#207 - Why Smart Entrepreneurs Stop Hiring and Start Doing This Instead | Adam Spector

Most founders mess up and say, "Well, I have to go run the back office operations. I have to figure out payroll. I have to figure out finance because that's what a good CEO does." That is BS. You are stupid if you think that is true, and I will tell you right now: Your company will fail. You will drown in all the admin. You will stop doing the thing you love. Your product quality will go down, and your company will fail.

Welcome back, uh, for another episode. We're gonna get into it. Sometimes I start with big energy, sometimes I start a little bit low. Today I have to start with big energy because the person on the show and the guest is gonna come even bigger than this. So I gotta make sure I at least substantiate my role here as the host. Um, but today we have Adam Spector. And I looked at my production team and they said, be careful. His team said you should interview Adam S. And I went, this sounds like— that combined with Spector sounds like a James Bond podcast episode. So, Adam Spector, he's a co-founder of Chore. It's a platform focused on simplifying home services and making everyday home maintenance more reliable and accessible. He's building in one of the most fragmented and operationally complex industries to tackling the challenges of trust, quality, and consistency at scale. That's a lot to go in 45 minutes. But Adam, welcome to, uh, The Necessary Entrepreneur.

Thank you. I, I apologize to your, uh, your, your, your team there. They, they're a little bit part of it wrong. We don't do stuff with homes per se. We do, we, we run operations for startups or really every small business, but we, we do the back office operations, right? So the whole thesis for every business in the world is you're a founder who has a superpower. I hope if you're crazy enough to go start a business, you better have a superpower in something.

So why, why is it crazy to start a business? A couple entrepreneurs are sitting here talking to each other. There's millions of entrepreneurs in this country. There's a lot of 'em that I wanna get in this. I don't know if they fail. My mean take is they quit.

I think that's pretty much true. Um, a large majority quit. No one knows just how hard it is. Like, it is really, really difficult to build a business. Like, that is, that is hard, right? You need to go out there and convince someone to go buy your pen. Like, whatever your thing is, like, why is your pen better than anyone else's? How are you going to market? Even if you build the best pen in the world, how are you going to market it? That's really hard. Distribution's really freaking tough. Then you have to get up every day and do it over and over and over and over again, and you cannot stop. And so like, this isn't— yes, you can get to a point where it's a path to freedom in some ways, and certainly you're your own boss, which is amazing. But usually when you're the boss, like, let me be clear, when you're the boss, it means it all comes back up to you and you get to deal with all the problems when things break down. There's no one else in the end.

So we were talking about, you threw out about pens, why your pen's better. So do you think it's important to develop the best pen or is it to develop one that's just marketable and be better at branding and marketing it?

Man, I mean, like, if I have to choose, it's the marketing part. Like in the end, like you need to be able to sell something to anyone. And that's more important than building the best. Like, if you, if you build the best technical pen in the world, but no one knows it exists, like, who cares? So like, you need to be able to sell it just as well as it has to be better. Um, and, and, but I mean, you, yeah, it's, uh, the selling and marketing is more important.

Doesn't that go back to, um, the moment where, hey, sell me this pen. What, what's, what are they trying to teach us when the speaker is speaking to 1,000 people and he's looking at the audience who came there and learned how to do something better, be a salesperson, run, and he said, sell me this pen. And people keep failing and failing and failing until someone does it right. What's happening there?

What's happening is people don't know how to— they're not reading the room. They don't know how to understand, like, the psychology of the person they're talking to and actually explain it to them. Like, what, what gets that person? What is the thing that makes them excited enough to give over your hard-earned money? Like, think about the restaurant you ate at for lunch today or the thing you're going to go buy on Amazon. Why did you choose that item? Why did you choose that? Like, there is a bunch of psychological triggers that are going into those things, many of which you probably don't even understand. We don't in many ways. But what is making that decision, handing over your hard-earned cash for something is really difficult to do, right? That's kind of the beauty of capitalism is, is you need to work at it. You need to build something that is superior to get people being willing to do it. And so why did I buy this pen? It's a good example. Like, I bought this pen because I read about it on some random blog that was talking about really cool pens. I like a little kind of fidget spinner to some extent. I thought this is cool. It looks cool. And I don't know, I was in the mood for some random purchase on Amazon, so I bought it and it wasn't crazy expensive.

So as busy as you are, um, we're gonna get into a bit later about being an angel investor in multiple startups. And, um, you said reading a blog. Why read blogs?

Man, I read so much. I think the best entrepreneurs in the world read a ton. And are deep, heavy consumers of knowledge. Many of them read lots and lots of biographies. I've done a lot of that, although I haven't recently. I did read a ton of biographies. I listen to a lot of podcasts, by the way, as well. Why read blogs? Because I want to learn things every single day. I need new ideas. I'm always trying to stay at the edge of what the best is that's out there for my industry and not just my— I mean, obviously you need to be in your industry, but you want to pull in ideas from other places. Like actually what makes humans really good at things and actually why AI, if we ever want, if we want to talk about AI at all, but like why AI is still not necessarily as good, is humans can synthesize lots of data from places. You're not going to remember it all, right? You and I forget lots of things every day. But the ability to synthesize data from different sources and then make intuitive leaps or leaps of faith on something like, oh wow, I just pulled this data from— I'm— I saw this pen and I had this, you know, water bottle and they're both made out of aluminum probably. And what if I combined them and had like a— a pen cup or something. I mean, this is going too crazy with my analogy here, but like, but you can start creating cool ideas and be like, that could be really useful in this other industry. And, and AI doesn't really do that today. It can answer your question specifically, but it doesn't, doesn't come up with new ideas. Do you think that's what entrepreneurs do?

Do you think it will? And the, the important reason for that question is, aren't we supposed to interpret what the future's gonna be? That's what the big, that's what the big folks, that's what an Elon Musk does. That's what a Jeff Bezos did, right? They're interpreting the future and everybody calls 'em crazy. Because they're not operating now, they're operating where it's going.

Correct. Skating where the puck is going to be, right? Wayne Gretzky.

And so the challenge is right now is, is AI going to be agentic?

Oh, I mean, AI, look, I'm pretty red-pilled. I live in San Francisco. I'm deeply red-pilled on AI. I think AI is going to be able to start coming up with those intuitive ideas and new ideas. It's probably going to take everyone's jobs. I think there's a lot of things we should be deeply concerned about, but also, I also think can be very optimistic about the future and a massive world of abundance that we're heading into as well. So it's kind of, I personally have a combination of deep fear and deep excitement.

So if you have that, a lot of people have anxiety now. So you said deep fear, you invoked it. A lot of people have anxiety, which causes depression. You're not talking about that. You're still moving forward. How do you find this distinction in this silver lining between deep fear still causing you to take massive action versus a lot of the world, deep fear causes them to have anxiety, depression, and no action.

Yeah, I know. Like, that's a great point. And it is, I know lots of people certainly have like anxiety and it does stop them. For me, it, and I do like, I literally feel like I'm living in 2 worlds sometimes with AI and what is happening and where it's going. I'm like living in the normal world, taking my kids to school, they go to normal school, all those sorts of things. And then this AI world where I'm like, oh my gosh, everything is changing. In, in, I'm, I'm standing on quicksand right now. The world is changing so fast. Um, how do I do it is like, I feel like I don't have a choice. Number one, like you have to keep moving forward. I can't just hide in a little hole and, and be like, uh, you know, put my head, head in the sand and, and hope nothing happens. I need to be, I might as well be a part of it as best I can and step up and, and do that than the alternative. That wouldn't make my kids proud. It wouldn't make my wife proud. It wouldn't make me proud. So I'm gonna get up every day and Keep working hard and hopefully be a small little part of the change that's going to make the world a better place. I don't know. I just feel like I don't have a choice otherwise.

Yeah. Where do you operate from? A lot of people will have an underlying principle or value or the thing that drives them, right? Simon Sinek, he is like, you got to find your why. And everybody comes up with their thing, but do you have like an underlying purpose? Is that too big of a question?

No, not at all. I think Peter Diamandis calls it like your, your, it's like your massive summing purpose in life or whatever. He has a good statement for that. You know, I don't have a, I probably don't have a great answer. I think my purpose is to, my purpose is really like, look, I want to leave the world a little bit better than I, than when I arrived. I kind of have had that purpose really at every place I've gone. I mean, I was president of the student government in college and vice president in law school. And for me, it's always been like, can I leave the world just a little bit better? than when I got here. Right. And that goes obviously every single day, but also like picking up trash on the street when I see it just laying there. I'm doing it and I don't always do that. Sometimes I just walk right over it and then I think later I'm like, hmm, I just walked over that piece of trash and I should have just picked it up to make this place a little bit cleaner and nicer. So that's probably my purpose largely is like I want to make the world a little bit better. And if I can do that, if I can, you know, if I can create a great company, I hope we get to be multi-billions of dollars valuation. But if I can make a company that just employs a lot of people, creates a great job for them, Um, and they can achieve their purpose or whatever they want for their families and lives. That's also something to be proud of. And I'm, and I'm good with all this, but in the end, so that's the bigger one. The smaller one is I just want to learn new things every day. And I get to do that. I'm pulled in a lot of different directions right now. And it is, I was telling my coach last night about this. It is stressful, tiring, but also a lot of fun. Like, I think mentally it pulls your brain in so many ways to be pulled. I have so many different streams I'm working on right now. And, you know, No one on your team understands that. And that's sort of hard to try to be like, hey, like, I don't have time for this. There are other bigger things. Um, but that's also, uh, uh, that the learning and education and knowledge I get from that is pretty exciting and fun.

With everything you, you're doing, you've accomplished, like, you, you know that you can do it. And that's a big statement, but I'm going somewhere with this. But you have a coach. Tell me the benefit of that.

of having a coach, having someone who you can reach out to and talk to about different things that go on. I've had coaches on and off. I think some people would say they should have a coach all the time. I do think as a founder, especially as a solo founder, but even as a— I've had— so this is my 4th company, right? I've had co-founders for the first 3. This one, I'm a solo founder. So having someone you can talk to about things that you probably don't even— I love my executive team. But there's some things I probably don't want to talk with them about, or they don't even want to hear me talk about, right? It's just like, they don't want to hear why I'm like stressed. Like, they don't want to hear that. And in fact, I don't want them to know that I'm stressed because that might create anxiety in them. Um, and, and so, uh, having a coach is sort of an outlet for some of that. Um, and being able to just have someone to talk to who's been there, done that before, and understands you.

Yeah. So it's more than just a professional therapist. That's 50% of it. But isn't 50% also the person that knows how to process and give great strategic advice from outside the bubble.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, my, my coach has worked in industries like Chor before. He has good thoughts about where we're going, what we're doing things, how we're going about it. Um, he gets it. And so that's really worthwhile to have those conversations too, to think through what we're building and how we're building it. Um, and, and I appreciate that aspect of him as being someone who's sort of been there, done that.

As we jump into Chor here and really figure out what the business is and what you guys think you're solving for, um, give advice since you've, you're actively engaging with a coach, give advice on how someone would what you've learned through your experience for them to find a coach that fits the best for them and that's really beneficial and valuable?

Yeah, I mean, look, you should interview the coaches the same way you would interview an executive team. Um, most coaches are going to offer like a free session of some sort to talk with them and see if there's a vibe, see if you get them, see if you like what they're talking about. Do you feel like this is someone you might want to talk to on a regular basis and get advice from on a regular basis? Um, if the answer is yes, then that might be the right fit. If the answer is like, oh man, like that feels really— I mean, look, most good coaches are going to be expensive. So you have to be okay with that price. Um, but, uh, once you get over the price, can you be like, hey, am I gonna get the value here that's gonna help me move to the next level? And that's hard to know upfront, but everyone should get a coach to start with and then see where it takes you.

Yeah. So what do you guys think? Not to go into this big marketing deep dive about the business and stuff, but what do you, you, you starting 3 other businesses, having co-founders and angel investing in so many more. Why Chor? Why now?

So, I mean, to be clear, Chor in one version or another has been around for 6 and a half years. So that's sort of one thing to point to. Why now? It's been around a long time, although the current version, 3 and a half years. Why now? Pretty simple. The, the world is moving into a place where more and more entrepreneurs are starting businesses. More people are starting businesses in general and becoming an entrepreneur. All of those people, as you mentioned right when we started, right? You have a, a purpose in the world. You have a superpower. If you have to spend any of that time doing back office chores, your company will almost certainly fail, right? I was talking to you about how I was spending my time today dealing with a bunch of marketing stuff and kind of like updating passwords. Um, that should have happened with other people on the team. It didn't. So I'm doing it now. That is a bad use of my time. Right. And that is where I should be outsourcing it or delegating it to other people as much as I can. The weird thing about back office work is most people think, oh, I can go figure that, figure that out. When it's like, okay, yes, I get it. You can go figure out how to run payroll. Cool. Like you can do it, but I can also go figure out how to do my books and I can go figure out how to build a server to run my website on it. And I can do all these things. Always the question you have to ask is that a good use of my time and a good use of my skill set? You're great at real estate. You're great at podcasting. Are you, are you the, I mean, you have, you have a, a team to help you make the podcast great, right? You could be the editor, you could be the editor, you could be the poster, you could do all of those things yourself. You absolutely could. You don't. So my question to you is like, why don't you do it? It costs you money to hand it, give it to other people.

Yeah. So, um, I am early in my career, people didn't think I was going to be a good, I don't even like the word delegate, but they didn't think I was gonna hand off things to other folks and they had no idea that I was yearning and building something to be able to do it. But here's the challenge that I felt. to really build trustworthy, credible, capable people who have a sense of ownership, who literally will take the thing and do it better than you would do it. Now you have to build that so you can scale. The challenge is, is when you're scaling at a hyper speed is finding enough capable people that want to be a part of your team that literally have the know-how and they want to. It's a huge challenge right now.

Yep. Correct. I'm talking about that, but you didn't answer my question. I'm going to push you. I'm pushing you right back. Here's the question. Why, why, why not do this work yourself?

Well, we all know I can do other things that can make a lot more I, I, I just, that's it.

That's, so there's the answer, right? And this is something most founders don't get through their heads. And, and no offense to founders, this is where they're really dumb. They, they are pennywise and pound foolish in most cases. And they don't realize if you were a pen maker or a pie or make pies for, and you make the world's best pies or a great podcaster, right? Like you make more money doing the thing you love, you enjoy it more, you make more money doing it, and your business will be more successful because of it. And yet most founders mess up and say, well, I have to go run the back office operations. I have to figure out payroll. I have to figure out finance because that's what a good CEO does. That is BS. You are stupid if you think that is true. And I will tell you right now, your company will fail. You will drown in all the admin. You will stop doing the thing you love. Your product quality will go down and your company will fail. End of story. And that's why Chore exists, by the way.

Yeah. So there you go. That's a great, that's a good, that's a good marketing and sales statement. You need to use it. If you don't use Chore, use something else. That's a great salesman that does that, right? Make sure you're using one of these systems. Go a little bit in depth on your journey and where you can help someone work through the process of turning over the areas of your business that you shouldn't be doing. Because there's this argument, right? And, and getting to know Adam a little bit here is that he believes, I, I think he believes that you should hire slow and fire fast. Right. And so there's people that, there's, there's big brands out here that say hire fast, fire faster. There's, there's people that have all these perspectives, right? You're like, yeah, maybe you don't disagree with it, but, but hire slow, fire fast. Take us through that. And when we're trying to scale our business and hand over something we shouldn't be doing to someone that it appears they have the expertise to do.

Yeah. So, I mean, a few things, and it's funny, I'm actually moving more into the world of like hire fast and fire fast a little bit more, but it depends a little bit on the role. Um, but what, what do you really need to do well, and we have some job openings right now for Atchor. And so I'm trying to get this— we've hired lots of people, we've, we've some of it really down pat, but other ones we're trying to get better at, which is how do we build a great hiring system? In other words, like, how do you really build a good job description so you understand what, what are you hiring for? What, what do you really want someone to do? So we talked a little about we're redoing our marketing at Atchor, and I'm like, what do we really need a person to do? What are we really looking to hire? And I'm not— I don't know if it's clear. So I might change the job description actually this afternoon on one of those roles because I'm not sure it's totally clear to me. So if I don't really know what the person's gonna do, gimme a break. We can't hire that person's— we're not gonna hire the right person if they come in. That person's probably gonna fail cuz I won't even know what to manage them towards. So you need to know what you're looking for, number one. Um, once you do that, have a good process in place. What does it mean to hire? Like, create, spend a little bit of time. It doesn't take much time with AI building out a whole plan of like, what does that role look like? How is it gonna work? How am I gonna test? Um, ahead of time, maybe give someone a test case and pay them a little bit of money. So we actually have a new system in place where we pay— it's actually a whole process where we'll pay people to do a small test, a bit of work to show us what they can do. But part of that is a secret part of the thing because this is a test for us. Um, so hopefully people listening might hear this, but like, we want to know if you follow up to make sure you get paid. We'll absolutely pay you, but we're not going to pay you right off the bat. I want you to hit me up again and be like, hey, like, you said you'd pay us. Pay me. Like, I didn't see a notice about it. What's up? Be like, oh, great. Here's, here's payment. But I want you to, I want, I want to know you're proactive and will follow up.

So you've identified that following up is a massive key metric in accomplishing the tasks of these roles.

Right. And you can't fake that with AI right now. I don't, you can probably fake the test we have you do, but you can't fake the Man, like Adam said he was gonna pay me. He didn't. I'm gonna assume best intentions. Like maybe he, he didn't forget, like, you know, maybe he forgot. So I'm just gonna hit him up one more time. Hey, like, is payment coming through? Cool. Um, with that said, when people come on board, we've gotten really good about this at Shore, and I'm, I'm with some new salespeople have been really good about this. If within the first week or two you are not hitting certain metrics that I'm expecting around like proactivity, following up, getting— we have a clear check— we have a very clear checklist of things to do. If you're not doing that, like, I just don't have time for it. And it's done. You're out. We're moving on. No hard feelings. The faster you— if I know it's not going to be a fit early on, it probably not— it won't be a fit in 6 or 12 months either. Let's just move on.

Did you have to learn this?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's hard. It's hard to fire people and it's hard to sort of trust your gut. And if it's like not working, you know, you know, an example with a new sales guy we had, I gave him a very clear— actually, I fired 2 sales guys very recently, both within the first 2 weeks of being with us. In the hiring email with them, I said, here's the first 4 weeks, what it's going to look like and what the expectations are. One guy asked in a public forum, which we're all about public stuff, I don't mind it. He said, hey, like, I would really like to see what the plan is for my first time, my time here. And I wrote him back in a more private channel. I'm like, hey, like, Do you remember the email I sent you with your offer, with the full outline of this? He's like, oh, I forgot. It's like, man, like I'm your CEO, I'm your, I'm the CEO and I'm your boss for this role. If you're forgetting that, what are you going to forget with your clients that you're trying to sell to? So that was issue number one. The other guy, we talked with him a bunch about it and, and like the goal is like, you need to start hitting target. Like you need to start going do outbound before you fully get our pitch. I get it. But you need to start learning our pitch. Which, ask me questions about it. But then 2, I want you to start doing a lot of outreach. Just like start understanding how you're doing outreach to people. What does your cadence look like? Start hitting up a lot of folks. You know, you got 40 hours a week, you got 40 hours a week minimum to get stuff done. We don't do very few calls internally at Chor. You're not on sales calls yet. So you got a lot of time to get good at this stuff and a lot of time to start doing outreach.

What do you do in these moments?

2 weeks in, I was like, okay, how far have you gotten? He'd emailed 4 people and, and the other, the other guy in the group had, had pulled a list of 20,000 people.

Yeah, it's probably somewhere in between, right?

Yeah, I mean, for sure. But like, I need to know that you can move fast and follow these instructions. And if you don't, by the way, ask a lot of questions. This is something people mess up all the time. If it's unclear, you're unsure, or even if you know, ask a lot of questions because communication is so— we should talk about communication. It's key. And people mess up all the time.

We'll jump in that here in a second. So you You touched on earlier that you're always looking to learn new things. You referenced that. Absolutely. So then what do you learn from failures of, is it they end up being the type of employee that's commensurate with the way that they're onboarded? Do you look back and look at all these metrics to say, hey, what do we learn and how do we keep this from happening? Because what I've told our team over the past 2 to 3 years, I said, guys, you're thinking about this wrong. You're thinking it's expensive to let people go and fire people. No, no, no, no. You're late on this. It's really, really expensive to hire them because if they're not hired the right way, it's already going to be really expensive and inefficient, not accomplishing goals.

Correct.

And I'm not talking about expensive from the salary. You better go ahead and look down the road. If we don't do this right and we don't take full responsibility, I can tell you how much it's going to cost us.

So a few answers there. One, yes, it's sure. We do very deep, um, we do retros on every single person who leaves and doesn't work out. Um, we try to learn from it and update and change how we're hiring and what we're looking at, all this stuff. So absolutely, we've gotten, I think our system is really good now. We hire great people and most people, but it's still, we still mess up to be clear. And that goes to the second point that you made where people today still, so I'm a huge believer in the idea of like, you want to automate. Or outsource basically as many things as possible. Hire as few people as you can. Do not hire new people for roles. So where I said we're redoing a lot of things in our marketing team, I'm going to do my best not to hire, rehire for most of those roles. I'm going to see if we can build it with AI or outsource it to, to, to outsource specialists. What people mess up and what a lot of people think is like, I need to have someone in-house with me. I have to have that role in person. Well, let's pretend, going back to this, like pen maker, you're a pen maker. If you're a pen maker, what do you focus on? You probably focus on building the best pens. So should you hire a marketing team like internally that you're going to manage? You're the world's best pen PhD, and now you need to go figure out how to go hire for a marketer. You've never done that role in your life. You have no idea what to do. Do you actually think, like realistically think that role is going to work out for you? No. So guess what? It's not just the cost of that salary. And there's numbers. I actually posted something about this a few, probably a month or two ago. But let's pretend the person's making $100K a year in that marketing role. Let's say the cost actually to you as a business, if you look into the realistic amount of how often they will fail, is something like 2.5x their base salary. Because the likelihood is within 12 months they will fail. Maybe let's call it, I think, 18 months. Within 18 months they will fail. Either they will leave because they're looking for another job, they won't be doing the work that you expect, the outcomes will suck. Even more likely, they might fail within 6 months. And now you have to start the whole process over again. Recruiting, training, managing, hiring. You've lost all this time. Instead, just hire an outsourced partner. Say, hey, your job is to create great marketing for me. I get I'm going to be paying you probably 2x, but in return, you have a team who already knows what they're doing and you're going to get me great results. And if you don't, I can fire you tomorrow and not have any problem with it. And I'll fire someone else who jump in.

I was just in a conference this past week in Charleston. I actually flew back this morning and I can't believe I'm still awake here.

Um, hopefully I'm, I'm hopefully keeping you awake. It is. No.

Yeah. Right. It's good conversation. Um, so he said, hey, anything, anytime he touches something 3 times in his business, he automates it.

Smart. He's right. Smart man.

So it's like automate and move on. Automate and move on.

Yep. Smart. And that's, and that's the right idea. And you should be doing that every single time. Once again, people too often say, I've, uh, this role is open. I'm gonna fill it with another person. Um, even, even forget AI. That was a bad decision to make. Having more people, more, you know, where they say more money, more problems. It's actually more people, more problems. More people, more problems every single time. I love working with people. I love having a team, but man, like people are messy. Like people are beautiful in this way, but people are messy, right? They get sick. They got family issues. They, you know, you name it, things come up.

Yeah. Well, it's not just come up. They, what, what we do as humans, all of us, it's not just them. It's all, we prioritize, we reprioritize throughout our lives.

Yeah.

And that's almost impossible to solve for as a business. It's almost impossible.

Well, what you use, you have to carry extra capacity for everything. And so that's, that's expensive. Now, the beauty of outsourcing it, and it's a little bit about Shore, I suppose, but like, why do people hire us? Because guess what? My team gets sick too. But what do we do and guarantee to our customers? We have backup for everybody, right? Like, so if your teammate, we literally had a teammate on our, on our team who was working with a lot of his customers of ours. He literally got hit by a bus. Luckily I can talk about it. He's, he's okay. He's back with us and everything, but he got hit by a bus. Guess what? Now, if that person was working for you individually, internally, either as a sole outsourced person or internally at your company, you'd be SOL. You'd be like, oh my God, all the operations are now back to me as CEO, right? That would suck. With Chore, that this guy was backed up the next day. His clients didn't miss a beat. Right. And that's a cost. Like we bear that cost to have that backup capacity always ready to go. We don't— so we don't get sick, we don't go on vacation, right? Same. We don't have to take holidays. Now, of course, our people do, but we back everyone up. Now, I view the same thing for my vendors, the vendors I work with. I have the same expectation. Just because I'm, I'm going on vacation doesn't mean you get to stop. I don't care how you figure out how your backups are going to happen, or if you as the founder have to work a little bit harder. You told me you're going to deliver X by Z timeline. You better do it. It's not my problem how you do it. Get it done.

Yeah. So, I mean, this leads us perfectly into, you know, the topic of communication. We could say, what do we get wrong about communication now? What do we get right? But my question is, how important, if we had a pie chart and the percentage of importance in your business, what percentage of would you say communication is for the overall success of the business? We could have marketing, we could have product development, market fit, we have, but communication.

Oh man, I like that. I don't know. I don't know if it's good. I probably would say like 25%, but I almost wanted to say 50%. I

wanted to say 50. I wanted to say 50.

Yeah. It's so important. Like, and this is why I say it's so important. It is for us critical when you're talking to your customers, you need to tell them what you're doing, when you're doing it, why you're doing it, and how. Don't, if you disappear in our world, like if you, if your client says, I need help with X. And you don't get X done by like, you know, and then, and you disappear for a week and don't communicate with your client about doing X, the client's gonna be like, what the heck's going on? And then you're creating anxiety. But to be clear, that same thing happens with your manager. If you say, hey, I'm, you know, I want X to occur and you don't acknowledge your manager, you don't respond and you don't follow through, or you do follow through, but you just don't talk about it. Your manager's also gonna be pissed. By the way, same thing happens with a spouse or a significant other. or a friend, if you don't communicate at all, people are going to be pissed. So communication is so key. And yet for some reason, people find it so difficult to do. I don't know why. It takes no time at all to write an extra sentence, update someone on what's going on, and yet people struggle with it in all walks of life.

Yeah. I mean, is that the soft skills of business? Because we hear about bedside manner in physicians and we talk, right? Communication is the soft skills and the bedside manner of business, is it not?

100%. I, once again, I am shocked by how bad most people are at this. They need, they, they, it is a soft skill. It's like so easy to start just showing up, having conversations, being, building relationship with people. That is, that is how you still get things done in today's world. Like, yes, you're influenced by marketing and digital this or that, but like showing up and talking with people and messaging them. Um, and it's how you actually really build, build how you almost do anything.

So is it just communication in general or is it the type of communication, right? Are we talking about Slack? Are we talking about email, text, voice over the phone, voice interaction, video interaction, person to person, face to face? Because there's a lot of different types.

It is. I would say it's context dependent, right? It really depends on the context of the kind of conversation you're having with someone and why and when. So Like, you know, we could do this podcast digitally like we are right now, but it might be better in person. And I wonder about that many times when I'm on podcasts.

They always are. They always are.

Right. And so, and, but it costs money and costs time. And so it has its drawbacks. So yeah, I think it really depends on the context. But look, in the end, just starting with communicating in general, right? Like, man, it doesn't take me a lot of time. I'll give you an example of someone. A really well-known kind of VC and entrepreneur. I know him. I don't know him super well, but I know him. He sent me a message. He was with his daughter visiting Vanderbilt, where I went to college. He sent me a message, said, I'm at Vanderbilt right now with my daughter. It's awesome, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh my gosh, like, how did you even know I went to Vanderbilt? He's like, oh, I just remember it. I don't believe that he actually remembers that, but he probably has a really good system for it. He always sends me a note on my birthday. And guess what? I noticed that stuff and I'm like, man, how do I build a system like that? It's just the ability to follow up, stay in touch is so impressive. And he made it part of his life. And that's, I'm sure, a huge part of his success.

He probably has it automated.

He probably does, but he might also just say, I'm going to set aside 20 minutes every day. Like there are tools that do this, right? There are tools that can do that, but he still might go in every day and he's dedicated himself to, you know, I'm going to spend, I have a tool that does this too called Clay. Or they just changed the name because they're competing with this data broker, Clay. But like, that it's sort of like a personal relationship manager. It shows me all the people. I think it shows me their birthdays. I can put notes in about people. I don't spend time doing that though. Like what I should do after our call right now, I should go in and put in information that I learned. I probably won't, in which case I might not remember this stuff in the future and I will be bad at following up with you and building a relationship. And that's A loss to me.

Yeah.

Maybe a loss to you, but a loss to me, certainly.

Yeah. But I mean, is it important that we try to focus on, because, you know, businesses, we can call it what it is. We can call it war. We can call it whatever it is. All right. It's very, very, very competitive and hard. And so should we strategically pick out the 3, the 5 people, create those relationships, go deep with them? Because to your point, we don't have time for everything. So should we say, who are the influential people that I want to create relationships with that I know I'm going to have to provide value and show up first? Should we do that as entrepreneurs? Because you can't do it for everyone.

Yeah, of course. I mean, yes, like you should be doing everything to prioritize the relationships with the most important people, right? Why do people take out their customers to dinner? The customers are already paying them. Why do you take them out to dinner anyways and build a relationship? Makes it harder to fire you. Um, why do you take your spouse out to dinner? And those sorts of things and like spend quality time with them. It's important to build those relationships and strengthen them. So yeah, like I think you do have to prioritize. You can't do it with everybody, but you can do the basic stuff. And this is where once again, I fail too. This is not a strength of mine. I need to be hitting people up. I need to just say 10 minutes a day, I'm going to just send people a note. Happy birthday. Hope things are good. It's been a long time. Easy to do 10 minutes a day. And but Same way I hear people all the time, like, I don't have time to work out. I'm like, dude, you literally, there's something called a 7-minute workout. You can do it in your living room or your hotel room. Get off your phone. Get doing that.

What do you do as a hard-charging entrepreneur with knowing that you need to give yourself, it's a word I'm gonna impose it here, not from like a faith perspective, but like to give yourself some grace, right? On, on acknowledging the things you don't do well, but having the conversation. How do we do that with hard-charging entrepreneurs? How do we give that to other people at times? Without cannibalizing our businesses.

Um, well, I, I, well, you mean give yourself, uh, re— re— re-say that. You give yourself the grace to like be okay not being good at things or?

Yeah. And well, to acknowledge it and say, hey, listen, I'm not gonna beat myself up and say it's the end of the day, but to acknowledge it's not okay and say, hey, it's, it's okay that it's not okay, but you still need to do something about it. How do, how do we do that? Because then we need to carry that to people we lead as well, it seems.

Yeah, I mean, look, the grace I guess I give myself in those cases are I have maybe come to the conclusion as I've gotten slightly older or done enough startups or whatever it is, that in some ways none of it matters. Like, this sounds weird. Like, I have an ego. I have things I want to go build and get done. I've acknowledged in my life I'm not Elon Musk. Probably for good and bad, right? He's probably not the best parent, definitely not the best spouse, but he's an amazing entrepreneur. But I'm not going to, I'm not going to be someone who's, you know, going to be the world's richest man. So I give myself the grace that that is okay. I give myself the grace that every day, as long as I'm trying as hard as I can and doing the things that I believe are right and learning a little bit every day, that's good enough. And it might, it might mean the company doesn't totally work out, but, but I don't want to look back and say, man, I didn't, I didn't work hard enough and give it my all. And I wasn't proud of that. And, and I can go to sleep every night feeling like, you know what, I worked hard today. I mean, to be clear, like I work basically 6, like 6 days a week and I've done that for about 15 or 16 years straight. So like I'm already at that level, but I need to set time aside, set time aside for my kids and family.

So, so you've invested in these 200+ startup investments and I look at something like that, right? As an active angel investor, I look at that and that's such a big number. And I joke with people and stuff and I mentioned before, I'm like, what's he doing? Opening lemonade stands on every corner? Is that, is that what it is? Is it 200 corners of lemonade stands? And you have little kids that are underage, you're giving them 50%. Like, how do you invest in 200+ startups for an angel, as an angel investor?

A few answers. One, I, in some ways I wish they were lemonade stands because a lot of those companies are out of business now. So maybe lemonade stands would actually make more money. Um, but, but, um, the way you do it is a few things. As with all things in life, look, I'm, I'm a huge believer in what Warren Buffett talks about being the 8th wonder of the world, compounding. Um, if you can let things compound, you get good at things and things build. So look, I've been at angel investing for— I've been in Silicon Valley for 16 years. I started about a year after that. So about 15 years I've been investing now. It builds up. You start, you start seeing a lot of deals, you get on a lot of deal lists. Not all of those deals are massive investments. Some of those are like pretty small. Maybe I put $2,500 in, which is recognized for a lot of people. That's a lot of money, but like they're small checks, relatively speaking. Some of the other investments I've done also, I can They're on my list of 200+ investments, but they're via a fund where I was a partner. So I was doing, I was doing those deals actively with my partner. So it was both of us, but the fund was the investor, not me individually. Um, and through those, the way you do it is you just meet a lot of startups, um, and you start having conversations with them and be like, this makes sense. This is cool. This is different. You seem like a different sort of founder who thinks in a new way. So I'll answer it. I'll stop there and I can tell you kind of my philosophy has changed a little bit in angel investing recently over the past few years. But that's the high level of how, how do I do it the same way you do everything else in life? A good job, one foot after the next, day after day, and try to learn a little bit more.

So what's changed? Because if we talk about your changed philosophy, if people are also trying to stand up businesses and they're trying to have exits, if there's things you've learned, it's also something that founders could also take away and utilize what you've learned. How do you build something? So what have, what's transitioned? What's evolved in your mind when you're, when you're angel investing?

Well, I mean, for angel investing, what's evolved for me personally is I don't do a lot of— I'm doing much less early-stage angel investing. So before, I would meet lots of early-stage founders and I would do lots of early-stage investing. And if I had a crystal ball ever, which I have a good track record, so I probably had some sort of a crystal ball for a while. I don't know if I have that anymore. Now, I don't know if that's because I've gotten older or because I don't go to as many events anymore. I used to go to events nonstop in San Francisco and was just talking to tons of people and learning a lot. Maybe that's part of it. I also think a lot of it, though, is because of AI. I just, I think the AI is flipping the world around in so many new ways where what seems like a good idea 6 months ago gets crushed by the new launch, new ChatGPT or Claude launch. And it's like, I just don't know anymore. So what's changed is I just don't do as much early-stage investing. I'm doing later-stage investing now. Um, it's a little bit more safe. Obviously the returns might be less, but not even, right? And you could have invested in Anthropic 3 months ago. in 3 extra money on paper. Like, so the world is also crazy. That's probably the biggest one that's changed, but also the ability for founders to build amazing things has changed. So when I talk to founders a lot, like, hey, like, what would get you to invest? I'm like, look, you got to prove out now that you can get things done for very little money because you can. Like, AI enables you to build an amazing website, to build an amazing MVP, to getting early customers for a relatively low cost. If you were unable to do most of those things and you're like, I need $1 million to make that happen, You're not gonna get anywhere. That's a joke at this point in today's world.

So there's some very, some highly successful, um, seed investors and early stage investors that I've gotten to know well, not friends, but you know, as we build these networks, we get to know people when you spend a lot of time around 'em. Um, they've had huge exit, hundreds of millions of dollars in exits, probably actually at a time, probably over a billion now. And they're investing at a high level. They're very connected throughout the country. And I had an event 3 weeks ago, my first event I've ever put on, and had some high-quality people that came in, sold some high-ticket numbers, but they keynoted it in the end because you have to pay them $150 grand to show up. I've developed a relationship, but they did this no fee, no charge, but they did it virtually on an LED wall that I just built in this new theater I built in my headquarters. And we were talking about growth of business and really the effect of AI since you brought up AI. They said, anybody who talks about their next hire, you need to change your mindset. It's a very definitive statement. The only person that you need to hire for every role now is an engineer of AI.

Mm-hmm.

You wanna hire a sales role? No. You wanna hire an HR role? No. You don't hire anybody else. Your next hire. And what they said was, the reason why is all the billionaires and multimillionaires that they know, This is exactly what they're doing. They're hiring an engineer of the AI to AI their businesses for those things you thought you needed to hire an employee for before.

Yep. I, I, and Mark, I totally agree with that in every single way. I mean, like, we are, anybody in my team who is showing signs of being good at AI, I'm pushing them to see where they can get to, giving them opportunities to do a lot more, hopefully spread their wings and keep building as quick as they can because that is exactly right. Um, I'm talking to some other, another person about being another AI person on our team. And those are exactly the right questions, Mark, in every single way. Like, because a lot of this stuff can be replaced with AI, not all of it.

With agents, right?

With agents, with agents or various part types of AI. I mean, you call it agents or not, but like, yes, with, with so many different things. And that is changing dramatically and changes what you do and how you do it. And so, I mean, yes, at a high level, yes, yes, that, that is what the smart people are doing. I like to think I'm a smart person. That is exactly what we're doing at my company. Um, I, and, and this is the excuse everyone's going to make. If you have the time, you should be trying to build things yourself as well. Um, in thinking through how do I— so I have a wonderful EA. I've told her though, when I get the time, I'm going to try to rebuild some of the work that she does. Now, to me, from my view, that does not mean I fire her. It means I retask her to the things that I can't build. Um, and have her do the things that, that I don't need a human to, that I need a human to do versus outsourcing and kind of automating the rest.

So where does Chor integrate with what we just said? For, for all the businesses that we're saying, hey, this engineering of AI for your business is very important. And so where does Chor come and interact with the businesses for us now?

Yeah, I mean, look, so the key thing though is yes, you should hire AI engineers to build everything you can. With that said, there's a lot of things that you, this is where I think the narrative on AI is a little bit messed up. And there was a few, probably a month ago, month and a half ago, there was sort of the SaaSpocalypse, right? A lot of these SaaS companies got really hit stock-wise. Um, the one thing that I think is wrong with that narrative in many cases is like, you're not going to really rebuild. I'm not going to rebuild Salesforce. Like, could I build a CRM with AI? For sure. But, but is that a good use of my time to rebuild Salesforce and then maintain my own version of Salesforce? Salesforce has a lot of features. Some of those features I don't need, so I don't probably need to rebuild all the pieces. But that's a, that's, that's a lot of work and time. And for like the, you know, $100 per seat I pay, probably not even for— so $300 a month, like, yeah, like get a Claude Code, you know, account for $100 a month. So maybe, but like, once again, I think this is where most companies, if you're great at what you do and the price point is fair, it doesn't make sense to rebuild it because that is still, that's more work you're taking on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We don't, whoever's using Salesforce doesn't need just a replacement for Salesforce. You have to be thinking, what are they going to need in 3 years and build that.

Right. Which once again, like it's hard now if you're building it for yourself, you can go do that. But also like once again, you have to now maintain that. There's all these things you need to maintain. I'm like, I don't, I don't want to go do that. So, you know, I mentioned like we're, we're revamping a lot of our marketing. This is an opportunity for us to rethink things. So I'm talking with 3 different groups right now. About AI-ing a large majority of our marketing. And so we're going to find out if that's possible. It might not be fully, and we might not want to maintain it or build it. But like, I've looked at other tools. I'd rather hire other tools. We're going to hire some contractors to do some work, but it still might make sense for us to just build our own version because, no, I've not— this is a free idea for the world. I've not seen a great marketing orchestrator out there that can kind of be the run your marketing each way.

All right. So as we wrap up here, what are you excited about? Like right now it can be around what, but what do you, what do you, what is Adam Spector of James Bond?

Spelled differently, not the way they do it on James Bond, but I guess I'm happy to be an evil villain anytime. I probably am to someone.

What are you excited about though? We're sitting here mid-2026. Things are going so fast.

I'm excited that we are going to be living in a sci-fi future. In the very near term. So like, literally, I will tell you some crazy things to end this on. I think we are getting to longevity escape velocity where for every day that I live, I'll be aging in reverse, or at least staying still age-wise. We're getting longevity escape velocity. You're going to cure every single disease. We're going to have like the holodeck from Star Trek. We're going to have replicators so I can get any food I want, full abundance on everything. I'm ecstatic for that world. But I'm also very scared for the hardship it's going to take to get there because we're also going to go through 50% white-collar job loss and restructuring of what it means to live in a society where you have some haves and a lot of have-nots. Like we already are in that world to some extent, but at least people can still get jobs. That scares me as well, but I'm ecstatic for what the future holds because, and once again, I read a lot in all the sci-fi things. You can read some dystopian sci-fi stuff, but a lot of the more positive sci-fi like Star Trek or something is pretty mind-blowing and amazing. The stars are out there for us to explore. Let's go. Let's go do it.

Yeah, right on. Hey, to wrap this up, what's your call to action for people to engage with you? It could be as simple as just follow me on LinkedIn. It could be go to a website. What's your call to action?

Yeah, follow me on LinkedIn for sure. Just, I think it's just Adam Spector, maybe Adam Spector 2 on LinkedIn, but you can find me pretty easily. hiretour.com, H-I-R-E chore.com. So hirechore.com. You can find more information about us there and just stay in touch. Like, if I can be helpful to every entrepreneur in general, you don't have to pay me money for it. I just want to be helpful and make everyone a success. That is a win for the world when there are more successful entrepreneurs. So I hope this is helpful and valuable to them.

Awesome.

Mark, thank you for having me.

Yeah, thank you, man. Thanks for giving us 45 minutes. Time's valuable these days and we appreciate it.

For sure. My pleasure.

Thank you.