match data among like hundreds of thousands of people. And we’ve, and I’ve lived in countries where I didn’t have running water.

Jen: Like it just, everything always works out. And I think that grounded feeling I have about things is really because I’ve lived in places without any creature comforts, I’ve had all kinds of experiences and at the end of it, it’s great. Everything works out. Everything works out in the end.

Brent: So two comments, number one, I’m sad to hear that you associate Minnesota with mosquitoes, which we have a state bird. It’s not the mosquito number two. I did spend a lot of time in the eighties watching the show, Laverski and Shirliova. It’s a Kazakhstan program about two ladies in a beer bottling plant that in nevermind.

Brent: It’s a, that’s a tie back to Milwaukee Laver, Shirley and Milwaukee. Yes. I know I’ll stop. So do you please, do you think there’s a special risk factor or no, maybe not risk, but there has to be something in you or. Something you can’t quite quantify to be able to leave your job as a public employee or a city employee, and just jump off and go for it.

Brent: Do you think there’s something that most people can’t quite identify with?

Jen: I don’t know. I certainly had the golden handcuffs on if that’s what you mean, had every, I was paid I had. still have my retirement from there. Certainly if you know all of the security in the world, I don’t think I was actually gonna lose my job.

Jen: But it, I wasn’t happy. So I think that when you look at your life and you’re like, this isn’t really what I want. I, I don’t know. Some people will decide to. and be miserable. And I just, that, wasn’t what I wanted for myself. And I wanted something different. I also have the experience that when my dad was around 50, he was being worked to get to death at the state of Idaho and had a bad situation.

Jen: And he ended up having a heart attack. And I was like, I don’t wanna be like that. He didn’t want that. And so I think that as I, got into my forties, I was like, yeah, I Don. This is not the road. I know where this road can lead because I had seen it with my dad. And I was like, I don’t want that road.

Jen: And I have been so much happier since taking the risks since doing something. But certainly I would say a lot of people don’t do it because maybe they don’t have the same sense of adventure. They don’t have these experiences where they’re like, Yeah, I’m just gonna go move to Kazakhstan now, ha that’s crazy.

Jen: Most people that’s crazy. So I do think that there’s a part of me that is really adventurous and willing to take these chances and take chances on myself. And I would say certainly I’m the person who gets the LinkedIn email, the little messages and I’m like, is this real or not? And I’ll actually research things that don’t.

Jen: real. And then that’s how I ended up I had a film crew at my house earlier this year because they read one of my blog posts and they’re filming a documentary and they wanted me to be in it. And it was just a random request that came into LinkedIn, but I’m willing to take the risk that that could work out.

Jen: And it did, it was fun. It. Unique. Doesn’t happen every day that I have a film crew at my house. So I do think that we have these opportunities as entrepreneurs where we can either be like, oh God, I get so many LinkedIn requests all the time. I’m just gonna ignore all of them. I don’t even know these people.

Jen: And I’m that. Odd person. Who’s oh, is this looks neat. If this is real, then I’m gonna pursue it. And I think that we have these opportunities all the time in our lives, and we have that choice. We have the power to make the choice about how we’re going to navigate and proceed. Do

Brent: you think it gets more difficult as you get older to make that decision?

Brent: And I’ll just back that up with, I started as an entrepreneur in college, I went to college for eight years and decided. I wanna do something different. So I dropped outta college sure. After eight years and I started a business. But I really didn’t know what I was doing or getting into at a younger age.

Brent: Sometimes you can jump into those things and it just happened, whatever that I got some traction and it worked, but some people as they get a little bit older might think I’ve got a career and I don’t know if I want to, chance on not having a paycheck. Do you think it’s more difficult as you get older?

Jen: I do. And I would say that, at the time I was leaving my executive role, that all played into it as okay how much runway do I have? The truth is I had more runway because I had more savings. had more experience it. It was a different runway than if I had decided to do it right outta college.

Jen: Like you, that would’ve been a disaster for me. I know who I was and where I was at that stage that would not have worked for me. It was also not on my roadmap. Peace Corps was a hundred percent on my roadmap coming outta college, having my own business. That was something that kind of simmered later on.

Jen: And I think that you have to have that entrepreneurial mindset, that entrepreneurial spirit, and I guess I had it all along. I just didn’t identify it as that ability. Be adventurous and take the plunge. I don’t think that’s for everybody. I don’t think that everybody feels that way about life.

Jen: about what they want for themselves. Everybody’s different. So I do think that those decisions become a lot harder because we have families, we have more complicated lives than we do out of college or when we’re younger, there’s just not as much complexity. Maybe we don’t have a house. I had all of these things I had to worry about.

Jen: We have a house, we have, I have a marriage. I can’t just run off and join the circus. I could, but there’s not really a lot of circuses anymore. Size 45 clown shoes in case anyone’s curious, but I can’t do that without talking to somebody. I can’t just run. And do whatever I want anymore. So I think sometimes we get lost in that complexity and we decide it’s just not worth it because there’s too many elements to work out.

Jen: So I think that can be a hard stop for people when there might be gold there. If you did take that plunge, if you did go out there and do something new.

Brent: Yeah. I can think of so many, like be your own boss. Do your own business. There’s so many people like that are pushing franchises or something like that.

Brent: And I think there’s a distinction between taking somebody else’s dream and going with it and doing your own dream. Maybe it’s harder to do your own dream because especially as you said, as you go along, you have more entrenched things that you want to stick with. And part of it being an entrepreneur is being able to let some of those things go and embracing change.

Brent: Oh yeah. You had mentioned earlier about being an accidental entrepreneur. How do you, how would you relate to that?

Jen: I said earlier that I wasn’t gonna lose my job, but my job was very uncertain. It was a year to year deal where I had to wait for the budget to go through, there was a lot of uncertainty around that and I was really unhappy. I really, at one point thought that I would bounce around at different roles at the city.

Jen: And it became clear that this role I was in was that was where I was gonna be. And I. Like it. I created the job. I created the entire department. I had been doing a lot of projects. That’s really what I would do that was my role at the city was I would create new programs and places and policies, and I would move around a lot.

Jen: And I became clear that this is, this was it. This was the landing spot. And I was like, oh no, this is not interesting to me. as I was making this entire. role and crafting this program. I was like, wow, I wonder who’s gonna have to do this all the time. And then it turned out to be me and I was not happy. So what happened then is in life outside of my work, I had a friend who had their own business and I began to see how I could help other people in smaller roles in smaller businesses.

Jen: Where it wasn’t an enterprise large business situation. And I started to realize that some of the things that I took for granted and thought everybody knew they didn’t, about marketing, about technology, about how to get all the pieces to fit together. And so I started helping people as side hustle, is what people call it now.

Jen: And. from that experience. I was like, I could really do this. It wasn’t the intention. It was all by accident, helping somebody in need. And then it became another person and another person in the meantime, during the day, I’m in a role that I’m really unhappy with it’s budget season. Again, do I want to go through another.

Jen: Will I, or won’t I have a job, even though I think I will. The program, it’s been years now and it’s still running, so yes, I would’ve had a role. So it all happened. Like the kismet, like all of the things started happening and I was like yeah, it’s time to go. I need to go.

Jen: I wasn’t happy. There were a lot of reasons. so I took the plunge, but it wasn’t some grand master plan. I think a lot of times when people go into, should I have my own business or not, they’re looking for some sort of bright light that they run to, or all kinds of certainty and knowledge about how it’s all gonna turn out.

Jen: it’s not like that. it just doesn’t happen. I don’t think for a lot of people, maybe some people do have funding set up ahead of time, or they have banked a ton of clients. That’s certainly not what I was in when I decided this is what I’m gonna do. This is what I enjoy more. And there’s just a lot of factors that go into it.

Jen: So it was accidental. And it took a little bit of time to decide that this was what I was going to do.

Brent: If you were to think between say the employer role and the employee role you talk a lot about how you’ve helped others as an employer, do you want to encourage your employees who you recognize could be good entrepreneurs to chase their dream?

Brent: So basically you’d lose them, but they would have their dream. Is that something you think as a good entrepreneur, you should be doing?

Jen: Absolutely. My role in companies, when I go work there is to work myself out of a job. I’m not real big on the whole, have a retainer for life kind of deal. Like I like people to move on, get out of my nest and move on.

Jen: And I feel the same way about the people who work with me, who work for me. Part of what we’re doing is we’re fostering the growth of others. And in that we have to allow them to blossom and grow. And one of the reasons I feel that way is because that wasn’t something that was an option to me at several different points in my career.

Jen: So I don’t want to inhibit the growth of somebody else because I know what that feels like.

Brent: I can remember people that have helped me and people that have hindered me in the past. And certainly maybe the ones that have helped me the most are the ones that are more confident in the abilities for them to succeed in their own roles, knowing that they’ve now fostered somebody to go out and chase their own dream. Is there any advice you could give an entrepreneur to help them, maybe it’s insecurity where somebody feels as though that they wanna retain this person for the rest of their lives.

Brent: And I’m not saying that it’s bad to have an employee who’s gonna be there for the rest of their lives, because there are people that simply want to be an employee that are not interested in being an entrepreneur. Not everybody is cut out for that. No, but I do feel as though. Some employers could be a hindrance to somebody’s upward career if they were to, I don’t know, a stranglehold or something

Jen: well, I will say that I haven’t had as many mentors as other people have.

Jen: And I think that sometimes what happens is, and by mentor in this specific case, I know that you can have mentors that. Anywhere. But a work mentor, like somebody who was above me in an organization, mentor me and helped, find another role somewhere else. I work really hard. It’s one of the things that I do.

Jen: So I didn’t tend to attract mentors who wanted me to leave. So they wanted me to stay there because they knew. Whatever they needed, it was gonna get done because Jen would do it. And I can tell you, by the time I left the city, there were like four people doing what I was doing. Like I was taking on so much and I would just get it done.

Jen: That’s what I’m good at. I’m an implementer, get stuff done. I can say that just because somebody is working really hard. And I think that we’re seeing it now with the quiet quitting is what they’re calling it, where it’s basically people who have really good boundaries. And they’re saying, I’m gonna come in.

Jen: I’m gonna do exactly what you want me to do. I’m gonna leave on time. I’m gonna turn my phone off. I’m not gonna answer your. And people are really upset about it. And I’m like, why they’re finding that you’re gonna pay them the same, regardless of what they do. If they work extra or not, and they’re not interested and you’re not helping them grow because they wouldn’t be doing, if you’re doing it, if you were actually fostering a better relationship, For entrepreneurs.

Jen: Yes. It’s hard to have somebody leave. I get it. You don’t wanna have to train a new person. It means that you have to take on more for a while you find a new person, train them and get them to that next place. I will say though, that in the long run, you have to think about all of these things in the long game.

Jen: If you foster somebody and send them on their way, and you have a really good relationship with them, meaning they don’t quiet, quit. There’s not a big argument. And they leave . That is a partner that you have in the future. That you can be working with. This is somebody that you can join forces with maybe at a later date, but you are building a community of people who are going to sing your praises, their potential contractors later on down the road.

Jen: You don’t know where that’s gonna lead, but you do know where it’s gonna lead. If you burn somebody out and don’t help them grow, that never ends well. Never.

Brent: It leads to resentment and things that aren’t happy. So on the on the flip side of that is the employee relationship.

Brent: We talked about the entrepreneur, the employee how as an employee, do you see ways that you can encourage your employer, maybe to have this fostering role rather than working you to death. And I do agree that now today’s new world that they want to have that time to themselves.

Brent: And the motivation to just work for the sake of work is not there anymore.

Jen: That’s true. I think a lot of it is that the new younger generations. Relate to work differently. And I think that they get just as much done as anybody else. , it’s just how they do it looks differently. I have, I’m still seeking a mentor from, generation Z.

Jen: I wanna know exactly how people feel and very curious, because it’s not my generation, but I will tell you. . If you come into an organization, you have to understand that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. So that’s the first thing, right? You don’t go. You ask questions, you go in and you ask a lot of questions.

Jen: So you can be really clear about the role. You can be really clear about what the environment is like. You talk to other people who work there. That’s the starting point. If they pass over. Hurdle then the next hurdle is then you make it clear about your future goals. Like where is it that you see yourself going and you need to start having like conversations with the person you work for to help build those skills so that you can make it to the next place.

Jen: And I think that you will find people who are very open to that. You will also find a lot of people who are very, not open to that. And I think that. It really is about having those conversations early. It’s about meeting with your boss and talking through problems and solutions and what that career ladder can look like for you.

Jen: It does mean being brave and a little bit bold and. These things don’t happen overnight. and I know that we all want it. I remember when I was younger, I thought I knew everything. I thought that I should have this, and I should have that. Sometimes these things take time, not as long as your boss wants it to your the entrepreneur wants you around as long as possible.

Jen: So it. There is a little tension in that conversation, but I think it’s worthwhile for both parties to start really having these mentor mentee conversations, help building skills, because they’ll be a better employee up until they leave. Anyway, if you just open the doors and sometimes people will go, oh, there’s a lot.

Jen: I don’t know. And you might end up having them longer. The more, you open the curtain so they can see the mess of everybody’s business. Cause none of our businesses are perfect. You might actually find somebody who can help you in ways that you don’t know. If you start to give somebody more responsibility and teach them as much as possible.

Jen: And then as the employee you’ll wanna stay longer because you’ll see more and you’ll learn more than if you go elsewhere or if you go and embark on having your own business.

Brent: I think. What you said earlier about burning bridges that applies even greater for the employee, because if you can leave on good terms yes.

Brent: And you can provide value to your previous boss. Now that boss becomes a conduit for you for your next job or your next role or whatever you’d like to do. What advice would you give to a a younger employee who’s trying to navigate learning how their boss is gonna react to, Hey my timeframe is 24 months and I’m gonna be leaving.

Brent: Right. some bosses are gonna say they’re gonna say to themselves, that’s great. I’m gonna look for a new person already, cuz I know in 24 months they’re gonna be gone or the boss may just come out and say, that’s not gonna work for me. There’s a certain amount of rapport that has to be there in the beginning.

Brent: But then there has to be. almost there has to be some not psychology, but there has to be some way to learn and feel out where each person lies without necessarily giving out your entire hand.

Jen: Absolutely. This is about relationship building and a lot of what I believe in is honesty and transparency.

Jen: building those relationships over time. Now, as you begin to get to know your employer, , you might realize that they’re not interested in what it is that you want, and you may not be able to be all the way to look, I have a 24 month window here. Like you might not be able to share that part that might be too much for that person to handle.

Jen: So you need to. Feel it out. This takes time. You don’t know the person as well, as you think, particularly in the beginning when everybody’s on their best behavior, like things change and evolve over time. So certainly you have to be careful and strategic about it, but being honest, it, it really does pay off.

Jen: So you’re not just shocking somebody because that can be part of burning the bridge too, is if you’re just like, whoa, piece out and it’s over, you have to give, you have to have open communication. And that’s part of it is if Y and part of it can be covered in the interview process. If you’re getting a sense of, they don’t, they’re not really interested in having any sort of.

Jen: Mentorship type of relationship with you. If you are not getting the sense that this is a growth opportunity, that’s gonna be very telling and you have to be strategic about how you ask about those things as well. But it is something that I think you can feel out early on, and hopefully you can talk to other people who work there.

Jen: You can also look at things like Glassdoor and stuff to see what former employees say. It depends on how big an organization is. All of which to say, it’s not an overnight thing, no matter what, no matter how open somebody is, but you also have to take care of yourself. You can’t just stay somewhere because somebody needs you.

Brent: Do you think it’s a red flag as an employee that, if your boss clearly doesn’t care at all about you or your personal life, is that a red flag for you? You as an that’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? I don’t even know why I asked it. I can say that as an employer, I’ve gotten much more aware of the fact that I need to know about my employees and there is a world outside of their job.

Brent: And simply asking some of those questions and being interested in what they’re doing helps you as an employer to build a better relationship with your employee. And it just does go vice versa. Is there anything that you can say to extract some of these things out of an employer as an employee?

Brent: I don’t think you can ever teach anybody to. I think somebody has to make that revelation themselves, as an entrepreneur, as an employer, if you’re narcissistic and you only see anything other than the end of your fingers, then you’re never gonna move past that point.

Brent: But there has to be some growth on both sides and as an employee, It is a delicate art to try to coax that out of people.

Jen: Absolutely. And I’m laughing because I worked for somebody who absolutely didn’t think anybody should be friends with people from work. And I will tell you that it wears on you after a while they’re talking about themselves and they have no care about what’s going on in your life.

Jen: I’ve worked for people like that. And I can. . I said, I worked hard and I do work hard, but after a while, you don’t wanna run into the fire with that person. If they don’t care about you, you will not run into the fire for that person. As the employee, you will go to a certain point and then you’ll be like, I’m done.

Jen: I’m out. This is hard. And because when it gets hard, you want to have somebody that is with you. and if you don’t care about anybody but yourself, and everybody’s just there to support you, but you don’t care if they like to go hiking or if they have a boyfriend or not like that’s, it’s gonna be game over sooner rather than later, because we all have lives.

Jen: We all have things outside of the business, outside of whatever it is that you’re expecting somebody else to do for you.

Brent: Yeah, that’s a really good perspective. I make a point of in my day job, I make a point of interviewing or at least talking to everybody every quarter.

Brent: And I think it’s about 65 people that I do my best to talk to every quarter. Yeah. And I’ve gotten to the point of saying, are you happy? At least, I’m trying to build a relationship and I’m trying to learn more about. But I think that’s a good question. Do you think that I would go with you into the fire to take something out?

Brent: That’s a hard question to ask cuz they may not answer it truthfully and you don’t wanna say, would you come with me? Cuz of course they’re gonna, yeah, of course they’ll come with you. But that’s not the real answer either. You wanna somehow build that? As the employer, you wanna support your employee. You don’t wanna force their support on you. You would like them to support you because they enjoy their job. And they would like to continue on and build this momentum that you have as a relationship. And as an employee, employer, you don’t wanna say you have to run in there with this, into the fire regardless.

Brent: You would like it to be voluntary. .

Jen: Yeah, okay. So this is an eCommerce podcast. We haven’t talked about that this is marketing people don’t buy from you unless there’s no and trust they’re buying in to what it is that you are selling. So as a leader, why isn’t it the same thing?

Jen: Why is it that we expect people to just do it? Because I’m paying you, they’ll go with you because you’re paying them. I’m talking about will they go a little bit further when times are tough? When things go sideways, are you nice mistakes happen? It, there are all of these opportunities that you have to really build that relationship so that your employees know can trust you.

Jen: And when things go bad, cuz they always go bad. Nothing’s perfect that they will say, yep, I’m here for you. I’ll stay late. I’ll do what it takes. Let’s make this happen. Let’s make the magic, let’s turn this around. And that’s really what it comes down to. It. It is that you have to build those relationships in the same way that you would with a customer who’s paying you.

Jen: It’s a two way street. And I think oftentimes as employers, it can be forgotten because we have so many things to do, but it’s really important to surround yourself with the people who are. going to support you, who are gonna help you and who are going to help you bring the people in that you need to keep the thing going.

Jen: And you have to look at that holistically. And if you can’t do that and people are leaving, sometimes that’s a you problem. It’s not always that everybody there’s that nobody wants to work. It’s that’s not always the answer. It’s that? You’re not providing a safe community for people to work in.

Brent: I’m just gonna write that down safe community to work in.

Brent: That’s a good one. You, I would like to talk about let’s I would like to talk about your podcast. So women conquer business. Yeah, can we, and we were gonna talk about marketing too, but now we’re already at, we’re already at 38 minutes. I know. Do you want to take a little bit of time and talk

Jen: about that?

Jen: Sure. So yesterday we recorded our hundred and 50th episode. I’ve been a podcaster since 2018. I will say that I’ve had probably four or five shows in that time. I used to do. interviews don’t do interviews anymore. I used to talk about all different types of things. Now we just talk about marketing it’s I think that over four years you change a lot as an entrepreneur.

Jen: What you talk about changes. and certainly the show is a reflection of that. So now what we’re doing are marketing howtos. So I help people understand concepts that can be somewhat challenging and drill into the essentials. I think yesterday we talked about course platforms and how to find a good course platform if you’re just getting started with online courses.

Jen: So a lot of my bread and butter. would be, if a CMO was, somebody came and said, we wanna do this thing. And you’re like, I don’t really know what that is. I can talk people through what something is and help them. And that’s really what the podcast is about is if you wanna do X here’s, how you get started or, and it can be at different levels of complexity.

Jen: So that’s really the bread and butter, and that is. And one of the opportunities. So when I was talking about opportunities, one of the opportunities I had really early with my podcast, I was approached by an organization I’d never heard of. And they said, we really like what you’re doing. Can we repurpose your show and pay you?

Jen: I was like okay, is this for real? I don’t even never even heard of you. So a lot of early solo shows have been repurposed and sold on another platform. I retained the rights and. that is how my new business epiphany courses was born. Like I have a lot, even though I don’t work at enterprise all the time, a lot of my content that I create and share is sold to enterprise companies as part of an eLearning platform.

Jen: And that is the baseline for epiphany courses because we know that all of that information and that content has been vetted. And is very popular among you. Fortune 500 fortune, 100 companies that are consuming it on this other learning platform. So we’ve started making a learning platform for small business owners where they can also learn in this container and get that information and then supply a community for people to talk through it.

Jen: So that’s really the essence of what I do around the podcast. They’re really these lessons. That then get repurposed elsewhere that then we turn around and make courses around. It’s an interesting concept. I never thought that what I do would evolve in this way. I think that when I started my business, if somebody had said you’re really gonna be into creating content.

Jen: I would’ve been like, I don’t even know what that. I didn’t, it was never on my radar, but as you can tell, I like to talk. So it seems to be working out for me.

Brent: Yeah. I think that’s such a great way to look at marketing as well is repurposing content. And I now, there’s this content driven eCommerce and everything is around.

Brent: eCommerce and even no UX eCommerce, where it is all about a conversation. You’re gonna talk to somebody in WhatsApp and they’re gonna place the order for you or whatever. I think that you’ve taken the opportunity. You’ve taken that risk and that challenge and. Stepped up on it.

Brent: So one of the things that I’m on the entrepreneurs organization board here in Minneapolis, and I’m on the DEI diversity committee. Yeah. And we in Minneapolis, we’re not incredibly diverse. And in, even in the entrepreneur C. I think we’re 15% women and 85% men.

Brent: So if the math is right, is there a particular struggle that women, this is a rhetorical, I’m sorry, I don’t know how to phrase this, but , I know that there’s struggle in, in people that aren’t white, bald males to break into the entrepreneurial community.

Brent: Through all kinds of factors. . Do you talk about that, those struggles in your podcast?

Jen: I did. I talked about that a lot early on as a woman in tech at a large organization, meaning the city of Portland. I experienced a lot. I had a lot of days where I felt like I should just walk in with a helmet on, I had people.

Jen: Call me, Jenny, like as a way, a very pejorative way of little girl I’m gonna pat you on the head and stuff. So it was . I dealt with a lot, and I have a bank of content that really talks through some of those struggles and how to get through it. And all of that.

Jen: I think that a lot. what I have learned is, if you go to my website, I there’s nowhere on here where I’m saying I’m gonna empower you because empowerment comes from within. If you even look at like the definition of it. So the truth is we can talk about it a lot, and I’m glad to talk to people about the struggles of women in entrepreneurship.

Jen: Certainly, I would invite that and also. we just have to put on our helmet and go in and do it. Anyway. I was at a networking event once they brought me in to speak. It was a small group. I was my friend who invited me and I were the only women. There was a man sitting next to me. I handed out my business card and I saw him playing with it the whole time.

Jen: He, I hate to say it, he was a bald white guy. So no offense to bald white guys. I. Including you, Brent. He was playing with it and all kinds of stuff, and we got to the end and he was like, I just, I gotta tell you, I’m never gonna send anybody to you because of your business name, women conquer business.

Jen: And I was like, okay. And I was really taken aback. And in the moment, I didn’t know what to say. I was like, really, I had just spoken. as you can tell, I’m fairly friendly. There’s not a lot here to really be angry about, I didn’t think. And I got home and I was like, you know what?

Jen: That’s really good marketing, cuz I didn’t really like that guy either. So if he doesn’t wanna work with me, like that’s an example of good marketing. And I think that women have to find those corners where we fit and people are willing to help us because there certainly are corners where people.

Jen: Aren’t. And I think though, that’s also the case with men. I think that’s the case in the transgender community. I think that this is fairly universal. It’s just that for women, there are a lot more corners where we don’t fit. And I think that really stunts the growth a lot is that, and so when we talk about, we’ve talked a lot about mentorship.

Jen: I do think that sometimes as women, we. men to be our mentors. They need to come and they need to say look this, Jen’s really cool. Like she knows what she’s talking about. Let’s how can we support you? I think that’s part of it. I think also as women, we need to say, you know what, a lot of people don’t like us, they’re gonna hurt her feelings.

Jen: Oh when we just have to keep going. So I think that it’s really hard and it’s difficult and. Over time. I have really strengthened my own helmet, to where I just don’t care as much. about, I don’t focus on the people who don’t like me anymore, because I have a hater every time I put something on YouTube, there’s one person that dislikes it.

Jen: I’m like. What it’s just, and I think it’s the same thing. Like they just, maybe I said something one time and I’m like, I could focus on that one person, but then I’m ignoring all the people who I could be helping. And I’m ignoring all the people who like me, if I just focus on the one hater.

Jen: And I think that as women, it’s a lot easier sometimes for us to absorb that criticism and focus on that when the truth is we have to focus on. all of the other people who are helped by us who want to help us. And I think there’s a lot more of that than the other.

Brent: Yeah. I think a good lesson for every, a male, whether they have hair or not is empathy.

Brent: Because if as an example, that person that made that judgment based specifically on a name that maybe they lack some empathy, but if you have empathy and you put your, if you could put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and I run for a team called mile in my shoes where you’re running with people in homeless and people coming out of prison, that if you could put yourself in their shoes for a mile.

Brent: You can empathize with them. And I think there’s a tieback as being a good employer to have empathy for your employees because they’re going through their own struggles and you can’t thrust upon them your own. Like I can’t thrust upon. Anybody my own things without having some buy in from the other side.

Brent: So I’m trying to navigate the whole subject. And I believe that talking about it is better than not talking about it. I agree.

Jen: And I think that there has to be some realities out there and, may speak to the male listeners for just a minute.

Jen: It’s easy to say we’ve made so much progress. That’s not really a problem anymore. The gendered issues, the differences in pay, so many things that are going on. And yet I can tell you that I’ll go out on Quora. And there are like executives from Google who are like women don’t like tech, so they don’t need to have jobs in tech cuz they don’t like it.

Jen: The truth is we leave smart women in tech leave because of bad management. because we’re smart. we don’t wanna put up with it. So we are interested. We’re interested in everything. We are smart. We’re capable. We can do all of those things. We’re not there yet. We still need. empathy and we need compassion.

Jen: And just like you do, I think men need it too. I think that those are the things that we need to realize is yes, we’ve made so much incredible progress and things are looking so much better for women and people of color. And we don’t have equity yet. We’re not there yet. So we just need to have that compassion for each other and build those relationships and we’ll go a long.

Brent: Yeah. So I, we are running up against the clock and I feel like we need to have a follow up conversation about marketing specifically. We’ve talked about a lot of great topics and I thank you. I know we talked earlier about my free joke project and I don’t want to, I this is a terrible segue, but let’s just talk about the fact that. My free jokes land very poorly. And you had a much better joke with the size 47 or 45 clown shoes. cuz I said 17 and I was just thinking American sizes, but you said 45? Yeah. And you weren’t thinking European, you were thinking clown sizes. That’s even better.

Brent: I appreciate that. And you caught me off guard so I’m gonna tell you a joke. And the goal from the joke is just to know if I can charge for it or if it should remain free. okay. All right.

Brent: What did the tectonic plate say when it bumped into another, sorry. My fault.

Jen: I do like that.

Brent: I have one more.

Brent: My doctor says I’ve developed a German sausage phobia. I fear the wurst. Oh. I know that was just a, that was a free one. That’s a free one. The first one, I think the first one should it be chargeable or not? Yes, it should be. Wow.

Brent: All right. Yeah, I’ll

Jen: give that an a plus. They’re both great, but I love dad jokes,

Brent: all right, good. Jen at the end of every podcast, I give my guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like, what would you like to plug.

Jen: I would like to talk about epiphany courses. This is our new project.

Jen: It’s at epiphany courses.com. It’s a course platform and a community where we talk about marketing and we’re focusing on service based businesses in particular people who are coaches, consultants, all types. I have acupuncturists, I have intuitive coaches in there. all different types of people who are building all types of service based businesses.

Jen: And we talk. marketing and how to build your marketing platform. How to we answer questions. We have some mini courses, our bread and butter are courses that are under an hour. Hence epiphany. We wanna give people in as brief amount of time as possible, all the information that they need so they can make a decision about whether or not it’s even a viable marketing tactic for their business.

Jen: And that’s all at epiphany courses.

Brent: All right. And I will put those I’ll put the links in the show notes and and what’s the best way to get in touch

with

Jen: you. Oh, I’m all over social media, but yeah, you can find me at LinkedIn on LinkedIn, Jen McFarland on LinkedIn. And then also through my

Brent: websites.

Brent: All right. Thank you, Jen. Thanks so much. And I’ve enjoyed this conversation.

Jen: Thank you.

Dare to say NO with Lisa Hammett

April 14, 2023August 16, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

When you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else. What are you saying no to? @lisahammett

If you’ve ever experienced burnout, it’s like hitting a wall. You’re done. You’re mentally and physically wiped out. You’ve lost your capacity to see beyond your present situation. Your life has become gray, devoid of color.

Lisa talks about her experience with burnout and how saying yes too much can contribute to this. This is a great conversational interview that covers a variety of topics that causes stress and burnout in the workplace.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisahammett/
https://www.lisahammett.com/book

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have Lisa Hammett.

Brent: Lisa, go ahead. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you’re doing in a day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in.

Lisa: Thanks, Brent. It’s so nice to be here. I am Lisa Hammett. I am a success and mental fitness coach and I help executives and business owners reduce stress. Hopefully to prevent burnout, but I have helped others get through burnout, by developing mental fitness so they can leave a healthy, happy, productive life.

Lisa: And having been through burnout myself, I am really passionate about helping others get through that because oftentimes when you reach burnout, you feel like you have no hope you’ve hit a wall. I like to equate it to the world kind of goes gray devoid of color and it can really seem like there’s no hope.

Lisa: So I like to give people hope.

Brent: That’s great. And I know that what sparked my interest was that you had a article on LinkedIn and I think it was about just say no. So tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind that and some of the things you found out of that.

Lisa: Absolutely. So one form of stress management is setting healthy boundaries and that falls into the self care equation.

Lisa: And oftentimes when we think of self care, we think of what we eat, how we move our bodies, our sleep water, which are all amazing, but setting healthy boundaries is just as important. And especially for managing stress. So just say no was about how you can set those healthy boundaries and you don’t need to apologize for it.

Brent: in just say, no, your article was directed to both entrepreneurs and employees.

Lisa: Yes,

Brent: absolutely. And maybe speak to how entrepreneurs sometimes would say yes to everything which causes them to have more stress.

Lisa: Oh, I can so relate to that, cuz I’ve been an entrepreneur for quite a while and when you’re hungry and you’re starting your business, you don’t wanna say no because you don’t want to develop a reputation of, oh, I can’t do that.

Lisa: Or, if you’re in the business, Sector. You don’t want people to think that you’re not a team player, but what I have found is when you learn to say no the right way and set those healthy boundaries, it actually commands more respect and you don’t need to apologize for it. In fact, apologizing for it sets a negative example.

Lisa: It’s okay to say no, in fact, it is encouraged.

Brent: Do you think there’s some truth to focusing on a couple of things is better than trying to do everything and by saying no, you’re really just targeting those specific things that you’d like to work on.

Lisa: Absolutely. Absolutely. So somebody explained to me and I thought this was such a unique way of looking at it is, when you say yes.

Lisa: To something you’re actually saying no to something else. So it then begs the question. What are you saying yes to? Are you saying yes to the wrong things, which ties into what you had just asked? Are we focusing on the wrong thing. So we are not able to really drive our business or move forward in a relationship, make positive change in our life.

Lisa: It really begs the question to assess and say, okay, what am I actually saying no to, and should I be saying yes to it a way to shift it a little bit.

Brent: Yeah. And I think there’s some things in there that business owners would say yes and no to, and I want to break it into two parts right now.

Brent: There’s the customer portion of it. And then there’s the inner drive to do something new portion of it. And I think Verne Harnish calls it the shiny object where that thing is making you add something more to your list. Let’s talk about the customer first. You mentioned that they would have more respect for you for saying no.

Brent: Talk, just dive into that a little bit.

Lisa: If you are saying no, from a place of authenticity, you’re not apologizing. And you’re being honest without providing a dissertation, people will respect you because oftentimes other people want to say no as well, but they don’t know how to, or they’re afraid of offending somebody.

Lisa: And when somebody is honest and authentic, it’s very refreshing. For example, when dealing with customers saying something to the effect that. Unfortunately, I cannot do this for you right now, due to X, Y, Z, in my schedule, I want to make sure that I am able to provide you the best service. And by saying yes to this, I won’t be able to do that.

Lisa: Somebody said that to me, I would be thank you. I might be disappointed, but I would be so appreciative because how many times have you been in a situation where somebody told you yes to something and then it surpassed, it went the deadline just kept pushing out and you never got constructive feedback as to what was happening.

Lisa: And it really developed some resentment.

Brent: I think a real life. Way of looking at it for a business owner would be to look at the restaurants that have a list for you to sit down. They are telling you no. You can’t sit down right now because either we don’t have enough room or we don’t have enough staff to handle all this.

Brent: That no, then sets your expectation for when you’re going to be able to eat. There’s a direct correlation with that. That’s more of a quick thing where, Hey it’s gonna be 45 minutes, but I could see all these open tables. Well, we don’t have enough people to cover all those open tables.

Brent: So if we were to seat you, you would still sit there and wait. Do you think there’s a, a way that business owners can work or let me just back up a second, are there some exercises they can work through to help them to understand when they should say no? And when they shouldn’t.

Lisa: That’s a good question.

Lisa: I think a lot of times it boils down to what is most important, and I’m gonna go to the shiny object thing that you were talking about earlier. It’s we get distracted by things that we put too much importance on, so it really boils down to prioritization. And what is of the utmost importance and when we are,

Lisa: squirrel squirrel shiny object. That is not helpful. So sometimes, it’s as simple as doing a brain dump and just writing down. Okay. These are all the different things that need to be accomplished and then start prioritizing them in need to be done now, need to be done. And X number of time can be done later.

Lisa: And. It sounds remedial, but it really does work.

Brent: I think too, the making sure that you, from a customer standpoint, when you do say yes, looking at that entire journey that the customer’s gone through and then going back and doing a little retrospect on how did that actually go and are we serving them in a good way?

Brent: Maybe we could talk a little bit about the monetary side of that. Cause I think a lot of times newer business owners always wanna say yes, and they don’t realize where their profit comes from. And there is a actual monetary value that you could put on saying no. In economics it’s opportunity cost, right?

Brent: So every time you say yes, you’re giving up potential opportunity for a higher revenue. In your coaching, how do you like coach that into somebody that isn’t sometimes very receptive?

Lisa: Oh, gosh, I personally went through this when I lost my lost launched my business. You almost want to be something for everybody and then just see kind of where it sticks, but that doesn’t work.

Lisa: I mean, it’s really more effective to narrow down specifically who your clientele. Is and be very, very specific because oftentimes we get so focused on, oh, here’s something here. Oh, here’s a little bit here. Well, what happens is that just takes time to prevent you from really going after that ideal client it’s just becomes like busy work.

Lisa: If it’s somebody that isn’t really going to help you develop your offering in a sense that can actually help you move forward. Do they have people that they could refer you to? Is it really the, the area that you want to.

Lisa: become involved in, as opposed to, oh, here’s just something that’s gonna get me some money. Does that make sense?

Brent: Yeah, that’s a really good way to look at it. Okay do you think it’s harder to pivot from nos to yeses at some point? And I’ll give you the example. The agency that I run was specifically a Magento agency and Magento’s an eCommerce platform.

Brent: The name of the agency is Wagento. And a couple of years ago, we took on another brand, another partner called BigCommerce. And it was very difficult because we were so hyper focused on the one platform to get people to understand that we’re gonna add another one. So that pivot took a little bit of time.

Brent: Some may argue that, Hey, if I’m so hyperfocused, it’s gonna be harder to branched out when we’re ready to branch out what sort of advice or coaching can you give to somebody like me? Who was so hyperfocused for 10 years?

Brent: And then suddenly I’m like, oh geez. You know, I’m gonna have to do something new. How do I start saying yes again to something.

Lisa: I think having somebody to coach you through the process is really important to have somebody who’s outside of the situation. And I’m not saying actually hire a coach. It could be somebody, a mentor that you really respect.

Lisa: A fellow business owner who has gone through a similar transition, but somebody who can look at it objectively and really provide you with some great feedback because when we are so focused on one thing, it’s really hard sometimes to shift that focus, cuz it’s been so ingrained in us and it served us well, but now we need to take take the lens back and really look at it from a different angle.

Lisa: And I think that’s a good place to start is to find somebody that you respect to help you with that.

Brent: Yeah, I think that’s a lot of businesses do QBR or quarterly business reviews or quarterly business planning. Mm-hmm and when we’ve had a facility come facilitator, come in and help us do that. I feel as though we’ve been way more productive than if we just did it as a leadership team.

Brent: Cuz I think sometimes as you said, it’s hard to see other perspectives without somebody who doesn’t have a perspective to come in and look at it. And maybe some of those questions they ask help you to spark those new questions to ask about your business. I wanna ask specifically then about if how do you coach a business owner to not be defensive when they say, how about this?

Brent: Why aren’t you doing. In EO, we don’t should on people. You should do this. You want to sort of do some experience sharing. Do you find it delicate sometimes when speaking to business owners about some of these topics to help them through that,

Lisa: I think they need to focus on, and I know this can’t always a hundred percent of the time be the case, but

Lisa: oftentimes when we get so focused on a goal and something that is not going right. We just dive in and focus all our energy on what is not going well, instead of really focusing on what is going well. now with that said, I’m not saying put on rose colored glasses, and if you have a problem that needs to be addressed, throw it under the table.

Lisa: Absolutely not. But I think when you’re having a conversation with somebody that. They need some coaching and development. It’s really, it’s starting with their strengths and maybe they’re in a situation that isn’t leaning into their strengths and maybe it needs to be shifted into something else.

Lisa: I think that’s really what needs to be understood first is where is everybody best suited? And sometimes it isn’t the right fit and that can be addressed, but. When you’re leading from strengths personally how does that make you feel when somebody is saying, you know what, Brent, you are so talented at this.

Lisa: It’s just, it’s a real natural fit for you. You did such an exceptional job and X, Y, and Z. So if somebody were to say that to you, how would you feel.

Brent: Obviously it makes me feel a lot better so leading with those type of questions is much better than leading with criticizing questions.

Brent: Right.

Lisa: Right.

Brent: We’ve talked about the kind of customer dynamic as a business owner. The other dynamic, a lot of business owners have, would be I’m gonna rescue everything. And then suddenly. If you have a team of 20 people or 50 people or a hundred people, your bandwidth becomes completely lost because you’ve now said yes to your entire team to rescuing them instead of helping to enable your team

Brent: to solve some of the problems. How do you work through that type of situation where you want to encourage the business owner to delegate some of that work? It might even come from a lack of trust in your team to solve those problems. But I, and again, then you need to lead with the strength.

Brent: How do you encourage them? Not to say yes to everyth.

Lisa: That’s oh, that’s a great question. And I’m gonna lean into Brene Brown, who I just think is phenomenal. And she talks a lot about this type of thing in Dare to Lead, but it’s, it starts with first of all, creating a safe space for people to be vulnerable and authentic and to be able to share when they are struggling and

Lisa: if your culture does not have that type of environment then situations like you just described arise. And the manager for whatever reason, supervisor, business owner may not feel like they have confidence because they’re not having open ended dialogue with their team and they’re not encouraging that.

Lisa: So they’re feeling compelled that they have to do everything themselves. Well, that’s not an effective leader. I mean a leader is taking the spotlight off of themselves and developing and encouraging their team. So again, it starts with having that open, honest culture where you can share ideas without judgment and criticism, which can be challenging.

Lisa: But when you have that starting ground things really start to

Brent: shift. Do you think there’s the opposite problem of somebody who’s giving credit to somebody else all the time, even though that person didn’t do it,

Lisa: so like favoritism and

Brent: nepotism, that type of thing, not favoritism, but I I’ll be honest that a lot of times I like to give credit to somebody else for an idea because it makes everybody look better, but.

Brent: Maybe, I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud right now. Maybe it’s not a great idea to give ever, or talk to them in, I suppose, in advance and say, Hey, this is a great idea. And I feel like you came up with it. I’m gonna give you credit for it. Well, I

Lisa: think it’s important to give credit where credit is due, you know, and that is really, what’s going to build the authentic, open, honest

Lisa: environment, because if you’re starting, if you’re doing that and giving credit where it’s not fully due, other people are gonna start to pick up on it. They may not initially, but then it will start to cause resentment. So I understand why maybe once in a while you might want to, but it’s not a good practice to be in.

Lisa: And I’m not saying as a business leader to say, oh, I’m so awesome. I did this, blah, blah, blah. In fact, if anything, even if you did do something exceptional that shouldn’t come from you that should be noticed by other people and not, you should not. Toting that yourself, because that’s really demotivating to your staff.

Brent: Yeah. Is there something around the business owner, always being in the savior?

Lisa: Yes. It, that’s not a good thing either. They need to be there to support if something goes wrong, but if you are developing your staff the way they need to be developed then you shouldn’t have to save them if they do something that maybe they shouldn’t have, or they made an error, or it could have been done better.

Lisa: They can recognize that and learn from that and they don’t need saving. Does that make sense?

Brent: Mm-hmm yeah, that’s a good way to put it. As a business owner, if I am overwhelmed with a certain thing, but I don’t know how to ask for help. Is there keys and is there coaching things that you could tell me to say, Hey, you know, and I think too, as business owners, sometimes we don’t feel like we wanna be that vulnerable to say, I can’t do this.

Brent: I’m gonna need help. Is there ways that I could express my myself better to say, you know, I’m a hundred percent on this. I don’t have any more capacity. How can you help me? Or can.

Lisa: So I think that goes back into, if you’re in a situation where you can go to a mentor to help that. That’s awesome.

Lisa: Now, if you are needing to share this with your staff, you can do it in such a way where it doesn’t come across, that you are floundering because you still want to appear. I don’t wanna say stable. Don’t give a false sense of impression, but you want to be reliable to people, but you know, if you are really asking for authenticity, you in turn need to be authentic as well.

Lisa: And that doesn’t mean saying, oh, I can’t do this, blah, blah, blah. You know, but if finding a way to maybe integrate somebody else into the equation to help manage the load. so to speak Does that make sense? Yeah. And then when it actually comes down to maybe if you’re starting to feel as a business owner, overwhelm yourself, that’s where I illustrate mental fitness and how that can really help by shifting all that negative energy, which is in your left analytical side of the brain, which

Lisa: stems fear and anxiety and stress and overwhelmed that all comes from your left side, quieting it so that you can then transfer your focus to the positive right side of your brain. So you can be a little more clearheaded because oftentimes when we get in that space of being overwhelmed, we’re not clearheaded.

Lisa: It just snowballs and then we start over dramatizing in our mind and assuming that, oh my goodness this could happen. Well our thoughts are not facts. 99% of the time we tend to overdramatize them. So this just kind of grounds us. So especially if you have to have a difficult conversation with

Lisa: a person that you are working with an employer or mentor, whatever. It’s always good to come from that positive right. Side brain.

Brent: Does that make sense? Yeah. And I’m left handed, so I’m using my right side all the time. As you know, as you were talking about that, I remember myself, let’s just say 10 years ago or five years ago, even that.

Brent: When I felt overwhelmed, I would start lashing out at people by saying, I can’t do this anymore. Or, I think that the emotional side sometimes comes out and that and employees don’t absolutely can’t and don’t understand that. I think one of the things I read was emotional EQ 2.0, which was a great book.

Brent: And going through that book and learning more about my emotions and how those emotions affect your team, helped me through some of that. And I’ve realized as we’re talking now that it’s been five, six years since I’ve experienced that overwhelmingness. That has caused me to start lashing out at people about whatever the issue is.

Brent: So, not that I’m fixed, but I can now relate to the fact that I’m not that I don’t experience that anymore.

Lisa: right. And that’s a, oh, that’s not a fun position to be in, but you know that we are emotional beings and when all that negative emotion bubbles up, that is one of the responses that happens.

Lisa: And yeah, if that is not managed oh, that can create a toxic mess.

Brent: So. And just as a facilitator side of things we, as a group hired a facilitator to facilitate that book. And there’s some tests. If you read the book, there’s a test you can take in the beginning and then they would like you to go through a bunch of exercises and take another test.

Brent: So it was a great experience. And I would encourage any anybody business owner or not to read the book and do some of those exercises because I feel as though. I even thought maybe anger was a good tool to use. Cuz you think about coaches and you look at a coach in a locker room and they’re yelling at their players, right.

Brent: at some point that doesn’t work anymore. And I think that’s not the most effective way of coaching your team yelling and getting angry with them. and that the book itself, that was one of the big things that I got out of. that’s awesome. I wanna switch gears now to the to the employer, employee relationship mm-hmm and the fact that some employees work a lot and they, they tend to not say new, no to their employer.

Brent: And there is a little bit of a conundrum in there. Like I am a results person. So I would expect less. I would love it if everybody worked less than 40 hours. If we were all in Europe, we all work 35 hours when we get August off plus another two weeks. Right. But in America it’s different, right?

Brent: We’re all expected to work 60 hours a week and not take your vacation. So there is a conundrum in there and I think the specific conundrum comes down to you want your people to work no more than 40 hours, but let’s just say somebody’s worked 40 hours on Thursday already. Do you expect them to work on Friday?

Lisa: That’s a really good question. I think it depends on the business and what is happening, you if there’s been a lot of turnover, it’s not ideal. Let’s kind of go backwards a bit. So let’s just say you are starting a new position at a company and you were informed that this is the expectation of the number of hours that you

Lisa: should work in order to get your job done. Well, if you start from day one, when you’re there telling everybody, oh, I’ll work the weekend. Oh, I have no problem working over time. Oh, I’ll take my laptop home with me and do this. You’re putting this expectation on yourself and sharing that with others.

Lisa: So then they will just come to assume. Well, this individual has expressed that this is not a problem, so they will continue to hold you to that expectation. And before you know it, you have no boundaries. You’re 24 7, you’re taking your laptop on vacation. So you’re not really on a full vacation, so

Lisa: that is one thing that needs to be established upfront, and again, I’m not saying that in particular situations that maybe you are open to stepping up, but. You’re the one who sets that expectation up front. So don’t set the wrong expectation. And then if it gets to a situation where there’s staffing issues and there’s not enough people, and you’re doing the job of three people, If it’s getting to the point where you’re starting to get chronic stress, it’s impacting your work life balance, and you are working as hard as you can, but you need help.

Lisa: Then you have to say something. You can’t just, oh, well, no I can’t say anything. That’s gonna make me appear weak. No, you have to ask for help. I’m not saying you’re always going to get it, but you have to ask for help. And it’s how you ask for help. It’s kind of with the solution in mind, it’s like if you’re presenting a problem to somebody you don’t wanna just appear, like you’re a complainer, you want to provide a solution as well.

Lisa: That solution may note be taken into account, but at least it’s going to show that you’re trying to be proactive and you’re not sitting there complaining.

Brent: I think that there’s a dynamic there where the employee may not have the skills to be able to delegate yet as a coach

Brent: how would you encourage them to do some of that delegation work.

Lisa: I think it really boils down to sitting down with them and, okay. So where is the fear coming from? Is it a fear that, oh my gosh, I am going to look like I can’t do my job if I delegate it or is it not going to be done right. Because I’m delegating it. So it’s really looking that fear in the face and then working on moving through it because fear ultimately can paralyze all of us

Lisa: at any point in time. And that’s the, one of the largest reasons why people do not achieve goals is fear. It’s either fear of success, fear of failure. And it can manifest in very weird ways like procrastination, or you become a hyper achiever because you won’t delegate and you have to keep doing it all yourself.

Brent: Do you think the other problem in that is, is also. The employee has so much to do that they couldn’t possibly be successful at everything they’ve been. They’ve said yes to doing.

Lisa: In some cases that might be the case. Certainly the working world is very different today than it was.

Lisa: I know when I started decades ago, it’s very different. And especially now as we still try to get through the whole pandemic issue and the whole flexible workspace and it’s just it’s constantly evolving into different things. So it, that could be. But not always.

Brent: And just to be clear, you and I have both established that we’re both in our mid twenties, so yes, decades we’ve been working since we were five years

Lisa: old.

Lisa: yes. We’re amazing humans that way.

Brent: absolutely. Lisa, we are running out of time here quickly. As we close out the podcast, I give everybody, a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug today?

Lisa: Well, thank you for that opportunity. So I have a book, it’s my first book that I am publishing next month.

Lisa: That’ll be mid month and it’s From Burnout to Best Life. And it integrates my story of reaching burnout and how I overcame burnout, but it’s really a guide to your happiest, healthiest life. So after I went through burnout, I started my personal health and wellness journey and I lost 65 pounds. And I have been a health coach for many years.

Lisa: And then during the pandemic, I added the life coaching piece of it as well. So the book encompasses both areas. So it talks about healthy eating, and diet and everything, but also like we discussed fear. How do you deal with fear? Setting healthy boundaries? A lot of the topics that we discussed are in the book.

Lisa: I am starting speaking engagements. I’ve been doing podcasts, but I’m actually doing a Ted talk coming out at the end of August. So really looking at the book as a way to just get speaking engagements and just kind of open doors. So that’s, what’s

Brent: happening with. Yeah. So let’s definitely do a another interview when your book comes out and we can dive into more of these topics.

Brent: It’s been a, it’s been very interesting and just as we close out too, I am a running coach. And so physical. And I recognize how important that mental aspect is to especially running. But even last night I had a conversation with another coach and I was asking about something and he said, I think you need to work on your mental toughness because a lot of times we think we can’t do something and as I’m running and I’m in a long run, I always say to people, I think running is

Brent: 90% mental and the other 15% is in your head. Then I wait for the reaction some, and it depends how well they’re doing or not, but it is a lot of that. And I think you’ve really illustrated how important a lot of these things are from a mental standpoint to be healthy. And how if we’re putting our employees under so much stress that.

Brent: Really degradates and it just didn’t people are gonna find a new place that is less stressful. The great resignation is telling us that people would like to be stress free rather than stressful.

Lisa: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I hundred percent agree with you. It’s I tell people all the time it’s, if your head’s not in the game, you’re not gonna be successful.

Lisa: And you have to visualize, you have to believe that what you want to achieve will happen and really have a clear mental picture. And when you do, you can be successful.

Brent: Lisa Hammett thank you so much for being here today at thank you. I look forward to another conversation when your book comes.

Brent: Thank

Lisa: you so much. This has been great. I appreciate it.

The 90/10 rule with Jeff J Hunter

April 14, 2023August 9, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

I can do it faster myself. It will take too long to teach someone to do it. I don’t trust that the person will do a good enough job. You must learn to elevate and delegate if you have said any of these statements. @jhunter101 Jeff J Hunter helps us to understand the importance of getting S#!t off your plate.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce today I have jeff J. Hunter. Jeff, why don’t you go ahead and do a much better introduction than I just did? Tell us what you do in your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life.

Jeff: I’m a huge IT nerd. I’ve always been in IT my entire life started a computer store that I used to work at for free back at my high school days. And then I ended up becoming a it guy for a networking company in a health and wellness center. And then I became an it guy for a school. And then I became the it coordinator for the whole school district.

Jeff: And then I became an it project manager for each fortune 500 Phillips electronics. And I literally build virtual teams. That’s what I’ve done pretty much my whole life and turns out it’s a pretty important thing to do. These days, I was just telling you before the show that back in 2019, I used to have to convince business owners why they should hire remotely.

Jeff: And after COVID happened I got tapped by pretty much everyone to be their kind of remote team expert. I have a column at entrepreneur.com. I talk about virtual teams and personal brand. I’m officially faculty at digitalmarketer.com on how to build remote agencies. And I’ve definitely helped build out teams for, everything from real estate to e-com to

Jeff: every type of business you could think of. I have 170 team members, mostly in the Philippines. We’re a Filipino virtual assistant company called VA staffer which is now up to about 2.7 million in revenue. And that’s me in a

Brent: nutshell. All right. Thanks for that. So I know that we did talk a little bit about

Brent: pre pandemic. And there was a lot of resistance from employers to build out remote teams. I’ve been in the Magento space for almost 15 years now. And I think there was a necessity in our space that you had to build remote teams because of the lack of talent.

Brent: So maybe go into some of the reasons other than lack of talent in your local area, where you need to build a remote team.

Jeff: I think that’s very valid. I think that, when you hire remotely, you obviously can tap into resources that are not local. For example, I live in a very small 50,000, maybe 80,000 person town in central California, like it’s near Tracy, California.

Jeff: It’s a very small area. The closest, I am an hour and a half away from the bay area, in all reality, like my talent sources are limited. And I think most people actually are now. I also think that there’s another advantage here that we’re not talking about, which is the American work ethos.

Jeff: Where that’s progressed. I think that over time American has become more entrepreneurial. America’s always been very entrepreneurial, but I feel like right now there’s a huge movement in America for like side hustles and things like that. And and especially in a field that we’re not talking about that much, which is personal assistance and executive assistance, which is something that

Jeff: it used to be an incredible career, right? Like in the sixties, seventies you’d have assistants. Everyone had an assistant and nowadays it’s very challenging to find people for those types of support roles. And another reason why I really like the Philippines is because they have a very strong work ethic.

Jeff: They have a very like service, heart mentality. Also in the Philippines, it’s like a really amazing role that people look up to, to become an executive assistant to a founder CEO here in America. It’s like an awesome thing compared to in America, when you hire someone to be a personal assistant or an executive assistant, they say, cool, what’s next?

Brent: Do you think the Philippines are two virtual assistants like India is to technology talent?

Jeff: I think so.

Jeff: Although I have learned a couple things along the way. Here’s probably a valued nugget for your listeners. One is I don’t hire virtual assistants. virtual assistant, no matter where you are in the world are typically like entrepreneurs, they’re usually. Managing multiple clients, they’re servicing multiple clients.

Jeff: They have multiple retainers. And for me, I want dedicated people that are committed to me. We’re a permanent staffing solution. So like we build teams, we have people that have worked for the same client that have been on my, that have been in my client lists since 2014, we still have clients that have the same VA.

Jeff: So it’s I guess in all reality, what I do is I actually go out to like technical support call centers, like Uber, Microsoft, Shopify, Canva, right? Like I go to these types of technology companies and I find people that are like, Two years, three years of tenure, they usually work in six days a week.

Jeff: They’re usually getting mandatory overtime. Non-paid mandatory overtime, by the way, they usually have to commute. And then I just simply give them the pitch, which is, Hey, how would you like to learn how to become an executive assistant or a virtual assistant to these awesome companies here based in America.

Jeff: And you’re gonna make two to three times more than you’re getting paid right now. And you can work from home. In your pajamas. That’s how we get them to stick around. Cuz I, I think that, I think the real issue Brett is that retention rate. I think that’s the one thing that you really have to think about remotely is the retention rate.

Brent: Yeah, I know that we’ve hired quite a few people in Mexico and it has been a challenge in the developer world anyways to keep people from moving from job to job. In certain markets, there is a strong a strong, I don’t know what, I don’t know what the word I want to use, but, Trying to get somebody else’s talent, nabbing, your talent or whatever you wanna say.

Brent: So I know that recruitment, yeah. Recruitment is a much better word to use. So yeah, I, so maybe some secrets around how do you keep that talent staying there?

Jeff: Yeah. First off one, one thing’s for sure. You cannot treat people like. A clock in clock out employee. As a matter of fact, if you’re hiring people overseas, you’re not gonna have them be employees.

Jeff: Anyway, they’re gonna be a contractor. They’re gonna be what’s called a W8BEN W8BEN is a form. You have them fill out that they’re not a us resident. or citizen. And thus, they are not held liable or you’re not held liable to us tax law. So another benefit they actually make it very difficult to hire Americans.

Jeff: These days they’re getting so more expensive. just hire, especially the low wage people. If you’re hiring. A tech stack developer, a hundred K or whatever but if you’re trying to find just like low level, I here in California, where the minimum wage where I’m at is about $15 an hour.

Jeff: I. It really hurts the economy in all reality, because, and the sad part is these laws are meant to help people that are the most vulnerable young people in, maybe minority communities, they’re meant to be like, Hey, look, you’re gonna start out great with a great job, but here’s the problem is business owners have to evaluate what kind of return am I gonna get for a $15?

Jeff: They’re not gonna take their chances on some Joe Schmo. They’re not gonna take some chances. They’re gonna find someone who maybe has some experience or whatever else is they’re gonna pay 15 bucks an hour. So the people that need it the most are not able to get jobs. But anyway, the point that I’m getting at is, as far as retention goes, I try to keep things results based, not clock in clock out.

Jeff: So when it comes to results based you say, okay, what does it for? So in the E eCom space, for example, let’s say I built out teams to do e-com fulfillment. We have a bunch of stores. I have a guy who’s got a huge Trump store. Who’s just killing it. And it’s all drop ship. It’s all drop ship, Amazon fulfillment.

Jeff: They get hundreds of orders a day. They have a VA who basically goes in there, gets into their Amazon account, sets up the drop ship orders. Boom easy. Here’s another thing it’s very hard to find Americans that would be satisfied every day, going into an Amazon account and shipping drop ship orders.

Jeff: It’s like very a low level task. So I think that, setting the right expectations and having it results based, how many orders they should be able to fulfill per day rather than, Hey here’s the amount of hours you should work and that’s gonna go a lot.

Brent: isn’t that Amazon model, the exact model that Amazon uses in their warehouses to show productivity. And I know that there’s been a lot of talk about how busy and how that, that you have to be in motion all the time at an Amazon warehouse.

Jeff: Yeah, they have stories. They have stories about people who like pee and water bottles because they don’t have enough time to run to the bathroom and pack or something.

Jeff: obviously I do not condone that. I’m just saying that obviously they have results based stuff and it’s the same thing with their prime shipping model. Like they have their, like you can see every package, what like the, they know exactly what drivers are doing because they can see it.

Jeff: They got GPS, they got the little blub-blup, they got a picture everything’s results based. And I feel like right now we’re moving into results based, or even a show me economy.

Brent: Yeah. Do you think there’s a little bit of a trade off between just hourly and then results based. Some people are motivated to work a little too hard even.

Jeff: Yeah. I’ve actually had to have a real talk over the past year with my leadership team. I have nine people that run this company, VA staffer and actually technically have five people. And then four of those people have an assistant. Including my assistant. So I guess that’s 10 people, but what I’ve learned is that there is a little bit of a trade off.

Jeff: And I also learned that I don’t like to have caps on my people. I want them to be able to earn as much as they can whether that’s, if they, what if they need to put in extra time or whatever. I also reward my team. For example, Jacqueline, my assistant, she does a kick ass job. Hey, you did fantastic today.

Jeff: It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. We’ve done for the day. We’ve done the to-do list. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? There’s little leadership nuggets like that, that make people like, wow, this guy is really cool to work for. If you’re the kind of guy who has your assistant work an hour, two hours overtime every day and never actually say, Hey, thank you so much for your what doing take the rest of the day off, whatever, like you’re setting yourself up for

Brent: failure.

Brent: Yeah. That’s a really good point. And having some of those expectations up front and what to expect at the end are so important, especially as a manager. So I would imagine then when you’re helping a company build a remote team, do you have a roadmap you’d walk ’em through to be successful in that.

Jeff: Yeah. So we usually start, and this is it’s funny, cuz it’s backwards. Most people think oh I, when they hire somebody, they have this whole laundry list of things they want them to do. I call that what I call the miracle trap. Like you wanna find this miracle virtual assistant, that’s gonna do everything for you.

Jeff: What that does is it burns them out and you’re also gonna find out they don’t like doing a lot of this stuff. So what I like to do is I figure out like, what is it that this person really likes to do. Like for example, because we specialize in executive assistance. We have what we have something called an experiential hiring process. But experiential hiring process means that we actually have tests of things that they would be asked to do for their real job. For example, one of them is taking meeting minutes.

Jeff: I have my assistant on all my calls. She’s matter of fact, she’s probably feeling weird right now that she’s not on this call because it’s a podcast interview, so she’s not needed. But on every other call throughout my day, I know that my assistant is trained on doing, taking medium. So the experiential hiring process, I have a 15 minute call where we give them a template of here’s the meeting minute templates. I don’t give them a lot of instructions cuz see, I don’t actually hire skill based. This is something that’s gonna blow people’s minds.

Jeff: I don’t care what’s on your resume to me. That’s what you’ve shown you can do. And by the way, I’ve also learned that B and C players. They’re good at copy and pasting A player resumes. I wanna see what you can do. And more importantly, I wanna see what you can learn. So I want adaptability on the forefront.

Jeff: How fast are you able to learn something new? I give them a blank document on Google docs. It has attendees objective of the call. What we talked about. Action items. Very simple. That’s what every call we have, and there’s a call it’s on zoom, it’s recorded and we send them the link. We tell them to listen to the call and fill in the form and we see what they’re able to take away.

Jeff: And that’s a really great way to see what someone’s comprehension is. Comprehension’s key. We hire people based on three things, their adaptability, their work ethic. And if they actually give a damn.

Brent: Is there a certain type of person that fits that well, or is it pretty much anybody that you can find.

Jeff: I like people that already work for American tech support companies, because half the battle is finding people that work on your time zone. If you’re recruiting from the Philippines, you wanna find people that are gonna work in your time zone as an American, which is half the battle, cuz they’ll fall asleep. So what I wanna do is I find people that already work during American hours at call centers, Uber, like I said earlier, Shopify Canva, and people that have already been trained by Americans because I know American obviously have really strong work ethic and standards, especially in training.

Jeff: And if I hire somebody from Google, Shopify. I know that they’re coming really well prepared already, and that they have good standards of their companies. So I might be one of those culprits recruiters that keeps stealing amazing people. But at the end of the day I have no problems with it cuz I know how much they get paid and I know how much more I pay them.

Jeff: And I’m proud to say that the majority of my team at VA staffer gets paid more than anyone ever has in their entire family generationally.

Brent: I know that’s it’s a great way to keep retention as well is to pay them a, an extremely fair wage. Yeah. So maybe going back to just the reasons why why an entrepreneur or a business owner shouldn’t focus a hundred percent on clock in clock out.

Jeff: Yeah, I think especially remotely, you’re not able to be there and babysit ’em, you can’t sit there in a, you’re not looking at ’em through the cubicle glass. So you have to have metrics that you can measure to see if they’re actually performing that’s the bottom line.

Jeff: So for example, let’s go back to that Amazon fulfillment, cuz I’m sure everyone listening to this show knows a little bit about, e-com knows a little bit about fulfillment. If you know that someone’s gonna be able to do 10 to 15 order fulfillments in an hour. That’s obviously just a whack number, let’s say 10.

Jeff: So you know that they should be able to fulfill about 80 orders a day. So like order fulfillment, and if they get a hundred fantastic. So as long as you keep like metrics, that people are doing what they’re expected and you also wanna keep people motivated to learn and grow and develop.

Jeff: And I think that’s something that we all have to think about. Remember this the first day that you hire someone is gonna be the least valuable they’re ever going to be. They’re going to grow. They’re gonna become faster. They’re gonna learn more, unlike a computer or a car or whatever else that depreciates, they’re going to appreciate value.

Brent: And how do you give them space to continue to learn? So let’s just say that you bring on new technology. Do you make sure that they have enough time outside of their say 80 orders a day? They’re gonna be able to learn this new part of this piece.

Jeff: Yeah. So this is a very simple hack. Usually it’s us that figure stuff out.

Jeff: We’re the crazy entrepreneurs in our business. And we’re gonna do the work anyway. I just pop on a zoom call and I say, Hey, come on the zoom, call the suit together. So the only difference is I’m doing the work anyway. The only difference is I’m turning my microphone on and I’m explaining it and I’ll record it if I need to.

Jeff: So they have a little tutorial and then here’s the key that most people forget. Come back on the zoom call. Have them do it and you watch you just flip roles and that way, you know that they’ve got it. And then if they don’t get it, you don’t, they don’t mess something up because you’re watching it. You can say whoa, hold on a second.

Jeff: don’t forget to click that, fulfillment tab, the, don’t forget to turn off the white, to click the white label tab. We don’t want that to know it’s

Brent: coming from Amazon. I know that earlier too, you had mentioned a 90 10 rule. Maybe dive into that and explain that.

Jeff: Yeah. The nine, 10 rule is something I found out about myself in 2016 when I was actually working at my corporate job. And this was like my side hustle, VA staffer. It was just fun. But when I was working at Phillips I started realizing that as a project manager, 40% to 50% of my time, wasn’t actually managing projects.

Jeff: It was. Doing documentation that sucked. I hate documentation. So I actually ended up hiring somebody to do documentation for me and they were awesome. And I found them somewhere in Pakistan or something like that. This was before I knew what I was doing. I didn’t even know about the Philippines.

Jeff: When I hired somebody in Pakistan who actually had a project management certification and I couldn’t believe it actually, cuz I was a project manager and I didn’t have that certification. So to find someone overseas for $5 an hour that had that certification, which requires you to do 4,000 hours of project management documented, I was like, this is unbelievable.

Jeff: I started thinking like, what other things could I outsource? What other things could I. and the documentation came back amazing. I ended up becoming in the first 12 months of working there. I became one of the top five project managers nationwide out of 95 project managers in the company.

Jeff: And that was when I started realizing that, my most effective use of time isn’t doing documentation. So then I started thinking, what are other. That I’m spending my time on that. Aren’t my zone of genius that aren’t really, like basically I felt like I was kicking the rocks instead of pushing the Boulder.

Jeff: So I just started finding ways to maximize what my most valuable use of time is, which I’ve learned over the years now is marketing. And sales. That’s my best use of time coming on. These shows coming on these podcasts, talking about stuff, obviously people are gonna be like, wow, Jeff, you really did a great job on the show.

Jeff: I wanna learn more about getting a virtual assistant. Like this is the best use of my time. This is my only job, my entire company hiring, firing, managing recruiting, training, performance evaluations, video editing, graphic design, web design. I don’t do any of that. I have a whole team of 170 people that do all that for me.

Jeff: And my only job is to show up and talk about them. that’s it. So the 90 90/10 rule is about delegating that 90% of stuff in your life. That is, it is important, but not important that you do it. So you can focus on the 10% that really drives the business.

Jeff: forward

Brent: I know that I think it’s Verne, Harnish in Traction has a concept called letting go of the vine.

Brent: For any entrepreneur that is such a good value statement to make that you need to find ways to let go of some of those things and just trust the process that you’ve built. I know you also mentioned just an operating procedure that would help build out that process for a business owner.

Brent: Maybe dive into that really quick.

Jeff: Yeah. What I do is that anytime I want to teach something new to my team members is I will literally do a zoom call and I’ll record it and then I’ll have them go back and document the process, take screenshots, things like that. And then I’ll review the SOP together with them.

Jeff: We’ll pop back on a zoom call. They lead the call. They go through the SOP and then we reviewed it to make sure if it has any mistakes. And I’ll tell you, it’s funny, cuz you learn a lot about the SOP process. I call them freedom recipes by the way. And the reason why is because it’s like for me I’m a horrible cook.

Jeff: I hamburgers mistakes I can do. All right. I got a pellet grill. I can set the temperature. It’s easy. I set it and forget it. But when it comes to like baking cake or whatever, I’m trash. But, my mom’s got this cookbook. All right. And it tells me exactly what to do. It tells me I need flour. I need eggs.

Jeff: I need sugar. I need cinnamon. I need some nutmeg. I don’t know. I’m making some eggnog, maybe but the point is that I’m putting it in the oven. I got this bowl. It says to set it in the oven, 17 minutes for 350 degrees. And guess what? Doesn’t matter how bad you are, if your ingredients are right and you follow the instructions step by step, it will come out

Jeff: at least 99% of the time, the. You might drop an eggshell or something in there. But for the most part, if you’re doing the, if you’re following the recipe, you’re gonna get the same result. And that’s the key, by the way. That’s the key with delegation is getting reliability and repeatable excellence.

Jeff: Cuz I think that’s where people fall short is they’re not able to have a reliable system in place. And reliable people in place to finally remove yourself from doing something because you don’t trust the people and you don’t have a good process. The people, the process, I’m starting to sound like Marcus Laona right.

Jeff: You gotta have the people, the process and the product . But that’s the key.

Brent: Yeah. I bet the hardest part is educating the business owner on why they need to delegate these tasks out and even helping them find those tasks to delegate out. Cuz some people think everything I’m doing is so important that I’m just gonna keep doing it.

Jeff: There’s three lies. Okay. I’m gonna call ’em flat out lies that I hear every business owner. Okay. These are the objections. Whenever people come to me like, oh, I really need a VA one. They tell me that it’s faster and easier if I do it myself. Yeah, it probably is. But let me ask you something, you got somebody who’s doing it 80% and it frees up a hundred percent of your time.

Jeff: Let’s say you get two people and they both do it 80%. now you’ve got 160% results. And by the way, did I mention having someone in the Philippines even for us at VA staffer, it’s $1,500 a month for a full time person, what is your time where that’s nine bucks an hour, not even nine bucks an hour that’s insane to think that you are your own secretary for something that somebody could do

Jeff: as effectively if some by the way, I have people on my team that are way better than me. So we’re talking about above a hundred percent because I’m not good at it, period. So I think that, that’s lie. Number one, number two is that no, one’s gonna care about it. As much as me, man, my assistant Jacqueline cares about my to-do list

Jeff: way more than me. there’s she sent me a message yesterday and said, boss, we’re over halfway done with with July. And you still have these things from the to-do lists from last month, we probably should get this done. And I’m just like putting it off ah, like I’ll get around to it.

Jeff: So that’s line number two, line number three is that you suck it delegating and it would take more time for you to teach them how to do it than to do it yourself. Ooh. See that’s the key. And that’s why I say there’s no excuse with zoom calls, cuz you’re already doing the work. Same with emails, like emails and stuff like, oh, I can’t have, that was actually really hard for me..

Jeff: Okay. The delegating emails was actually really hard for me because like I’m a control freak. So I actually, every day for about a week, we just went into my emails and I told her, Hey, here’s what I would do with this. Here’s how I’d respond to this. This is trash, this is spam, whatever. And if they’re not sure about it, message me.

Jeff: If they’re not sure about it message me. And I think that building that trust and having someone who grows with you in the business is one of the most important things you can do. As a matter of fact, the first two hires I tell every business owner should be an executive assistant and a copywriter

Brent: I can say from experience I’m in an entrepreneurial group and one of my forum members has an assistant and she is doing I where’s 10 of us in our group and I swear that this assistant’s doing most of the work for our group.

Jeff: Truth be told Brent my assistant is the one who set up this call for us.

Jeff: Yeah, she’s on my LinkedIn. She’s sending you the pitch. She said, Hey, this is what I talk about on the show. Like that’s, by the way, that’s a process that I built. I said, Hey, let’s engage with these people. I tell them, Hey, go into people, be genuine and listen to their latest podcast. I actually have my assistant listen to a portion of your show.

Jeff: So she gave you some feedback on the show like, Hey, whatever, you’re. Previous guest was great show. She likes it. She added you a connection request saying that she liked the show. And then after you come back, Hey, thanks for connecting. We should talk about this on the show. And you’re like, yeah, you know what,

Jeff: that sounds genuine. And I think my audience would get something out of it. That’s all stuff that you can build out. If you have someone who’s reliable that you can trust. And I think that’s the real problem today. It’s really hard for people to find. I don’t know if you know this Brent, but right now in the tech space I think you, you already said something about this with the developer, but right now in the tech space, the tenure of a team member is only 1.8 years on average.

Jeff: So imagine dumping all of your time, all of your resources, all your training brain dumping for a year and a half, and then find out at 18 months that person is gone.

Brent: That’s super expensive to keep hiring. And I know that we’re in Minneapolis where the employment rate is less than 2% right now.

Brent: So talent is very hard to get. So you’re exactly right. And I think, maybe just as we’ve got a few minutes here, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind, not that higher fire mentality, but that trying to keep somebody on consistently is so important.

Jeff: Yeah, I think that it goes back to what I said earlier.

Jeff: It’s about building that trust. It’s let me give it an analogy here. We are entrepreneurs we’re we wear a lot of hats. Now I’m wearing my VA staffer hat. I’ve got all these other hats here. I have my Savage marketer hat right here. That’s my podcast, which I should have you on my show by the way.

Jeff: And what do we do as entrepreneurs? We put everything on our plate. We have a lot of stuff on our plate. And when you hire somebody, especially an assistant, what happens is you’re gonna say, okay, cool. I wanna focus. Remember that nine, 10 rule. I wanna focus on these important things, these 10%. So what you do is you’re starting to delegate.

Jeff: You’re starting to take your stuff off the 90% plate, and you’re starting to pass it over to your assistant. You’re passing it over to your assistant. You’re passing. Next thing you. Especially around that 50 50 mark. We’re like, oh my gosh. My day is so much better right now. Like they’re doing 50% of the work.

Jeff: I’m doing 50% of the work. What do entrepreneurs do?

Brent: They work all the time. Yeah. They start

Jeff: filling their plate back up. So now you got 50% over here and you got 50% over here, but then guess what happens? We’re like, oh, now I have more time to spend with my family. Oh, now I have more time to go to these networking events and masterminds.

Jeff: Oh, now I have time to launch this course. I’ve been putting off. Oh, now I have time to start doing more content marketing and stuff, right? Oh, Hey, I’m gonna start a podcast. So now you’re back to a hundred percent, but it’s all a hundred percent things that you wanna do. And this person’s over here doing 50% now, guess what happens when you don’t have that reliability?

Jeff: And that person goes away. Now you’ve gone from a hundred percent and 50. And now you’re taking all that work back. So now you’re doing 150% and you have to go through hiring again to find someone to train, to do the other 50%. And so you can go back to a hundred percent. That’s the freaking story that I hear every time.

Jeff: And I can tell you this, our client retention rate is 97.2%. There’s not a single time in my entire career of eight years of VA staffer has a client ever come to me and said, you know what, Jeff, I don’t think this VA’s gonna work out because I really miss doing my own emails. And I really miss taking my own meeting minutes and I really miss doing my own order fulfillment, like never

Brent: Actually my name isn’t really Brent. And I’m just Brent’s assistant. So you liar ,

Jeff: I’m a liar. Yes.

Brent: I do find it interesting now that I know. Because you did said you listened to the episode with Taran Giselle and that you are gonna do an Ironman now. So that’s fantastic. Want my help in doing that?

Brent: So I appreciate that your assistant added all those extra details in oh, that’s horrible. You’re training for your first Ironman. Which I think was Coeur d’alene that they said you were doing so very exciting.

Jeff: I’ve been to coeur d’alene it’s a beautiful place. yeah. Good. But yeah. But

Jeff: that’s a great place because see, people don’t know the context of this funny conversation we’re having right now, but I’ve never ran in my entire life, except for maybe when I was in high school. And it was like required physical education class. Okay. And by the way, I grew up in a really poor area called Mooresville, North Carolina, which it’s better now.

Jeff: But back then, NASCAR cap, the world, my school was so poor that they Bused us over to Duke university to do our mandatory physical education, cuz we didn’t have a track but now here I am turning 40 this year and I’ve ran more than I ever have in my entire life. As a matter of fact, I’m looking at my total distance here, which I think you’re gonna be very proud of by the way.

Jeff: Right now, for those of you who are listening in I’ll rate off the numbers. But I have ran in the past 20 days, 54.7 kilometers. I’ve ran 76 times and I’ve ran a total of 9.93 almost 10 hours. And I’ve lost 10 pounds by the way.

Brent: That’s great. Wow, fantastic. Good. So that, that you’re getting ready for that Ironman.

Brent: And that’s so exciting. So as we close out the show, I always give everybody a chance to give a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. Yeah, Jeff, what would you like to plug

Jeff: today? I’d love to connect with you guys on LinkedIn. Jeff J. Hunter on LinkedIn. If you are, thinking about, if you hear this and say, you know what, I probably need an assistant.

Jeff: You can check out VA staffer.com, schedule a strategy call on there. It’s completely free. And by the way, my team’s job is to disqualify you. We’re very picky. We only actually take on about five to 10 clients a month because that’s, it’s hard to hire at the rate as finding really good people is very hard.

Jeff: We’re probably just as picky in hiring people as we are finding clients. I’ve definitely learned that there’s many times in life where I should have never taken somebody’s money. So I always tell people to make sure it’s a really good fit. And if we can really support them because that 97.2% retention rate, I’d like it to be a hundred percent, I know things happen, but usually what happens is when people come with us come and hire with us.

Jeff: We don’t do any marketing and sales outside of doing like this and the shows and stuff. Most of our growth over the past year and a half has actually just been from working really hard on just keeping client relationships. And usually they add on they’ll hire a second VA or things like that. Anyway, that’s my shameless plug for VA staffer.com.

Brent: Perfect. Jeff I look forward to seeing you at the next Ironman event that we’re both attending and I wish you all the best in your running world. I know we didn’t I always end up getting running. Into my podcast. So I’m glad that that we got that in. And I will put all these in the show notes.

Brent: Again Jeff, it’s been great having you on the show. Why don’t you tell, as we close out, just tell ’em how they can get ahold of you.

Jeff: Jeff J hunter.com has my socials and stuff on there. If you guys wanna learn more about VA staffer or VA staffer.com. Thank you so much for having me, Brent.

Looking for the patterns in your marketing with Kate Bradley

April 14, 2023August 2, 2022 Brent W. Peterson

In this week’s episode, we talk about everything from entrepreneurship to employee happiness. (@LatelyAIKately) Kate talks about the pressure on a start-up CEO and how it is compounded by trying to run a successful business and raise money at the same time. Kate reveals one really cool new feature on Lately.ai. (You must listen to the end to hear the big reveal!)

What you will learn from this episode and about Kate

• Passion for floating in a pool and listening to 80s music

• CEO of Lately, an AI that repurposes long-form content

• Focus on making fans, not sales

• Educated on Black American perspectives •

White Elephant in the Room: lack of diversity in podcast

• Advice to never assume what any side wants

• Value of lifting others up

• Making a fan creates a machine

• Marketing is about getting a fresh perspective

• Overuse of words leads to dull communication

• Creative use of language to engage people and make them react

I absolutely think that people who are focused on clock punching rather than performance and outcomes are missing out. Clock punchers are focused on the wrong thing and don’t understand the bigger picture. They don’t see how their work fits into the bigger picture and how it contributes to the success of the company. Performance and outcomes are much more important than just showing up and doing the minimum. If an entrepreneur is focused on performance and outcomes, they will be able to make better decisions and find more success.
Kate Bradley

Kate is the Founder & CEO of Lately. The A.I. that learns which words will get you the most engagement and re-purposes video, audio, and text into dozens of social posts containing those words.

Kate is a former rock ‘n’ roll DJ and served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer, and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales, and marketing expertise. What she learned in radio about the neuroscience of music helps fuel Lately’s artificial intelligence.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this wonderful episode of lately on Talk Commerce. I have Kaitlyn from lately today. Kate. Please introduce yourself. Tell us your day to day role in one of your passions in life.

Kate: I formally was a rock and roll DJ broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM. So I have a soft spot in my heart for podcasting, of course. I love the theater of the mind so much. I love radio. I love that you Brent have this I don’t even know if you know that you have it, you have this beautiful power to create what I call a two-way street, even though it’s one way.

Kate: I You wield the microphone here, but people listen and trust you and they lean in because you have this ability to create that magical kind of feeling as though they’re part of the conversation. And so that’s what attracts me to radio and podcasting specifically. And I don’t miss it.

Kate: Cuz can I swear in your show? I don’t know. Yeah. Go for it. I had a shit time. there, there’s great things about radio. I met my husband there and his record was our favorite record of the year. And of course, total job hazard. Cause I dated musicians do not recommend, found the one good one, who’ve cut his hair and wears chinos and now he’s. Sales bless his heart, but radio is a boy’s club, of course. And me too, and all that stuff didn’t even exist. And the rewards you got for participating in sexual harassment were large. It was applauded. And so we all did it, and I, not only, and I was a recipient of course, because, I don’t have a phase for radio.

Kate: Yay. And there’s no women either. So of course, like every day my boss would ask. Bradley or your hands queen, meaning could I hold this Dick while he peed? just, it was just the locker room bullshit. So that. Bizarre because what started happening? I don’t know why I’m going down this thread with you, but Hey ladies, listen up the the sexual harassment turned into a hostile work environment because of course I was great at what I did and I arranged.

Kate: The first ever marketing newsletter for any of the channels, it was ours. And it got all of this. This is before MailChimp. Okay. So I was like in outlook having to send multiple copies because you could only send it to 250 people at a time. Remember that there was like no formatting. And I got us. Just a huge amount of press.

Kate: Just because I’m a bulldog, and I was like I think we should do this. And I’m gonna ask all these people to republish it and forward it, et cetera. And they did. And and then I got shit on for my success. So that was confusing because you’re like, I’m killing it. Why aren’t people excited about this?

Kate: It’s because they’re threatened. And I dunno if that’s why I have my own company and I don’t have to deal with. Ego, except for my own. now , the mountain. What were the other two questions you asked?

Brent: What is your day to day role and one of your passions in life?

Kate: Oh we might have covered the passion but I think at the moment, my biggest passion is floating. I love the weightlessness of floating in a pool and we have a kitty pool and in text one, thank God for those people democratizing this thing, and we’ve had one for a while. It’s 12 feet by four feet, maybe three.

Kate: And there’s just enough room for two people to float. We built a solar heater out of black hose and a black piece of wood and a there’s a pump. And it does when there’s not a heat wave. It’s usually 88 degrees, which is what I like Brent, and me and my noodles are out there just floating away every day.

Kate: I’m allowed three songs, so I bring the Bose out there and I listen to three songs on the radio. Actually, I can still tolerate live radio and by tolerate, I really mean that cause it’s. Fucking terrible. Really terrible, but there’s this one station here that they mostly play 80 songs with and I’m a child at the eighties.

Kate: So I’m like, Hooters, Eddie grant, Steve Miller. Yes. And sometimes I’m lucky and I get three great songs. Sometimes they throw in some, another seventies, crap like BGS, or I don’t really like Harry Nelson, stuff like that. And I’m just like, I’m just waiting for the next good one. But that’s my passion at the moment.

Kate: And then. Who am I? What am I doing? I’m the CEO of lately lately uses artificial intelligence to repurpose long form content like text and video and audio into bite size social posts that it knows very specifically, which parts will get you the highest engagement. .

Brent: Yeah, that’s great. And I am a, I’m a user of lately for longly.

Brent: It’s been a great tool for us. I do want to just dip back into podcast guests, because it’s not always a two street. And when people come on as a guest that are, that have an agenda that are trying to. They are not a good guest. And I sometimes just look at the clock and think, oh my God, can this 30 minutes be over?

Brent: And now the 110 guests that I’ve had are thinking, are you one of them? Kate, you are not because this is the second time you’ve been on and I really appreciate you coming on. But it is sometimes difficult and it’s, my, my job is made much easier. when the guest holds the conversation, but it’s not a sales pitch.

Brent: And I, there’s nothing more than I hate in a sales pitch from a guest. But anyways, this is my pitch for lately because it is, it’s such a great product. And I’m falling in love with AI. I just signed up with open AI. I would I want want to get into the Dolly thing and there’s so many fun things happening in.

Brent: That I’m very interested in. But I do wanna talk a little bit about some of the entrepreneur journeys you’ve been going through and also, in our green room, I do wanna just bring up the white elephant in the room, which is me. And we did talk a little bit about, and you brought it up too.

Brent: The fact that there isn’t I don’t have a lot of diversity in my podcast and I would like to work on that. I’m part of the entrepreneurial community here in Minneapolis and Kate. I was just educating Kate, when we, before as well, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of the country.

Brent: And I know people on the coast don’t realize that there’s a part. World that between New York and California, but we don’t have to go into that. So I’m on I do sit on the diversity and inclusion committee. and I always ask myself, why should I be on this? And actually if I had some good guess, and they’ve given me some good answers on why me as a white male should be on this.

Brent: And part of it is just awareness and talking about it, because if everybody doesn’t talk about it, then it becomes something that’s back room. And I think it’s always better if we do talk about it. So not to belabor the point, but I know that there’s challenges in that. There wasn’t even a question

Kate: in there.

Kate: I have a comment though, if you don’t mind. My friend, please, Jen. God, what’s her last name? Vander something, sorry, Jen. Vander. Awesome. I’m just gonna call her that. So she, we were on a panel once and she. express this in a way that was the first time I got it, which is this, when you are the underdog, you can only be lifted up by those who are on top.

Kate: And the mistake many people make is not including the people who are on top in the conversation and we rely on them to lift us up. So in your case, it has to be white men in the conversation because they hold the power in the world. They. For the most part. And not excluding them is just a stopper right away.

Kate: So I get that on the, just a flip side and we should go into politics cuz that’s dangerous. But I did, I was a marketing consultant for a company called the perception Institute for about a year and their mission in the world or a nonprofit is to change the way that black men are portrayed in the media, black men.

Kate: And. . And so I learned a lot about people, about black Americans specifically and how they feel about white people of intervening in their business. And it was mostly not nice, which was interesting, and the overall reaction was like, stay out of it with your woke perceptions. Because what you think is right is not what we believe at.

Kate: And I’m generalizing. So forgive me there, but just a perspective, like it’s the S U right? You have to never assume what the other, what any side wants. Everybody has to be at the table for the magic to happen for the two-way street to happen. Let’s get back to that. And the second comment I had related to that was.

Kate: You touched on what makes for a good guest, so I believe it or not, I was a terrible interviewer on radio for a long time. I would get very nervous and I was young. And so I didn’t have a lot of experience, doing that. I was, it was the me show. I was great at the me show , I didn’t know how to make people shine or ask the right questions, cuz I was so nervous about pushing all the buttons and getting things right at the same time. Cuz you’re in my day you were managing like the whole show, just like you are with your podcast. So there’s a lot to do behind this in the green room, as you’re saying.

Kate: So to tie in what makes a good guess is when you are able to lift others up. Number one a and that’s I think that goes both ways, but as an entrepreneur. what we say is make a fan. Don’t make a sale right now. The value there might sound corny, but I believe in the long tail, this is the radio that I grew up in is all about the long tail.

Kate: The album cuts, not the hits, right? Get people to buy the records, make fans who are loyal to the death. And I saw the power of those people because when you make a fan, they work for you for free and they can’t help the. And so you get multiple banks for your buck because you make the sale and you make a machine,

Brent: right?

Brent: Yeah. No. And I really apologize for what I’m gonna say now. because I do feel like now I want to change the name of my podcast to ceiling. Because I would love to get ceiling fans but keep going. I know. I’m sorry, Brent. that was so bad. Hold your nose,

Kate: everybody.

Brent: Yeah. So I, my wife and I had this conversation about ceiling, the Mar Marcia Beski talked has a song about a hundred tampon.

Brent: And in, there was there, there was the first lady in space. They gave, she was gonna be in space for a week. So they gave her a hundred tampons and and she has a she’s on Ted. She has a Ted talk anyways. So they, she talked about the fact that she has this song. And then all of a sudden, all these men started berating her about, you shouldn’t make fun of these engineers at NASA.

Brent: Like who knows, like you, you need a hundred tampons right. For a week. And it was, we had a very good convers, my wife and I had a very nice conversation about it. And I, for me, I thought it through and I’m like, yeah, that doesn’t really make sense. I don’t, I don’t know any better, but her point was, there was a lot of men that came out and were.

Brent: Hit Eric making her feel bad that she’d come up with this song or not making her, I don’t know the right words, but sounds funny. They were ham whatever social media, what social media does, that’s what they were doing.

Kate: I have a segue

Brent: for this.

Brent: Okay. Yes, we need a segue. Yes, go.

Kate: So one of my favorite lines is Catherine Hahn in. the, we are the Millers when she calls it a Tanin and she’s from the Midwest. She is in this movie anyways, and so around my house, it’s called a Tanin and we laugh every time cuz it’s so funny to us, but that’s that ability by the way to take so.

Kate: and spin it in a new way, which is really what our jobs are about. This is marketing. How do you get fresh perspective? Whether it’s a hundred tampons in space or throwing a hot dog down a hallway, as she says, right? There’s I love that. I love. we, I just did a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know why I was inspired by somebody on Twitter.

Kate: And I said, words that make you like wanna bar. And I said, I’ll start. And the word was trousers. And so everybody piled on with not only just words that they don’t like the way they sound moist, got a lot of votes. For example, salacious got some. But then also biz lab was all over the place. So people were like partners and utilize at the end of the day, like all that kind of

Brent: stuff.

Brent: I’ll reach out to you later. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah. So I was just thinking about the, how we. how we can overuse words to death. So they don’t mean anything like awesome, which I am guilty of as well. All of America overuses. Awesome. But the whole point of communicating well is to don’t only communicate well, but to communicate with meaning.

Kate: and to hear some biz bla drive engagement, to make people lean in is to take something very familiar and just turn it just enough so that somebody is you catch the ear and you make them react. It’s the reaction that we all want. And I love thinking about that. I love so my husband is great at this he’ll he has all these isms one.

Kate: The hammer lane and the granny lane. That’s what he calls the fast lane and the slow lane on the highway. Or dirt nap. That’s like obviously dying

Brent: dirt nap. Okay.

Kate: Or booger sugar is cocaine , which we were just watching that Tom cruise movie American made, which is a great movie, by the way.

Kate: Even if you don’t like Tom cruise, it’s a

Brent: great movie. I agree. I’ve seen it. Very good. Okay. Alright, so let’s move into little, let’s talk a little bit about entrepreneur entrepreneurship. My daughter just got a job with a CRM company called endear and they’re based outta New York, a very young entrepreneur lady who started it with a partner and te.

Brent: Did you have any struggles as an entrepreneur?

Kate: oh, so many. I think the one that’s ever present for me is it’s, I don’t know if it’s confidence I, I don’t have an imposter syndrome per se, but I take things personally, that, that whole. Bullshit about it being work and business and not personal it’s it is bullshit, to me it is of course it’s personal, it affects people’s lives, right?

Kate: I That’s, it has to be right. And I’ve had to make decisions. I’ve had to let people go. I know how all that, how hard that stuff is. But I,

Kate: the pressure that I put on myself is pretty sprint. I perceive that there’s pressure being put on me by others as well. That may or may not be true, but there’s certainly that there’s that perception whether it’s my customers, like I wanna succeed for you. Whether it’s other women entrepreneurs, my investors, my fam, my family my team, obviously Lauren and Brian and Kristen, Jason and everybody, Kristen and Katie, Greg, I think that’s all.

Kate: Did I forget anyone, Emma Alex , and I, the problem is I don’t know what failure looks like. So let me just put this in the ground for everybody. We’re bringing it down. Brian, my CTO is very good at being positive and PR and practical. He’s an engineer. So he, he, he shoots pretty straight and I’m always.

Kate: wallowing in the negative. And he’s dude, like you have to really understand this, the odds of what lately is. So the chances of startups succeeding at all is already ne it’s negative. The fact that lately still exists. The fact that we have revenue, that we have hundreds of customers, we’ve had thousands before, we’re figuring out how to do it all here.

Kate: He’s like lately should have died a million. So you really need to acknowledge this, but it’s not that I don’t acknowledge it. It’s that the road to getting to the next level, like the levels, the goal post move a lot, which is very frustrating to me. Like I’m trying to figure out Brent constantly not how to win the game, how to beat the machine.

Kate: Okay. That’s all I think about how do I beat the fucking machine? Beat it into the ground. That’s what I. That’s all I see. And it’s not enough for me just to have a nice little business here. That’s not the game I’m playing, right? That’s not this game. And when you do everything that’s prescribed and you do it like to the fucking awesomeness of awesome platinum level superstar, galactic awesomeness, which is what we do.

Kate: And you still can’t hit the milestones. That’s defeating debilitating to me personally. I take it personally, cuz then I think, what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I fucking do this? And I hang my head in shame, honestly. The buck stops with me. It has to be me. It’s not I can, there’s all, there’s the great resignation.

Kate: There’s, COVID, there’s the market. There’s all these things to blame, of course. But I don’t think of any of them. It’s always hard. There’s always some shit out there. So it’s me. I’m the one where that can control. What’s happening or figure it out. And, I think just generally that’s the biggest hurdle is my, is myself in a way.

Kate: I don’t have an off button, cuz I want this. It’s not that I want this so bad, but I know it’s I know it’s not even possible. I know it’s probable. I.

Kate: And so I also, that means, I know all the pieces are in front of me here already. I know that they are, this is a matter of assembling the pieces. I have the right. Is which is a blessing and a curse. It’s right here. But the fact that I can’t figure it out makes me feel like an idiot , and none of that’s true.

Kate: I rely on you. I rely on our customers. We’re always asking for feedback. I’m terrible at taking criticism, but my team is great at it, which is why I had them, and we’re always looking for ways sorry for rambling but entrepreneurs, here’s a great tip. Someone told me, and you get a lot of tips that are garbage, cuz everybody wants to give you some advice.

Kate: But a friend of mine said, look for the patterns. So if you can look for the patterns in everything, whether it’s the way the funnel works or how much MRI you’re making or what customers click first, right? All these little patterns are macro and micro patterns. You can double down or then fix them.

Kate: and my, I joke all the time. My, my great skill is seeing the glass half empty. That’s what I do. I look for problems, patterns of problems, so can you imagine being my husband? He’s a nice guy.

Brent: yeah I am. I am the glass half full and my wife is the glass half empty. So we actually balance each other out.

Brent: We’re either full or empty at the same time empty we’re empty. So I definitely can empathize with your struggle. And I do of want to talk about as a leader that empathy part that you have to have for your employees do you see a difference in differe? Styles of leadership that work or don’t work, or I don’t know.

Brent: I I see sometimes that some entrepreneurs want to like they assume that your employee feels some way and if you feel differently, it doesn’t matter to what it’s not it, the feelings of your employees don’t matter. And I feel like that I’m I believe they matter, but that some of that empathy isn’t there in a lot of entrepreneurs.

Kate: I had a shitty job, so I know what it feels like to have that kind of panic attack and go to work and dread every day. And I don’t want to any make anyone feel that way. I am very lucky because all of those people on my team are very kind and they’re very loyal and they’re also very smart. I forget sometimes.

Kate: That they can’t read my mind. I try to apologize for that. Luckily they have a high tolerance for my bitch. That’s ano very lucky thing, because I can be an asshole. I can be, of course, and I’m so grateful. I have to surround myself with people who have that tolerance because I.

Kate: Always apologize for it. There’s too much to go on, but I have to also obviously reward and acknowledge. And so I need also the kinds of people who either don’t need that all the time can get it from each other. My re I feel my perception is the reward is to provide a workplace that is fun, which it really is.

Kate: It’s we have like unlimited vacation, no one ever takes a vacation. I don’t know why they don’t, but they don’t. You can, you don’t have to ask to go to the doctor or anything. You just, nobody cares. Get the work done. We don’t really care what you’re doing during the day. If there’s. And everyone is very autonomous.

Kate: There’s, some things I’m a micromanager about. I know this, but my aim is to not be that way and to, to a fault, honestly, like sometimes I’m trying to figure out why these people, these two people, maybe aren’t getting along or hearing each other. And then I realize , I don’t bring them together enough.

Kate: cuz we’re all just out doing our own thing. We’re running and running. And one thing sometimes I forget that. Because we’re, know, we are dispersed and we always have been dispersed and I like that because I feel it’s so much more productive. I hate being in office when people are coming in and talking to me all the time.

Kate: I hate that. I can’t get anything done, and. , I will forget how smart they are. I’m like, shit, Chris has really good ideas. I need to ask him these questions more often and then utilize them, or Lauren is, I think she’s 15 years younger than me. I forget, but she’s younger than me.

Kate: And I forget that she is because she’s so

Brent: she’s 10

Brent: And I talked to Lauren. Lauren is fantastic by the way. Isn’t she great. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. She’s didn’t mean interrupt to you.

Kate: No, I’m sorry for she’s so smart. And my, for all of them, my expectation is I, these people are on a scale of one to 10. They’re twelves. They’re all twelves. And so when they’re only tens, I get on their asses about.

Kate: Shame on me. Because I believe in them I respect them and I’m so impressed with them. And Lauren is certainly one of those people, and but she can tolerate my shit, which I, that this is also what I appreciate. So the way I try to reward, money is not the thing that motivates my team because.

Kate: We often can’t pay each other or the salary isn’t very high, but I try to create a workplace where there’s like a ton of flexibility and a ton of autonomy, because these are the things that I need personally. And I know there’s people out there like me, and I think to providing a safe place, like I call it where people can be themselves.

Kate: Like we don’t, we don’t really have a lot of rules, the golden rule, our biggest rule. And. a lot. We have two meetings a week, one for sales and one for the whole team, cuz we’re small enough. We can do these things still. And at those meetings we have what’s called the rolling agenda. And so the rolling agenda is a Google doc that goes on and on for years and everyone’s name is on it and you’re supposed to write what you’re doing, what you’ve done and what you’re doing there.

Kate: And everyone reads it an hour before the meeting and at the top of the meeting is the actual agenda discussion items. And the discussion items are the things that we all actually need to talk about together. Cuz I don’t need to have a report of what you’re doing and plus I can see it all in slack. Our slack channel is I don’t I poo threads because I want everybody, I want it to bleed over for everybody.

Kate: It saves me the time from repeating myself from silo to silo and it makes everybody sympathetic or empathetic. And so the rolling agenda what’s so funny is there’s almost never dis any discussion items cuz we’ve already had the discussion. So it’s a hang we get on the phone and we find out that.

Kate: Chris’s son, Zach just performed at a comedy club and killed it with amazing jokes. A couple of Dick jokes, in front of his grandparents, but I guess they were killer. Awesome. Katie’s daughter, Ruby just scored some major role in a play. I think it was beauty. The beast she’s the lead, which is pretty great.

Kate: Kristen’s getting ready to go to Paris with her two children. For the, and her husband. So the first family vacation and maybe the last one, cuz everybody’s going to college, this is what we talk about, I love that about them, Brent, how lucky am I?

Brent: Yeah. That’s building a team like that is, is like the dream of any entrepreneur.

Brent: It I think you’ve talked to a lot about, about that team building and how you’ve been successful in it. What would you. If you were gonna say something to an entrepreneur who was hung up with instead of that mentality that you have for performance I don’t care what you do all day, just so you deliver what we’re expecting.

Brent: The opposite of that is I, all I care about is that you come in and punch the clock. right there. There’s a dichotomy there and there’s a big swing, right? If you’re just assembling something and you’re punching the clock, you know what you get because you’re assembling something.

Brent: But the same thing is you could come in and assemble something very poorly. Or, if you’re not checking, there’s gotta be a balance between performance. I’m a firm believer in performance and the outcome of that. Do you think people that look at clock punching, miss the outcome part?

Kate: Sure. I’ve been that I worked in retail in the mall.

Kate: I know what it’s like. it sucks. And I hated it. Sorry, dad. I worked for my dad for a while. I love my dad. I think, so like begets, like when you are around other people who are working at a superior level and you’re not, it’s obvious and you feel bad and you want to catch up. So that’s one thing, right?

Kate: And I’ve surrounded myself. I’m very lucky to have these people who are, these are amazing people. Please never leave me please. And I’m always concerned when, like one of them, if someone’s gonna get married, Girlfriend moves in or something like that. I’m like, is my productivity gonna go down?

Kate: It’s so mean, that’s my first thought. Then my second thought is I want joy for this person. Hello. What’s wrong with you, Bradley. But I think that I think we were saying earlier, like the work life balance is bullshit. Like work is life and life is work. And if you’re not having a great time during what you’re doing, you’re not feeling fulfilled and joyful.

Kate: and like you’re doing something to improve the world or yourself, then you really need a different job. I It’s so important. I think, for entrepreneurs, the objective, I always think, and I think about this, especially when I’m like arguing with my husband is what is money? What is the outcome that I want here?

Kate: What’s the outcome. So let’s back into it is the outcome to make someone feel wrong because they fucked up is that the. that you want, you wanna make them feel bad. So then they don’t sell shit for you all day long. Cause they feel bad and they’re done. I’ve done that before. I’ve done that. I like making PE people feel wrong.

Kate: Like I do. I like calling them out on their shit. I’m trying to go to therapy to improve this, but it’s there, it’s the thing. And I, but I’ve learned not to do that because what is the point now? Now sometimes you have to correct someone on what they’ve done in order for them to improve.

Kate: I’m not great at this, but I, that is my aim, Poor Lauren. She, I like people to write copy for me. So we’re always, we work together on sales. And so she is in charge of the follow up with the sale, right? So we have a call. We have to email them, she’ll draft an email and Google I’ll take 95% of it apart and rewrite it and then be like, okay, here you go.

Kate: Now her feeling can be defeat defeated, like thanks for wasting my time. I explained to her, I was like, you don’t know how much time you saved me just by starting this. And my point of taking a part isn’t to shit on you. My, my point is to give myself something to play, where I can move around.

Kate: And I said, this was a, like earlier last year or something. And I was like, I will do. I promise to do a better job of telling you why I’m rearranging these things and what, why I’m putting these things in here. If you wanna learn how to do it better, but at the same time, I have to remember.

Kate: Lauren came from she. So she has a she’s smarter than all of us. She has a master’s degree in psychology analytics. And she came from working at the cancer ward in a hospital, God. And took the first job at lately as head of customer service, which she killed it at. And then she ran our sales team and now she.

Kate: Chief operations officer. So she has some very deep legacy knowledge of the company, but she didn’t come from sales. That’s not her background. None of us actually have come from sales me the most. I have the most experience in sales and we have a 98% sales conversion. Brent, Kristen come from sales.

Kate: Chris comes from radio like me,

Kate: the reason, of course the product is awesome, but we. Fucked up that demo 50,000 ways sideways to Minneapolis. Okay. I’ve seen it. Me too. And the demo does sell itself, but it’s the people, it’s the people that sell it. And it’s because Lauren, her ability to read the room and by the room, any room in a room, an empty room on a camera, in a zoom call or a room full of 85 people at SAP.

Kate: Like she has those nuances. And that, and Chris has the same thing as well. These guys this is about being nice, right? It’s about being thoughtful. It’s about listening. It’s about they know both of them are, I’m talking about them cause they’re my chief salespeople specifically, but like they can stand on stage any kind of stage, whether it’s just a call or actually on a stage and lead a room, they have that capability to do.

Kate: But at the same time they know when to listen. I don’t have that capability. I just like to be on stage and hear the sound of my own voice. Sorry.

Brent: So what would you say to To an entrepreneur then that is that they’re building this team and they’re, they seem to be getting a lot of turnover. Is there a magic formula in that team building model or is there yeah. Something to create community or is there anything that somebody could start.

Kate: I think the first thing is just to really think about how you wanna be treated. That’s just the most important thing. And that’s very hard cuz like you’re trying to get shit done, so you have to be very reflective constantly and to not just how you wanna be treated, but when you’re at your best, when you’re in the zone, right?

Kate: What are people around you doing to facilitate that for you? And then try to replicate that? I think that’s the first thing I. the second thing is to know this is so important. You have to ask people about their fucking lives, right? There are so many times where I just wanna get the meeting on and get stuff done, but I don’t, I make sure, Hey Brian, how was your trip?

Kate: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, Hey Jason, I saw that me is on Instagram and she’s like doing this whole abs routine. She looks amazing. What is that about? So he’ll tell me. You have to start that way. People want to talk about themselves. Obviously look at me. I’m someone who talks over people, Brent and I have no patience for people who are offended by that.

Kate: Honestly I believe in passion and I believe in the power to express your passion and that an interruptive culture should be celebrated because people are so excited to share their ideas.

Kate: and I don’t believe in democracy. Lately is not a democracy. I’m the leader. Although you have to make people feel as though they bring listened to right now, you can only do that with people you wanna listen to. So if you’re hiring people, you don’t wanna listen to, then you are an idiot, you’re, you have to really think about who you’re.

Kate: And we’ve made mistakes. Lauren will know, and she rolls her eyes and she tells me every time and I still make this mistake. I constantly think we need an experienced salesperson to come in here. And so I hire these fucking dudes. They’re always dudes. And. some dudes. I love they’re some of them are dudes.

Kate: I love some of them are dudes. I don’t love, and it never works out because they’re probably bold

Brent: white dudes. They’re the worst

Kate: is that where, how was, yeah. Or so one mistake we made by the way, which I didn’t know, this was, you cannot hire a salesperson to be both a manager and a salesperson.

Brent: Yeah. Very true. Absolutely. You can’t hire anybody to be either to do dual jobs. They’re gonna do two jobs poorly.

Kate: Yes. And that is a mistake that I made. I didn’t. I do that. So I don’t understand why someone else can’t do that, to be honest with you. And Lauren does that. There are Brian does that.

Kate: I have superior people in the world who can do that. So it’s of like why, but it’s not everybody’s nature, so I think that’s the first thing a very easy tell for us is this is if your company, if the PE, if your employees aren’t saying. you’re doing something wrong.

Brent: Yeah. If they’re saying you Kate, that then also you, and I’m, they don’t because I’ve talked to your employees.

Brent: If they are though, just always referring back to you, that’s also could be a problem.

Kate: I do that by the way on purpose. So I rarely, I don’t like it when people call me the boss, I correct them and say, don’t say that I don’t like. I say we all the time, my team I rarely say my employees, I rarely do.

Kate: I need them and I don’t like the word need, this an needy team is needy, but I cannot live without them. And so they know that

Kate: I send them gifts often, like little surprises, even the. Some T all guys like pocket knives, you can give them endless pocket knives. Am I right there?

Brent: send ’em a box of tampons. A hundred figure out what to do with these . I do, I want to just go back cuz I you talked about re you’re editing Lauren’s copy when she started it.

Brent: And I think that and it sounds like you explained to her. Why you’re doing it, I’m trying. Cause I think a lot of times a lot of times leaders will jump on they’ll just take it and they’ll do it, but they don’t give any feedback on why that happened. And that just leads to narratives in people’s heads.

Brent: And I think

Kate: I made that mistake actually, because I assumed that she would understand and know right. And I assume that she would take the time to read it and think about it. But of course, Lauren is busy and she’s just trying to check shit off her list and get, cuz she’s the queen of productivity.

Kate: She knows that. I respect that. And so either one of us weren’t both of us, didn’t want to take the time to do what you just said, which is a very important thing to do cuz who can learn if you don’t do that. And. , know, like I said, why can’t someone read my mind? What the fuck when it’s so obvious to me, but I’m sure at the same time, she’s thinking why can’t Kate read my mind.

Brent: So yeah, I, I have definitely got, I’ve gotten into the habit of explaining I’m always now trying to play chess with Anticipating the way somebody’s thinking. And I realize that people that are happy are more motivated and that they’re gonna be more productive when they’re motivated and that when they’re happy and productive, they’re gonna get a lot of work done.

Brent: So if I’m gonna be critical of somebody, I would like to explain all those reasons why that’s gonna. and I maybe now do it to, is the word in nauseam or something like that where you do it too much. Yes. Ad nauseum, whatever in nauseum I’m nauseous. Just that, that verbal feedback, because I think we do I also suffer from that same thing.

Brent: Of course, everybody should know what I’m thinking and yes, everybody can do this. Everybody can be a great salesperson. They can also be a developer. I fall onto that trap because I used to be a developer and I would. Of course, you can do that in AWS. I can do it in 20 minutes. Let’s watch me do it.

Brent: And everybody’s oh God, this is the worst time of my life. You can see everybody’s eyes are glazing over and pretty soon, like they’re, anyways, so to read the room, right? Yeah. Read the, yeah. And then it makes it worse on zoom, all everybody’s camera goes off and then you get done with your demo.

Brent: And then, so what did everybody think? And nobody’s there, it’s silence. Everybody’s gone to the bathroom. Oh, I’m sorry. And then one person leaves the mic on and the flush sound comes out and your zoom call was ruined or saved yeah. Or saved exactly.

Kate: yeah, I think I oftentimes I wish people would ask me why I do.

Kate: and they don’t. And so that, that is frustrating to me because I want the initiative to, to be there and that’s, my problem is that’s why I’m the entrepreneur and these other people are not right. That’s a different skill, so I have to constantly readjust my perspective to reality and think about.

Kate: What’s gonna, what’s gonna get the job done. Like you said, like, how do we get people to be happy and motivated and successful all at the same time? I think that

Kate: it’s important to ask people. Do you like working here? Sometimes you, I brace myself for the answer. You still like working here? Are you leaving? I just wanna know. I think that. knowing what your weaknesses are really important. Like I said I’m not a great cheerleader, but Katie Jordan is, she’s amazing.

Kate: She does it for me. And Chris is great at that. Everybody is there everybody piles on, but you need a cheerleader on the team if it’s not you that bubbly. When, when Lauren’s on vacation, slack is quiet. And you feel that energy gone like that. It’s so important. She she doesn’t even real.

Kate: I don’t know. She realizes that she probably does that. How. Much that energy. Slack is our workplace, right? That’s our work environment. And so it’s the, you can see the thermometer of how things going now. When I like last week, an investor who had hard, committed first to a smaller amount, and then to three times an amount hard commit pulled out for no reason.

Kate: I just was like, mother, fuck. I said every swear word of the thing like that could be. And no, I don’t do it in the general channel. I just did it with Lauren, Jason and Brian because I don’t wanna upset everyone else, but I need them to know cuz they’re my they’re. We are running the business together.

Kate: We’re running the numbers, we’re looking at all these things, but Brian and Jason are co-founders like, they do need to know what happened with this investor. And I need the ability in a place to express. Frustration. I also need them to have sympathy for me because like, when I have to ask them to not have a paycheck, they need to know exactly why, and I’m not doing it on purpose and it’s not cuz I’m selfish or I’m money grubber, there’s a real reason and it’s very painful for me.

Kate: So that sympathy, empathy thing here I think is so important. Like I’m just a person, Brent, I’m trying to do this thing. and they are these people’s lives are in my hands a little bit. Cuz a paycheck is a paycheck. I

Brent: Yeah I want to just jump on that happiness thing. I had a post on LinkedIn recently that I just put out there.

Brent: I meet with every person on my team every quarter. one on one, just for 15 minutes to get to know them. And we have team members in India and Mexico . I do that and I’ve always had this. I’ve always had a question that I’ve asked and I think I’m asking, are you happy in your job or something like that?

Brent: And I been thinking about it and like I was thinking like does anybody ever ask, are you happy? And period, because yeah. Are you happy period? Because there is. And maybe happy in your job or happy, whatever it’s different. And knowing if you’re happy, if you’re not happy.

Brent: Again, people probably aren’t gonna tell me in that short time, hopefully, maybe over time. In fact I recently did have an interview that I did where he said that I’m very intimidating and it’s hard. Like you had said, you want people to tell you the things that like if they don’t understand something and I think people don’t tell people things because leaders can be intimidating.

Brent: I can get very impatient and then become very I can be an asshole. And and especially when something going the way it should go and. I’m gonna assume you can relate with this. This is something that’s so obvious. Why aren’t we all doing this? Whatever that thing is oh my God, this is obvious. We should know this. You always get French fries at McDonald’s what thing? Yeah. Which I don’t, it’s the thing I don’t, I’m just making the insane, but it’s come on, everybody knows that in. As you’re driving on the freeway and you stop and you get a burger, you get fries, right? You get a Coke and a fries. Everybody does that. What the heck is going on with our team?

Brent: You guys are only getting chicken sandwiches. This is ridiculous. Everybody knows it.

Brent: It’s true. So I don’t know, is there, I think it’s a hard that’s, it’s gotta be one of the hardest things as a leader to give that space to somebody to allow to to open up and tell you, cuz it is a little bit of vulnerability from that person. And and maybe that’s I’m dealing.

Brent: Three different cultures. It used to be four. We used to have an office in Bolivia. But we have three cultures now. So I think culture’s a little different, right?

Kate: Yeah. I think, one thing is I always, and I’ve said this before, like I expect them to go to to complain about me, to each other.

Kate: I expect that happens to all managers and bosses. That’s part of the role that you’re accepting. And so good. Do it complain to each other, get it out of your system, certainly. The same way how many times you be, are you like fucking Brent? I say that of course, about myself, about, oh, whoever it is that’s just your, and it’s not you mean like you, you have to know that, like to and express a frustration.

Kate: because someone isn’t perfect in this second moment. It’s meaningless it’s just this thing, evaporating the world. And when you have people around me sometimes I’ll complain to Lauren about other people and the company and just cause I need that outlet with somebody and the validation that I’m not alone in this thought, and I’m sure they all, I know they all do this to each other, which is fine.

Kate: And I think they’re, that’s part of the culture that you wanna encourage, right? People are gonna vent it’s. This is human nature. And I think of it as if lately if everything about lately was. Just smooth sailing. Boy, we have no fun whatsoever. This is part of the adventure.

Kate: Are we gonna make it, are we not? So it, that ups and downs, it keeps it interesting. Like I, I think that’s why they come to work every day is cuz they’re wondering what’s gonna happen. I don’t know.

Brent: That’s it’s often said that without stress, without contention, without arguments, that you don’t move anything forward.

Brent: If everyone is always on the same page you could be going in the right direction, but you may not. And having a dissenter, there is always a, it was always, it’s always a having a dissenter there to ask those questions is important. And I think that essential. Yeah, it’s essential, right? We, as a leader we need to make that space.

Brent: I know that we’ve sent people we’ve sent Indian developers to Germany in onsite to work. And one of their, one of their things that they’ve said was that they were surprised that other team members on the German team would. Hard pushback to the boss in the room. And for them, that was an eye opening thing.

Brent: Cause their culture more is more around. And I’m sure I’m gonna get a whole bunch of Indian developers not telling you. No, it’s not like that here. But their culture is more about doing what you’re told. And you don’t often. It’s not a strong cultural trait to question the boss and to say this I’m a white guy anyways.

Brent: I don’t know, concern that because that’s my perception of the culture. I’m gonna I’m making a disclaimer. I’m gonna put a little asterisks in my transcript. Don’t get back to me on this, but I digress.

Kate: Yeah, I gotta go do shit, Brent.

Kate: I’ll say this one thing, we just released a new feature where the AI is rearranging what it finds to pull out into wholly new content. Okay. it, we just launched it like the other day. We haven’t told anybody. We haven’t even told our customers like so you’ll just start to see it suddenly the surprise you’ll be like, who wrote this?

Kate: Oh my God. The AI. and it’s pretty good. All

Brent: right, I’m gonna go try it.

Kate: Yeah. Keep an eye out. Yeah.

Brent: Kate, I always give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug at the end of the podcast. So what would you like?

Kate: Oh Jesus, I’m gonna plug forgiveness today. Forgiveness.

Brent: all right. Thank you.

Kate: Yeah, I think we all

Brent: need a little mark. Kate Laly Kate .

Kate: This is why just so you know, I’m on the air. I stopped saying my name because I mispronounced my own name once in an interview with the guys from we. And so I never said it again.

Brent: Yeah. Did you wean yourself off that?

Kate: About a thing on me. Oh my God. I love you.

Brent: Yes, you’re so funny. Kate Bradley co founder of lately, CEO of lately. Thank you so much for being here today.

Kate: Thank you, Brent.

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