Bootstrapped Web

Hello. It is Bootstrapped Web. We're back. Jordan, how's it going, man?

Good, man. Great to be back. Great to be back on the podcast, back in Portland. Very nice, man.

Very cool. So, so, yeah, we did I mean, not that we ever do any extensive prep, but we literally just got on the call today. So, so what's going on?

Okay. Let's see. So the past two weeks, I went back to New York. My sister-in-law had a baby, so we

Ah, brought congrats.

Whole Thank you very much, appreciate it. It's her first one, so it was a big deal. So we took the whole family back to New York, spent some time in Connecticut, saw some family, realized all over again why we left New York, and now we're back in Portland very happily.

Very cool. Yeah. So yeah, you know, over here and it's nice. I'm trying to have a relaxed work schedule and while getting some work done. And then this week, everything just feels like it's coming crashing down and crashing up at the same time and things things crashing into each other.

And whatever I had planned to do this week, I am definitely not gonna be doing this week because I am consumed in personnel issues at Audience Apps.

Okay. Okay. That sounds like a lot of crashing. Yeah. So I've had some interesting experience over the past two weeks, a while away also.

So let's get into those because a lot of my issues are personnel related also, at least tangentially. Mhmm. So you you wanna start things off? Well,

the good news is that audience ops is definitely having a couple of really good months now. We we had a tough early in the year, know, January, February, March, where we were seeing a bit of a stagnation and a dip in in everything, both, you know, revenue and sign ups and and leads. Everything was starting to kinda go slow around that period. Since then, you know, April, May, June have been really good, especially June and like this past week, the last two two, three weeks, we've had a number of client sign ups. Things are just really looking up.

Some of the marketing stuff that I've been doing has helped. The Facebook ads are continuing to run. I've been so busy that I haven't really been managing those. They're kinda just on autopilot right now. I wanna get back into, you know, doing some more optimization and maybe, like, doubling down on those a bit.

The other thing that I wanted to do, again, it had to not do this week was to fire up some new cold email campaigns. And I basically started that process and ran into a bit of a hitch and then everything started going crazy around here. You know, some some ops calendar updates are are kind of on the back burner and things that I wanna get going again on on that front,

but That sounds like that's directly linked to the optimism in audience ops itself.

Yes. It it is. So on that front, the I had the developers kinda take a couple of months off. They they stayed around to fix some bugs as they come up and they would just do minor feature updates, but I really ramped down their hours for a few months there to make sure that, you know, I got audience ops growing again and and and really make sure I can build up the profit to self fund ops calendar. So now we're definitely at the point where I I can bring them back on and and really get going on it.

There's two problems. One is those guys took on other projects, so I kinda have to wait for them to wrap up some other projects of theirs over the next month or two. You know? You know, I'm not gonna hire new developers. I definitely wanna keep working with the same guys.

And so they're probably gonna wrap those up and get really back in into the swing of things around August, September. I have some big features that I've been thinking about and starting to design, especially around using ops calendar for our work at audience ops. And that coincides with really aiming the product at agencies, like us.

Okay. So zero in on the higher value customer.

Yeah. But, I mean, all all of that is just conceptual right now. And I'm doing zero marketing other than, like, talking about it here. We are using OpsCalendar in AudienceOps for the features that it does have today. We're we're using those.

But other than that, I'm not actively going out and getting new customers, you know. All of that is really gonna be just on hold for probably until at least the fall, you know, when things really get into the swing of things. We're signing up new clients. We had, I think, three new client sign ups this week. I think three new came in last week, and two people quit yesterday.

Oh, oh, team members.

Yeah. And both of them are pretty heavy writers on our team, so they both write for a bunch of clients, and one of them is also a project manager. They gave me like a two week notice and I negotiated that to to hopefully, they could stick around for maybe closer to three weeks and help us really phase this out. So there's that combined with the fact that we just hired two new project managers like three weeks ago and they're getting they're doing a good job and they're getting the hang of things, but they're still kind of in okay. Still kind of figuring out this role, training mode.

The project manager role is really something that it takes many weeks to really understand the role. So they're still new. And then by next week, I wanna hire at least two new writers and two new project managers. We we did bring on two writers this past week. One came on yesterday, one came on a week ago, and I'm gonna hire two additional writers and then two project managers.

And so, basically, the big thing that I'm thinking about right now is that for a long time at Audience Ops, like the first two years, I had this strategy of, okay, let's try to do what we can to keep the number the headcount to a minimum. Obviously, it's a service, so we're gonna keep growing headcount. But I wanna try to keep that to a minimum and give whatever teammates we do have as much work as they're willing to take on for audience ops. And most of the freelancers that we work with are willing to take on a lot of work. They they love the steady long term retainer, you know, the reliability of of audience ops.

Like, yeah, their the workload kind of ticks up and ticks down, but for the most part, like, they're getting direct deposit twice a month. They're you know, it it accounts for at least half of their time, some of them almost full time to balance out, like, the ups and downs of other freelance work that comes and goes. My thinking has always been like, let's just have let's try to keep a a small team and and really pack in their schedules as much as they're willing to do. But what what has happened is I mean, that kind of worked pretty well for us in the first year or two. But for some reason now, it doesn't work as well.

And I'm not exactly sure why. It's, but basically, what we're seeing is writers are handing in articles late past the deadlines, and then that causes crunches for our editors and for our assistants and and managers who then need to keep the publishing schedule on on track. And when things are get crunched like that and turn into a rush job, then errors happen and then clients get upset and then that causes more problems. And, you know, most of these things individually are they're they're not good, but they're not the end of the world and we can always deal with them as they come up, but they've just come up more and more often, you know, more frequently and that just tells me that and we reworked our systems again and again, you know, and these things have come up for over a year now and so I feel like at this point, it's not, we we can only work the system so much and it's and it's really about a, everybody on the team being able to manage their their own schedules, you know, as efficiently as possible. But b, I I just come to the conclusion that I think everybody is overworked, especially a few like, a few key people on the team just have too many clients under their belt.

And so now I'm shifting my my thinking to, okay, forget the idea of limiting the the headcount. Let's actually get more than enough people on board in audience ops and spread the work around and keep limits in terms of the max number of articles a writer can take, the max number of clients a manager can manage. And

Do you think that's a reason or the reason that that the two left?

Well, no. I mean, one guy just took a full time job and and he was like, yeah, he he was just like really happy with with how things have been going at Audience Hops for a while. And then he was like, you know, I I wish it didn't happen at such a bad time, but like, I can't turn this position down. And then, the other one, she had a lot of, other client work going on in addition to a pretty heavy load at audience ops. And she's been on the team for, like, two over two years.

And so she kinda outgrew her her role here in a in a way. And that's totally understandable and I applaud that, you know. So Yeah. Right.

It's unlikely that people stay forever. Exactly. Yeah. But several several years, that's that these days that is forever.

And we have we have like at least four or five other people on the team who've been on the team for almost two years now.

Yeah. That's that's a good sign. So it begs the question though, Brian, how how are you gonna make the math work of what right what you're saying is the utilization rate per employee should be lower? You put people at 90%, they're gonna get exhausted, over a 100%, however you want to put it. It looks like you're doing less work and less clients per person on the team, how does that affect the math on the other side of revenue?

Because what you're effectively saying is expenses, labor expenses are gonna go up.

Not necessarily. So now everybody on the team is basically paid per article and per per whatever thing that they do on the team, whether they're managing clients or editing or writing articles.

So that's why you don't see the increase in headcount necessarily resulting in more expenses because it's if the the unit metrics stay stay consistent, then it actually is is no different.

Yeah. Okay.

Fair enough.

Really, it's been this way since the beginning is that everybody on the team are they are freelancers or or they're they're just looking to work on a part time basis. Some of them are like stay at home moms and they just they only wanna work ten, fifteen hours a week. And so this is kind of a good fit for them. Others are have other client work going on and then they they supplement that with audience ops work. The other challenge that we've had is is just the process of hiring people and onboarding them and training them and then getting them ready to start taking on client work, whether it's writing or managing clients.

And that's like a good two two to three week process at least, you know, before they can really be up and running with us. And when we get an influx of client sign ups, we're kind of scrambling to figure out who who are we gonna assign these clients to.

Right. Especially those first few weeks you wanna impress people.

Yeah. I mean, when a client signs up, like, do hit the ground running. We start working on their stuff within a week. So I need to get back to a point where we're getting ahead of it. And like after I do this this week, you know, hiring a bunch of new people to give us more capacity, after that, I wanna have a system where every single month we're hiring a new writer.

And and on the manager side, I'm thinking about opening up like an assistant manager, like an apprenticeship position, where somebody who just wants to get into that sort of work, working from home, working remotely, working online with a company like this, they can join the team at kind of like an entry level and just do some low level tasks and learn our systems and and kind of assist in certain things. And then when the time comes when we need another manager, they're ready to go. They already kind of know our systems and they can, you know, step up to that.

I like that idea. We we've experienced the same thing. At the point in time in which you are able to hire and also need to hire, like you're way behind. You're way behind. You people that know you, you know them, you trust each other, like each other, you've seen it, they know a bit about the business.

It's kind of like a yeah, it's hard to do. It's like you that's why you see people and like larger companies always out in the space. They are running events, they are sponsoring things, because you kind of need that. So it's it's a very interesting ways for you to kind of have project managers, are those key roles kind of bubbling in in the background.

Yep. Yeah. And and I mean, that's the hardest role to it's it's the hardest role to hire for, to even just decide like who's gonna be a good project manager here. It's like, hiring writers is a little bit easier because you can review their work, their their writing samples, you know, you could talk to them about their their approach to writing, and and then you can get a pretty good feel like, alright, that they're they're a rock star. They're gonna be great here.

But the managers, it's like it it's just it's just such a weird position to hire for. The other challenge that I have with that position is that I call it a project manager, But it's like not a project manager that that most people think of. Most people think of a project manager in like an agency setting of like, that person is in charge of building and customizing custom solutions and getting people and being the point person and every client is different, and we're gonna have we're gonna manage a thousand different things in Asana, and and we're gonna be putting out client fires left and right. And it's not like that at all at Audience Ops. It's it's a much more streamlined and process oriented role.

Everything we do is we don't do anything custom. We have a standard process and a standard plan that every client gets. And so it's really just the manager's role to make sure that to be the the point of contact between the client and our team and relay feedback from the client to the writers and make sure writers and everyone else on the team are delivering on time and manage like new client onboarding and stuff. Like, that's what the managers do. And most of our managers just they only really have to work around five to ten max hours per week, believe it or not.

Even when they're managing like multiple clients, five to 10 clients. It's not a very hours heavy job. It's like literally hopping in to Slack and Trello and and Help Scout for, like, one to two hours a day, checking in on the things you need to check-in on, sending a couple of emails in batch. We have templates for everything. And then, you know, working with the writers to just check-in on their progress and like, you're in and out, you know.

Occasional, a call with with a client and that's it. And so it's been hard to set expectations for what what that's like with new applicants. And it's it it could just be the way that I'm naming the role. When I put up job ads for project manager, I'm getting applications from folks who've been working at these, like, huge companies as as a as a high level project manager, and and this type of role is not for them, you know.

Right. That's how they identify and then the job isn't as they expected. Yeah. Like, you have to talk about that instead of qualifications and experience.

Yeah. And so, you know, who the people who are best for that position, like, most of them are also are are freelance writers who just happen to be really good at communicating and they're super organized and and they've they've managed a, you know, content marketing process before. That's kind of who who tends to work out here. It's especially and even if they're not, like, super experienced as writers, especially those who are just looking for a steady, very part time work at home situation, they they tend to to be a good fit for that as well. So that's what I'm dealing with right now.

Like, literally today on a Friday, which I don't normally do other other work calls, you know, I I have, like, three interviews with potential managers today. And, but, you know, gotta do it. I mean, the good news is that we're the the client list is growing. So

Yeah.

That's And revenue, you know, revenue is right back up where it was. So it's it's good.

And, yeah, I'd I'd love to hear over the next couple of weeks. It sounds like you don't have a crystal clear idea of where those new customers came from, but I'm assuming you'll get a better sense of it over the next few weeks of what what did it. Was it your your personal email list? Was it Facebook ads? Was it a combination?

Was it referrals?

I don't know for sure, but I think that it was a combination because a lot of people come from hearing me on a podcast, whether it's our podcast or know, I'm a guest on a bunch of podcasts and and they hear me there. That's a common one. Because I ask on the on the lead forms, like, where'd you hear about us? And a lot of them say a podcast. Some of them say they're they've been on my email list.

Some of them say they were referred by someone. But those those channels have always been there since the very start of audience ops, and there was a period where that stuff dried out, and now it's coming back again. And I kinda have a feeling that, like, yeah, they heard me on a podcast, but but since they've been then visited the site, then they started seeing ads.

Yes.

You know? That's right.

A little little combination.

And and also I don't know how many people would even remember that they saw an ad or or be willing to admit that they came from an ad. You know what I mean?

Yeah. It's hard to tell. If it's not a straightforward like click attribution thing, then it's it's a mixture. You don't really know. Even even if you get people to tell you, you're still not a 100% sure.

Yep. I mean, you know, that plus I I did publish a a bunch of big articles in the last couple of weeks and and then like this week, you know, I launched my my YouTube channel and the and the productized podcast. So I am getting myself more out there than I than I was for a while, and so that stuff is ramping up now, so I'd expect that'll that'll drive more activity as well. I mean, the productized course continues to sell pretty well too. So

I I like the theme this podcast is taking on of of good problems to have. Let's let let's keep that going for a while.

It it is a good problem to have. I'm I'm not gonna lie. But the thing that I don't like is is is when because I'm a freak about systems. Right? Like, it it should be growing systematically, not growing like like a scramble, you know.

Good luck for that.

Yeah. I know. Like, I just wanna know that like and I have a team manager on our on our team who helps with some of the filtering applicants and doing some first tier interviews with people, but like, still very heavily involved in the hiring process. And I wanna get it to a point where, like, I would love to get I would love to grow to a point where we just have, like, a a COO, you know, like or or some some sort of operations head who just takes over all that stuff and

I I have heard the word COO more in the past thirty days than I have in the prior year. It just it just didn't come up for a long time, and then I don't know, maybe it's the type of conversations that I'm having or but that word COO just comes up more often. You could see the

Well, I mean, where where a cart hook is at, I mean, you've been talking about like now we need systems, and now we need operations, and that's that's I'm sure that's why.

Yeah. You see businesses kind of starting to mature, and then it's not often the same person with the same skill set that that got the company off the ground. It's not usually not the same person, at least I know in my case, it's not the same person that would be best for building up systems.

So that's that's where it's at. So what about you?

My past two weeks have been very related to that that COO word. So I'll tell you like the kind of the evolution of what happened and what I what I learned along with it. A few weeks ago, I started to get to the point where I just need to kind of admit, okay, can't I do everything. How am I gonna change the reality of my day to day, my responsibilities, my tasks, and so on? So the the first thing I got to was I am almost gonna take like a hiatus.

Like, I need people to pretend I don't exist. Like, dear team, pretend I'm on vacation. Like If

if you disappear for a week, will things fall apart?

Right. And and and it makes sense that that kind of idea came along at the same time as I was away in New York, and I was away from the team, and I was like, I felt very peaceful.

Sorry. Let just What? Speak speaking of that, just to just to cap off what I was just talking about, like scrambling to have to hire people. So next week, Kat, our our team manager who is pretty instrumental in training new people and hiring, she's on vacation next week. And then the week after that, I'm on vacation.

So could couldn't have come at a better time. Yes.

Love it. Yeah. So it makes sense. I was away. I was on East Coast time.

Coincidentally, Ben, who's normally in New York, was in Portland. So we were flipped. So I would be waking up and getting to the coffee shop at 08:30AM. It's 05:30AM in on the West Coast. I'm like, nobody knows I exist.

I can just work for a few hours. No one even knows that they can contact me and maybe that's that's where it came from. Like, what what could I get done or how would it change, and improve things? Because what I started to identify was I kept looking at my to do list, and I kept looking at the things like that were really important, that I should do and no one else can do, and I was barely getting to them. And I started to feel like, this has to change.

We're starting to have enough people in the company, We're six of us now. We're looking to hire two more, so we'll be eight soon. We're starting to get to the point where we should be able to cover our own bases, and I shouldn't I shouldn't have 15 different areas of responsibility, cause it just guarantees that I won't do them well. So so that initial thought of like, what if I told the team I was on vacation for two weeks and just pretend like you can't escalate anything to me? So of course, that's a little silly and shortsighted.

Like, you could do that for a week, but that's that's not a long term solution.

I think it's good. I think it's a good idea though, because it'll definitely I think you'll be surprised, a, how much your team can do without you, and and b, where you really need to prioritize your like, which systems you need to build that aren't existing yet.

Right. So

I think you should do that.

Well, okay. So here's the thing. So I I kinda did it by default by being in New York. And we had hired a new team member, Matt, who's on customer success, and we're starting him off in support actually. Because we think what is the best way to learn everything really really fast, it's it's in our support channel because our support channel is is very active, let let let's say that.

We just have a lot of sign ups. We just did a big affiliate deal that launched like just, you know, more sign ups in a week than we're used to in a month. So everything's kind of very energetic and we think putting them in support first is good is the best kind of trial by fire to just learn everything, see everything. And then it's actually not a big shift to success because you're still talking to people, you're just answering pre sales questions instead of support questions, and so we we think that that's the right shift. So we hire someone and I'm not here.

So the first week this person worked with us here in the office in Portland, it was just him and Aaron, our head of customer support working together. And it was magical, like they just get everything done, and and I really am not that necessary in in that in that case. So another nice coincidence is is when I'm in New York, I get to see my brothers. My my younger brother I've spoken with about before, he's very into systems. He's the one that runs the crunch gym franchises.

So he has like 90 employees, like you you have to have systems. And he's very into emith and coaching and all, just building out systems and so on, much much more so than I am. So I'm having a conversation with him and he's like, here's what it what it brings to mind. He he gave me an equation, and the equation is performance equals potential minus interference. Right?

So the performance of of a team member in what they're responsible for is basically a factor of their potential or their ability to do it, minus the interference, the things that prevent them from accomplishing those responsibilities. So what that equation helped me do is it helped me a, understand myself and my situation. Right? My ability to perform, like what are you actually being judged on? Like your performance, it's not like how hard you work, it's what you're responsible for.

Is that being affected positively? Right? So when we look at Matt, our new hire, and his performance will be judged by the the percentage of new trials that turn into paying customers. Right? That's his metric.

If we're going to judge him based his performance based on that, It's potential, what he can do, his current experience, skill set,

all that stuff. What are the things that like gets in the way of him turning more trials into customers?

Right. So every additional thing that we task him with or that get in his way is going to affect his performance. So I started to see, okay, that role, I started to see the same thing in my role and all these in all the individual people, and what that helped me do was figure out a way to talk about this with the team that didn't sound like me saying, so guys, I don't want to do the shit work anymore and I'd like for you to do it instead. Right? Because that that sucks, and that that's not even accurate.

The the truth is I need to perform better as a CEO, and my equation is insane. My the interference portion of my equation is just preposterous, Right. And we have to reduce that.

I I love that idea of that formula. I've never heard it that way.

Me neither. I was like, dude, this is this is perfect.

Yeah. It seems like overly simplistic, but then when once you really start to think about it, like, what I'm thinking about right now is I've had that meant that same sort of mentality in terms of defining my team's roles. Writers just write. They are not doing client communication. They're not doing technical setups.

They are just researching and writing. You know? The assistants, they only do the technical setups. You know? The editors, they just edit.

And and I think that's working well. But where it breaks down is, like, same. Like, for me, like, I'm I'm doing too much. I I can't work on the things that are actually gonna grow the the bottom line of the business when I get consumed in in all these other distractions. And like and and I get so many I still get too many questions being escalated to me from the team.

Like, am I doing this correctly? This is kind of a special question that that's not documented somewhere. How am I supposed to handle that? Sometimes I feel like at this point, we we might have gone too far in the direction of, like, too many systems and processes where it's where especially for new especially for new people coming in, they see all those systems and, like, they're they're designed to make everybody's job easier. But but since they see all these systems, they feel like, alright.

There has to be a correct way to do everything, and I'm not sure if I'm doing everything correctly.

So it becomes a dependency thing. So so exactly that. Exactly what you're talking about. What this equation helped me communicate was that when you escalate something to me, you are increasing the portion of my equation, the interference portion. Right?

And then that is going to take away from my performance as whatever your role is. So so in in that way, what you're really saying isn't it's we are all gonna judge me based on my performance that has to do with x y and z responsibly. So

as CEO, what do you see as your performance side or the potential side?

First and foremost, making sure we have enough money in the bank to pay salaries to keep the party going. Right? Then I have other responsibilities such as marketing right now is my responsibility. Until we hire a a head of marketing, that's my responsibility. So that that is involved in my performance equation.

Right? So the number of trials. And so how do I best affect that? Me personally, it's partnerships. It's not content and it's not advertising.

It's networking and partnerships like the affiliate partnership that we just launched that, you know, it's a relationship thing, that that's the thing I'm best at, that's what I enjoy the best. So that that's something that I should be spending my time on.

I think for me, it's kind of the same except for so marketing definitely like, marketing and sales is all me right now. And I don't feel a special need to offload sales at at this point. I think at some point in the, I don't know, next six to twelve months, yeah, I would like to have a sales team. But I don't think that's a necessity right now. I think it's still good for me to do that.

Marketing in general, so getting myself out there and managing some of our content stuff on audience ops.

Right. But you are responsible for bringing on new clients. Yes. Right. So whatever you wanna whatever you wanna call that, that's that's part of your performance, you you gotta bring clients.

Yeah. And I mean, and and having money to pay the team, given our our model, it's really just about how many clients we it's completely self funded based on the revenue that we have. So my only key job there is to bring in revenue.

Right. So so when when people come to you with things that shouldn't be brought to you, they're affecting that. Yeah. Right? So so

So there's there's that like, for me though, it's it's that all all of that is really the way I see it is it should be half of of my week. And the other half should be building new products, designing designing the next product, working on ops calendar, designing that, and and thinking about like where where does this evolve to?

Right. Being a manager, being an owner.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that that helped me bring all of it to the team in like an appropriate way, and at the same time be able to say to them, you guys are in the same boat. You will be judged based on your performance in your role. So I use Ben as the example. I said Ben right now, his interference portion of the equation is ridiculous.

So Ben will be judged on the performance of the product, the onboarding, the way the admin explains things, how easily people use the product without needing support, all these different things, and right now, he's barely working on that stuff because he the interference side is way too high. So what Ben needs to do is take have agency over his responsibility and say, how do I improve my equation? I I used it as an as a way to speak to the new guys, Aaron and Matt who just joined the team. I don't want them to feel like, well, all the you know, crap rolling downhill, you guys are just gonna deal with it so it improves our performance equation. The truth is, I paid my dues, baby.

I did two years of support, sales, marketing, everything, and now I've moved up, and my performance equation is different. And they should be looking the same thing. They should say, how do I get so good at support that when we hire someone, I become the support manager and my performance isn't based on how many tickets I respond to, but it's how efficiently our support team operates.

Yeah, and you know, this is something that I definitely still struggle with is like kind of empathizing with the team and their role, like what it's like to be you and have this job that I'm employing you to do or I'm hiring you to do. I think sometimes I fall into the trap of like, would I wanna be doing that? No. You know?

That that's an alarm bell.

But, like, you have to realize they're they're in a different position. They're they're coming from a totally different perspective. They're different point in their life. They do something else for a living, and and we're completely different as well. And and so, like, people have different priorities and especially a brand new person joining a team like yours or a team like mine at sort of like an entry level position.

Like, there's all sorts of benefits that that I think we we might be blind to, you know, like, you get to you get to see what it's like to work at a at a start up or or at a at a remote team like this. If that's something new to you or or you've been a freelancer and now you have a steady, reliable thing to balance out your ups and downs, like, those are those are things that are really important to the team. And I mean, you know, for us, what's most important is growing the business, right, and building building these systems and building the machine. But for for them, like, they're not as concerned about that. They're they're more concerned about working on work that matters, you know, having having flexibility in their schedule.

Like, every person is different. Every role is different. But

Being being happy? Yeah. Right? Like we we have a lot of fun and I I think that's a huge part of why people are happy working at Cardhook because it's fun, man. If you if somebody recruited you and was like come work in this other company, you would definitely hesitate to be like, it might just not be as happy and fun of an experience and that it's a huge portion of your life.

No joke, sir. I remember when I was employed full time at a web agency back in 2000 I was there from, like, 2005 to 2008, early two thousand eight. Entry level position, really low salary in New York City, which made it made the salary even lower than what it really was. And and the only thing that that made me hesitate about leaving and going freelance was that, like, this is awesome. I love the people.

We have fun. We go out to concerts. We go out to dinner and happy hour, and it's a blast to work here. Like I can't I can't ask for a better, more enjoyable job, but kinda have an itch to go freelance. Yeah.

It's it's a big deal. So so what I wanna get to in like, you know, we only have a few more minutes left, so I feel good about that equation and the context that I'll provide to myself and to the whole team about like this next phase, we have six people, we're about to have eight. Everyone kind of has their battle stations, and everyone needs to be protective of their performance because that's how they're gonna be judged. And so trying not to interfere with other people, trying to make sure that your interference quotient isn't too high, so that part I feel good about. Here's the part I still don't have a good grasp on it, you just touched on it before.

Being okay with only wanting to do, let's call it CEO things, is a weird mysterious, you feel guilty almost? Like because you you feel like

you should be working on on other things like in the operation or?

You almost feel guilty that that you're not gonna be working on things in operations, and that you're just gonna take meetings and do a few calls here and there. It it it's a it's a strange transition.

I I kinda struggle with that too sometimes except well, you guys are mostly remote as well. So it's not like everybody sees what everybody's working on every hour of the day. So I sometimes I struggle with this is just personally, I don't know that anybody else on the team cares, but like, it's like, do they know what I what I'm doing? Do they know what I'm working on? And like

they Right. Do do they is it is it important for them to know? Like, is is it okay

Oh, there's a ton of stuff that Is

it okay if you did nothing?

Right. Like, they they certainly see

Is is that the goal? Should the goal for you to be to do nothing?

I mean, there are days when I when I am out with the family and during work during the workday. And, like but they have that sort of freedom too. Part of the thing that I think about is that, like like, all all the effort that I put into crafting our sales process and our demo video, and, like, that's a lot of stuff. And it's High value, high high leverage stuff. High and it's almost perfect now.

I spent a year I spent two years refining that. But that's basically all that work is basically invisible to everybody else on the team because they're not involved in that part of it, know?

It's a it's a strange thing. It's a because my my goal in my head it's turning into how to do as little work as possible. So so now the the funny thing is, I had a call with the business coach, and I said that to him and he goes, so let me get this straight, you think you're gonna like hire for marketing and hire for support, hire for this, and that's gonna leave you to do nothing? It's like if you go hire like six more people, you're gonna be real busy. Don't don't worry.

So it's just a shifting thing. Anyway, alright. I'm getting I'm getting funny looks at the conference room on Max. Cool. Yeah.

Got I think it's a good place to stop.

I gotta hop on a on hiring some a a job interview here.

So Alright. Cool. So we're both working on the right things, my man.

Alright, dude.

Great to speak with you. Everybody, thanks for listening. Brian, a great weekend, man. Happy fourth of July.

God bless you, man.

Later, guys.