209: Ari Meisel — The Art of Less Doing

All right, well, in this year, I think you should maybe do a little less. And that is the subject of today's show. We've got a great guest on about how to do less and make your company better, more valuable, and your life better in the process. And of course, we've got lots of things like this every week. If you want to get all of these shows and more, there's about 190 of these out there in the world now and growing every week. You can go get subscribed for the regular weekly updates, get all the tools and downloads, that kind of thing. Search the back catalog of our shows@scalingcoach.com Also, if you'd like a copy of the book for free, go to scalingcoach.com and you just pay the shipping and handling and I'll give you the book for free. So scalingcoach.com listen in now as we talk with Ari Meisel about how to do less and do better in the process. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today, Ari Meisel. Ari, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Bill.

Guys, I'm just outside of San Francisco in the Oakland hills, and Ari is in Brooklyn. And, you know, we often say that Oakland's the Brooklyn of San Francisco. It's got that little bit outside of town and. And definitely a hipster undercurrent here. It's funny. I was thinking about it. So I did stand up comedy as one of my quarterly comfort zone challenges in the fall, and I went through this, like, comedy boot camp. I got a coach, I worked on it, did a set. I did 18 minutes at Caroline's on Broadway, and it was really, really confronting to do it. And I am a comfortable speaker, as many of our listeners know. I'm very happy. I, you know, it's not hard to find the words for me, but, like, doing comedy and rehearsed scripted, you know, like written material, oh, my God. That was really, really overwhelmingly confronting. And I did, but I did this whole bit about Bay Area neighborhoods and what it's like to live here and how one thing's cool in one place is not cool in the next. And all that. It just. People just looked at me blankly through that whole section. And I tried to equate it, but I guess what we each think people know about our different areas and subcultures is not nearly as universally known as the other.

Well, you know what? Just not to go on a tangent here, but, you know, What I think is one of the most interesting skills that comics have that is actually applicable in business is their ability to observe things that everybody sees every day but we don't notice.

Right? Absolutely. Yes. Take for granted. Well, that's just the way it is. And then they take a pick at it and poke at it and unpack it and expose the pain and the annoyance of all of it. Right?

Yeah, but. Yeah, exactly. And at the end of the day it's like it's actually funny. You know, if you ask Seth Godin what he does, he says, I notice things.

Yes, noticing. And that's useful for. Anyway, let's, let's get into it. So guys, Ari, you may have heard him speak or read his books before, but Ari's best selling author of the Art of Less Doing and the Replaceable Founder. He's this self described Overwhelm Ologist. He'll talk about dealing with and confronting Overwhelm in his personal and professional life. He, you've heard him maybe also on the Less Doing podcast and he talks on stages all the time. He also posts on Medium with lots of really actionable posts about doing less. So this is a favorite subject. In fact, when I think about the CEOs who fail to scale well or who scale little but then sort of fall off the process, we come back to some core issue of trying to be Superman, trying to do it all instead of developing a strong team, a strong company. And so I love this topic. So welcome to show Ari.

Thank you very much for having me again, Bill.

So tell us a little bit of the background, like how did you come to less doing? It's a great story about your own life of overwhelm.

Yeah, so I got started in a very unusual place, I'd say, which was construction. So I went to the University of Pennsylvania to the Wharton School of Business. And when I got out, I went to to visit a friend in upstate New York in a place called Binghamton. And I didn't leave for another three years. I ended up doing this big real estate development project there and the, the lifestyle that I was living was incredibly unhealthy and stressful. I was working 18 hour days on construction site, managing finances, legal aspects, political aspects, being in the news. And after three years of doing that, I finished the project. I found myself in $3 million of personal debt and I got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. For those who don't know, Crohn's is a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract. It's considered to Be incurable. And it's very debilitating and painful. And long story short, I went from working 18 hour days to struggling to get an hour of work done on a given day. And that extreme restriction on my time has formed the basis for everything that I think I've done since, because it's always, always fascinating me. You ask somebody who works a 9 to 5 job, what would you do if you could only work till 4? And most of the time the answer is, well, they'd skip lunch. But if you ask that same person, what would you do if you could only work an hour a day? You get this blank look because it requires such a different way of thinking, a different methodology, different techniques and tools. Because at that point, the question really isn't what would you do? It's what wouldn't you do? And if the things that you wouldn't do still have to get done, then who or what is going to do them for you? And so that formed the basis for the Less Doing system, which I started writing about and then teaching and then coaching and consulting. And, you know, it took me all the way up to being on the Bill Gallagher show.

The pinnacle of your career, the Scaling up podcast. Well, you've spoken to our Scaling Up Summit as well before, and we just like to get you out to a wider and wider audience and continue. I mean, some of these things that we talk about all the time, we focus people in on their strengths using the Gallup strengths tools. We try to have people figure out what they love doing, what they love doing, and knock off, get rid of all the things they hate doing, organize their business around that, especially if you're the founder. But if you're any kind of a leader, figuring out how to optimize that. And then when we think about Daily Priorities, our quarterly priorities, what is it the one thing that if you only had the first hour of the day, what would you get done then? And I think that's a really useful kind of an exercise to do. I think it goes to your whole point, like what, what should you really be doing? And everything else should probably be done by somebody else, right?

Or something else. It's amazing what we can automate now that even a week ago a person had to do.

Yeah, right. And some of those tools are getting a lot easier, right? I mean, like connecting up any app to some other app, a zapier or an if this, then that routine is maybe a little geeky for some people, but there's somebody on your team who could help you do that.

Yeah, and. And some of them are more straightforward than that. I mean, simply something like Amazon subscribe and save, where you can subscribe to household goods or office supplies is a big win for a lot of people because they. It's amazing how much time is spent on things like that. And that is an automation.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we have routines and checklists like every quarter as we end a quarter, quarterly planning sessions with our clients, we look at our supplies and we burn through quite a lot of post it notes, among other small consumables. And as a result of that, we look at our supply levels and we restock to the appropriate level each quarter. But we just take an inventory. We don't buy a whole year because who knows how things could go up or down. But, but quarter by quarter is sufficient and takes a few minutes then. Yeah, so it's not a full robot automation, but it is like we've automated ourselves in our routines. And I think that there are things like I was talking last week with the team about how, like, I hate to do my books, I hate to reconcile expenses, I hate to look at the unallocated stuff and figure out what it is. And. But some of it can be done by somebody else. But there's a little bit that I have to do. So it's got routines and prompts and supports and things like that in for me. And I suppose at some level I could just like there's a certain amount that I just don't bother if I can't figure it out in, you know, 30 seconds or something, I move on and I let that stay in the unknown category.

Yeah, well, there's a, an old economist, I think, named Albert Alfred North Whitehead who used to, he would say that society progresses based on the number of operations that we can do without thinking about them.

Yeah, that's a complicated thing. There's a lot in that statement.

Yes.

So talk to us. So you have this idea, you begin to do this, but then you encounter similar problems all over again. Take us through that story.

So in terms of building the business, I mean. Yeah, so I was building less doing for a number of years and I sort of fell into coaching. What happened was I was teaching a class one night and I taught. Well, let me back up a little bit further. So there was this platform called skillshare that launched at the time. And skillshare, which is still around, was a platform where anybody could teach anything to anybody. It wasn't like Udemy or the online courses. It was really just a platform so you could Say, I want to teach Peruvian basket weaving at this place at this time. And then they would promote it and they would take the ticket sales and all that kind of stuff. So I put up a class on productivity and I got like eight people the first time. I think they're paid 10 bucks each or $5 each, I can't remember. And it went really well. And so I. Online or. No, in person. In person.

Person, yeah. Like an event bride or something.

Exactly. I mean, basically that. And so I started doing that more and more. And within a few months I was teaching to 40 people every week to a sold out class. And I became one of the most popular classes in New York on the platform. And I was refining the content. Every time I did that, every time based on people's questions, I would, I would make it better. And after one class, this guy came up to me and he said, you know, that was great. He said, do you do private coaching? And I, I said, yeah, I do actually. And it's this much money that you.

Hadn'T done yet, right?

I'd never ever done coaching before. This is the option.

Start that way. Do you guys do this?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, look, you know, if you look at most businesses, not to. Just a quick aside here. If you go look at most businesses that are doing less than $300,000 in revenue, the focus is on revenue. Like at that point you basically just need to say yes to everything until you get enough money in the door. After that you can start focusing more on building systems. But up until that point, you really do need to say yes to most things. So I said yes. And I said, and. But it was, it's still funny looking back on it, because I said yes so quickly. And I was like, and this is the price and this is what we do. And that's that. And he said, great. So I became a coach. Every, every class after that, I would say to people, and by the way, I offer private coaching and I pick up more and more clients. And I did something like a thousand hours of coaching over the course of two years, I think. And it was, it was a, it was a crash course in coaching because I made a lot of mistakes, I crossed a lot of boundaries, and I ended up figuring out what I really like doing, which, which was this form of business coaching. But I was trying to help people be more effective in their own lives. So I built that up over a number of years. And then about five years ago, I got an opportunity to start a new company with a friend so you're familiar, of course, with a virtual assistant. Yeah, yeah. So five years ago, I think five years ago now, there was a company called Zirtual, which is still around. They went out of business one morning very suddenly, and there was this, like, mass panic amongst clients and assistants alike. And there's not much that constitutes breaking news in the productivity space, but this was it. And so that night, just by happenstance, my friend and I were having dinner and we're talking about it, and he was saying, you know, why don't you start your own virtual assistant company? And I said, well, I don't want to do that. You know, less doing is going pretty well, and my wife's pregnant with our fourth child. We're going on vacation in two weeks. Like, I don't want to start another company. And he said, well, what if we did it together? So I said, okay, let's do it. And we got to do it quickly. So 24 hours later, we launched a new virtual assistant company. And we quickly grew it from the two of us to 183 assistants in 17 time zones. We did a million dollars the first year in revenue, never put a penny into the company. And the second year, we were continuing to grow. And it became very apparent that my partner and I had very different visions for the company.

Yeah.

Which I'm sure is not an uncommon experience. Well, I know it's not. I've seen it a number of times now. And that divide got greater and greater to the point that In October of 2017, I came into a meeting and I told him I wanted him to buy me out, which he sort of reluctantly agreed to do. And I had not uttered the words less doing, I think, over those entire two years. So I had pretty much killed the brand. And so I was starting over from scratch. So I brought in a team of people that were from that company that I had worked with for a number of years. Then I started from scratch, basically about two years ago with less doing, and was in that mode where I was saying yes to everything. So we were doing business consulting and speaking and coaching and writing another book and everything imaginable until I started to refine that further and further over the course of the year. And the focus now is on business coaching. And what we do is we help entrepreneurs become more replaceable, which is something that I'm constantly experimenting on with myself as well.

And you work one on one in this case, or.

No, it's all group coaching. I do do some very limited one on one consulting work, but I try to avoid it if I can.

So mostly groups. You do a class within a company or something?

Well, mastermind. Oh, sorry. In a company. Yeah, in a company where typically working with the whole team.

Yeah. And the, and then you do masterminds for CEOs and are those remote or are they in person?

Both. So they're for CEOs and typically an ops person also. Because I think that I divide, I sort of span that divide very well. But we, it's mostly virtual. Then we do three events a year here in New York.

And in that world you're talking about, is this all the optimize Automate outsource mindset?

Yes, that's the basic framework that sort of informs everything else. But in the replaceable founder, specifically, when we're dealing with businesses, we tend to look at three main areas which is communications, project management and processes.

Okay, good. So let's go into that for a little bit and I think here's a thing for folks to consider. Many of our founders and senior leaders are so tied to their business, they have this more than full time job and when they think about attracting investment or ever exiting the business, they just don't see a way. And they, and they think about their team like, oh, I just have the wrong team and if I had a different team or if I had more money to hire a better team or whatever. But there doesn't ever seem to be a way out of the trap. And yet the company's not particularly saleable. If you're as tied to it as, as you may be right now. It's not easy for somebody to come out and replace. You're like, well, I just need to hire somebody else like me. Yeah, I would argue that's probably. And probably you would argue the same thing. That's not actually accurate. It's the way you're set up, right?

Absolutely. There is no hiring somebody else like me. People have tried it, but it rarely ever works. If anything, you want to hire somebody who compliments you really well, I would say. But the thing is, is that they skip some important steps. And the reason that I tell people and that I teach this Optimize Automate outsource method, outsourcing is the last thing and where most people make a mistake is they outsource first. It's this knee jerk reaction where it's like, I don't want to do this thing so I'm going to get somebody else to do it for me. But if you take something that's inefficient, that's not clear that you're not doing well. And you try to give it to somebody else who has less context, less information, less experience than you do, and yet you expect a higher level result than you were going to achieve yourself. You're setting everybody up for failure.

Well, when I hired my first assistant, I think that I started to, just for my own sanity, optimize this stuff. So I'm like, okay, every time a new client comes on, what do we need to do? Great. And then how do we manage ongoing clients? What are the regular cyclical things that we do by client, by quarter, by year, by week? And we put in checklists and routines for those. So whether it was a checklist or a schedule or some hybrid of the two, all of that stuff was fairly optimized. So when I brought a person in, I said, okay, this is your job now. You can go make it better, you can refine it, improve it. And each person has. But I had done as much as I could to optimize it and automate it before I had given it over to them.

Yeah. And you also bring up a very important point worth mentioning, which is that a lot of CEOs make the mistake of hiring a CEO before they hire a personal, or rather an executive assistant. And what ends up happening is the CEO becomes the CEO's assistant in many ways. I've literally worked with companies that are doing 20, 30 million dollars a year and the CEO is booking travel for the CEO.

Yeah, yeah, definitely seen that. Oh, they got this one. Yeah, they're becoming super EA roles. But the other one that I've seen, I don't know if you see this a lot, is they bring in a CEO too early and then that person sort of competes with them in their primary function of establishing the vision and the direction of the company.

Yeah, that's right. They become the COO CEO.

Yeah. And then that gets weird. And in fact, one of my very good friends works a lot with CEOs today and he had some similar, you know, dynamic. They is too alike to the CEO.

Yeah, you see that all the time.

So that's the first thing. Then there's this framework. So talk about some of the. Before we move into the next bit, let's talk a little about some of the methods and approaches for Optimize Automate Outsource. Share a story or walk us through that a little bit. So just general ones about that.

Sure. So.

We have, you know, the. The beginning stage of it, of what.

It looks like to start out with.

What are we Talking bring that to life. Paint a picture for us.

Yeah. So what it really ends up looking like is a lot of tracking and identification. And that sounds very simple and sort of lower level. But yeah, you can't. I mean, I'm not. You can't imagine. I'm sure you've seen this a lot. But so many companies do things and employees do things without knowing why or really how they're doing it. They just kind of do it.

And yeah, they haven't uncovered the underlying process. It's done well.

Yeah. And you know, you say like that. Let's take an example, like paying a bill. Okay. So you pay a bill. And whether you're doing it with your personal life or your or in your business, the average number of steps required to pay A bill is 23. Now, when I ask audiences, and I've spoken all over the world, I asked people how many steps you think are required? I've never heard somebody say over 10. Most people are like, oh, 8, 9, 6, 5. It's 23. And the interesting thing about that very basic example is that the person who's paying a bill and thinks it's nine steps, they're paying bills, they're doing it and they're getting it done. But if they ever tried to teach that to somebody else or show it to somebody else, they're missing the other 14 steps. And so we end up basically making a photocopy of a photocopy. If you don't know how you do things, and if you don't identify how things are done, then it's almost impossible to make them more efficient. You know, that'll saying what gets measured gets. Gets improved. Right? Right. So we have to look at how we're actually doing the things that we're doing. There's so much waste involved in the way that most companies operate. There's so much quote, unquote busy work that happens. So a little time tracking goes a really long way. When we start out with companies.

You know, we. In the past, we've also had on Paul Akers, author of Two Second Lean on the podcast. You can find the past episode with him as well. And Paul does whole bunch of really great videos. And the thing that I like about that, what you're pointing to there is he looks at it in real detail and continually. He's like, wait, what is it that I do here? What is it that I do there? And he just keeps looking for the friction points. Right. But I had a funny one like that recently where I'm like, okay, Every morning, one of us goes downstairs and gets coffee. It's like one of the very first things that we do in the morning is we stimulate. And so one of us go down and I'm like, why is the coffee machine over there and the water over here and the coffee over here and the sugar and the mugs there? Like, why aren't all of these things in one place? So I, like, reorganized the kitchen, but it'd been like that for 20 years.

Yeah, and it's a really good example. I mean, so I get up at 5 o' clock every morning and I make lunch for four kids before I go to school. And I've gotten it down to a science at this point, because before it used to take me an hour and a half to make four lunches, and now it takes me about 15 minutes. Yeah, but you're right. So many people go through life and business just accepting that things are hard and that they're the way they are. And so they never look at a way that it could possibly be better. And I think that that's one of the things I was about to say that I think that's one of the benefits that entrepreneurs have. But actually, I don't believe that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into that same trap. There's. There's a certain mindset that's required to constantly be thinking, is there a better way of doing this?

So I think that this is where having a buddy, a mastermind, a coach, a part, somebody other than you get involved can make a massive difference. Because we don't see the water that we swim in. Right. The old saying that I say endlessly is that we'll never know who discovered water. But you could be sure it wasn't a fish. Right. I spoiled the punchline as I rushed it there, but I like that a lot. But it's not the coach or somebody else is smarter than you. It's that they just aren't living in your world. Years ago, I took over a company that I hadn't been the founder of, and I didn't know all the parts of it and the jobs because I hadn't built it. So I went. As part of my education, I went and I said, I'm going to learn every person's job. And I would sit with people for a couple hours or even a couple days. And I sat down with this one woman. I said, okay, walk me through your job. I'm just going down to sit, follow you through the day, and I'm going to ask you questions and she walked me through all this stuff that she did and she. The vast majority of her job was around labeling and relabeling and creating labels all pretty manually for product as it went through and got used in different places and ways, from a trade show to this customer to this market channel to whatever in and out of stock. But it was being relabeled. And I was like, why is that? And so she said, okay, because this group and this environment requires these different standards. Standards. And I, and I don't know, somewhere around the middle of the day, I said, okay, we're gonna eliminate your job. Yeah, I'm new CEO and. But chill out. I promise you, you'll have a job, just not this one. We're gonna change stuff. You're a good person, I can tell you, like this place and all that. We're gonna find something else for you to do. You may find it yourself, but this is insanity. We should never be doing this. And we have to figure out how to do this. Course of a few weeks, we got rid of all of that. We standardized to one kind of label and implemented new kind of barcoding software and, and scanners and things like that. And that didn't exist in the company before then. But I couldn't believe that we were paying a person, full time person just to do that back and forth stuff. And it was helpful to do that. So when I have people buddy up in companies or in peer groups, you can have somebody challenge each other, they'd be like, I do something like this. They'd be like, oh, huh. I do it like that. And I think there's something very powerful there that's so hard to do on your own. Why? I lived with the coffee organized the way it was for 20 years.

Yeah. And so my expression is, you can't read the label from inside the jar.

Right.

And so that's why it's fun. Because a lot of times the work that I do is. It's not that hard. Right. It's really just being able to have that sort of outside perspective. And the thing that you said about that woman is a great example because first of all, there's so much unpacked there. I mean, the first thing is that you have people who in that situation would be like, no, no, this is, this is my job. It doesn't matter if you think it's trivial, like this is my entire worth that I do this thing. It always reminds me of that, that scene in Office Space where the guy's like yelling at him like, what do you do here? You know, yeah. And a lot of people have that struggle and there's companies that just create these, these positions out of nothing that people figure out and then they end up in the. It's just like a maze of nothing.

Yeah, well, and, and we see this now in, in the battle between unions and management where I think unions did some really great things, you know, in removing child labor and improving work safety and giving us a five day, a weekend and all kinds of great things. On the other hand, there are many times where they struggle and hold a company back and even a whole industry where they have all these people doing these things in really arcane, dated ways that could easily be automated today. But they're like, no, these are the shop rules and we were going to bargain together and then the whole industry dies.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, the way that, that you've been doing what, you know, that very common expression which is what got you here is not going to get you there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talk about that a lot. About the stages of scaling up. The way that you recruited and organized in the beginning are not sufficient for the next stage. And the next stage. And the next stage. Managing a group of six is different than manag. Managing 24 is different than managing 50, 100, 500, 1000. There are different ways that you lead the company and run things at each stage. Right. And so there's a continual process of reviewing that.

Right.

So beyond optimize, automate, outsource, you talk about the three kind of leadership things that are critical that people get. Communicating, project management and improving processes. Can you take us through, bring that to life for us?

Yeah, absolutely. Communication is like 80% of the problem, I would say. I mean, we've already identified a lot of that. Like, it's very hard for people to convey what success looks like. They don't necessarily know how they're doing the things that they're doing. They just know that they're doing them. So communication is really the number one thing. And it starts with being able to be a decisive decision maker. That's a big one. And the interesting aspect to that for me is that there's a multiplier effect when you hold up the line, basically. So when you have a CEO or a boss or a founder, whatever, who's saying, oh yeah, I'll just, I'll get to it myself, it'll just take me a minute. Right. There's a big difference between how long it takes to do something versus how long it takes to get it done. So if you say it's just going to take you a minute, but it takes you four days to get to it, how long did it really take?

Four days.

Right, exactly. So the. Sorry, that was like a layup for you. The issue then, though, is that if you don't do that thing, there's something like it's measurable. There's something like a 23 times multiplier about how much you end up slowing other people down. So if I don't do something now that could take me a minute, then, and you, Bill, are waiting for me to get it to you, it's going to slow you down by upwards of a half an hour.

Right.

And then suddenly, you know, we've missed the deadline by two weeks and nobody knows why. So we always start with communication. That's the first one, the second one.

So in our world, we're talking about identifying, declaring, blockers, talking about stucks. And what are you stuck on? What do you, you know, what kind of blocks exist for you? We're using language like that with teams on a regular basis to make sure that they're communicating about those things. But even before that, if we create a culture where there's predictability and accountability, I'm going to get that done for you by this date. And we both know and understand what the promise is and that we've negotiated that that works, then we have something workable. But if I just am like, I'm going to get it for you and we have no idea when, or I miss the date and then I don't deal with and communicate that I. I'm gonna miss the date or I have missed the date, then we have a real problem in not only the deliverable, but also now the trust. I think you're a flake.

Yeah. And that's very hard to regain, you know, because that's. That then that person for like months or even longer after that is gonna say, oh, I'll just do it myself. And then they're stuck.

Yeah. And perhaps doing something themselves that they're not suited to doing, not the best at doing, hate doing, like, whatever.

Yeah.

And then we've got a declining. We've got declining performance for the team because the team doesn't trust each other and the team can't rely. It's like different parts of the machine don't work together anymore.

Exactly.

Or in a much reduced capacity.

It breaks, basically. They break it. So then the second thing, which is really huge. Really. Actually probably one of the hugest for me is asynchronous communication.

Yeah.

So for those who don't know what that means, that's just the opposite of what Bill and I are doing right now, which is synchronous conversation. I'm saying something and he can say it right back. Whereas asynchronous is I say it when I want, you receive it when you want and respond when you want, and so on and so forth. And that's what text messaging, email, voicemails like those are all asynchronous communication methods. And most people don't treat them that way, unfortunately. But I am constantly striving to do more and more in an asynchronous manner, whether that's dealing with my team having coaching calls or even now having sales calls. I've been able to do these things asynchronously.

So I hear real value in that. Right. I could send you a text message, an email, any number of things. And it's asynchronous. I can do it whenever it occurs to me and all that. Now people don't manage their alerts and inbound things, so they get these things sometimes in the middle of the night and there can be a response. But there's a real value in that, especially for self managing, responsible, capable people. But there's also mischief. Like I see people in my family and in my life and in my teams that get in really weird situations in their human dynamic because of misinterpreting these async where they can't hear. So as you talk, I can hear tone and timing and things like that. And as I throw out something, you respond to it. You're either correct or there's a real dance there. But I watch people with like any kind of like a textual exchange, whether it be slack or text messaging, and I see things get really weird fast as they interpret them from their own perspective.

Yeah, I mean, there's a great example that Cameron Herold, I think did this in one of his talks, but he took the phrase I didn't say you were beautiful and he has the audience emphasize each word individually. So it's like I didn't say you were beautiful. And then it goes all the way to I didn't say you were beautiful. You know, like so written out. It's the exact same thing, but it can mean six different things entirely.

So that I found it useful to say smart instead of beautiful there to remove the sort of predominant gender mischief that we have.

The. So one of the things is you're right. But one of the best tools in my Opinion might. One of the single best apps and tools that has helped me grow my business more than anything else has been a tool called Voxer.

Yeah.

And Voxer is voice exchange. Now, the difference between Voxer and sending, like a imessage voice text or a WhatsApp message is that with Voxer, you can listen live or asynchronously. So when you hit the send button on WhatsApp, or when I record a message on WhatsApp, I have to record the message, it uploads it, the other person has to download it and then listen to it, and so on and so forth. With Voxer, within 2 milliseconds of me pressing the talk button, the person on the other end can start to listen to it. And so you end up with this much more fluid conversation that can happen. You can do it in groups, you can do it as a broadcast. I've used that for, as I said, for communicating with my team, with clients, and even doing sales calls that way.

Yeah. So they can hear you there, and they can hear some of the tone and stuff as well. It's audio.

Yeah. And so there's many cases to your point that voice matters and emotion and tonality really matters, but there's a lot where they don't.

Yeah, well, I think that's where the text, like the factual kinds of updates and things like, hey, I'm running late. Hey, could you do this? Well, you got that? Like, there's a lot of little things. What I tend to. I don't know, it feels to me like the moment you find yourself explaining something more than once, once you should probably pick up the phone and elaborate or do something outside that channel isn't working. If there's too much back and forth and if you find too many emojis or it feels like the connection's off, you got to quickly go to something else.

I think there's actually this really great Slack integration for. I think it's called Howdy, I can't remember. It's a video chat platform like Zoom, and if you have more than five back and forth with somebody in a Slack channel, the bot will pop up and say, hey, why don't you guys jump into a video room?

Yes, pick up the thing. Because some people really like the predominance of video. I send videos or I'll record a thing for you. And, you know, there's a time and place where I love to listen to podcasts. Well, a few times in places, but there's lots of other times where I find it really Annoying that I can't just read and skip around. Like I can do that faster than I can watch your video.

Right. And so there is that, that failing in asynchronous communication a lot of times where the asynchronous communication really benefits the sender, not the receiver. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's, it's, oh, it's so easy for me to just record a 10 minute rambling voice message that my entire team has to listen to. Yeah, yeah, we see that too. And that's why you need training. You need. There's an etiquette that goes along with it.

Right, right. That pre thinking your points instead of working it out as you move air.

But also as you know, and there's all sorts of meeting protocols that we learn. A lot of meetings end up being that unfortunately people have meetings that are meetings about meetings.

Yeah, yeah. And do that more than once.

Yes.

It's one thing to do that, say once a year and design your meeting cadence. It's another thing to be doing that continually and then it just becomes this hall of mirrors kind of circular reference that. Well, and I think that that goes to different skills. So I know that one of my strengths is that I can listen to something going on. I can hear a vibe or a world of thinking in a group conversation. I can formulate, you know, two to five compelling points that help to summarize and find alignment and that kind of thing. I can do all that in my mind and then I can open up my mouth, take the mic, the stage, the whatever, and then do that really pretty quickly and eloquently. Right. It's maybe why I have a show like this, but that's not a normal kind of a skill to think, organize and then speak clearly. That's an unusual skill.

I would agree.

It's not unique, but it's not common. So a lot of people struggle to figure that out and what they want to say and how they want to say it and like that. Right?

Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. It's not an innate skill.

Yeah. So project management processes. I feel like we talked a little bit about processes with the optimize automate outsource. Right. Isn't that the same world of that?

To some extent. I mean, so the process documentation is a big part of the optimize phase, where you're really identifying how you do the things that you do. But then it goes further into how you can then automate parts of those processes and how you can eventually outsource them.

Right.

So with processes, what ends up happening is a lot of businesses do not have processes documented at all. And those that do don't necessarily have them in a place where everybody knows where they are. And those that do don't necessarily test or update them with any sort of regularity.

When I think about communicate, I'm thinking about the team dynamic, the team health, our meeting cadence, those kinds of things. When I think about processes, I'm thinking about the regular routines of the business. The core process is that relate to the company as a whole. Cross departmental, cross functional, but also then the processes within the processes that define a particular job or role within the business. Yes, that whole world of mapping and improving those things.

Yeah, yep, absolutely. And the number one way to scale and to make people more replaceable is to start to identify what those processes are. And you go from opaque to transparent. Right. You go from things living in people's heads to them being out in the open. It's just like it's making your business open source. Right. So everybody can improve it.

Yeah, it's really great. Well, we do a lot of like post it type exercises like talked about in the how to make Toast, helping people work through processes and do that kind of thing. We will apply lean and checklist work to improving those kinds of things. We'll map them all out. But then the new initiatives where the growth comes, that all feels like the project management work where we're doing something that's not core to the current business, but is some up leveling.

Yeah. And that goes hand in hand with communication. Because what ends up happening if you have a proper project management setup is that everybody knows what everybody is working on, who's responsible for what and when. And you save a lot of that communication where with people, chasing people around. Because I find that in a lot of businesses that don't have good project management Systems, that's what 50% of their communication is, is following up and getting project updates and so on and so forth like that.

Yeah, absolutely. We've probably talked through all the key things. Have we missed anything in your world?

No, it pretty much summed up my whole life right there.

But the mantra here is is do less. And so that you can focus on the little things that you do really well and that you can have a great life and ultimately that makes the business stronger. I've seen CEOs again and again try to Superman it out or Superwoman it out, burn themselves out sleeping two to four hours a night, night after night, script their family, their health, that kind of thing. But ultimately it makes the team weaker. If you think that working all night and sending somebody a semi coherent message at 3 in the morning to have something ready by the 9am is a good idea, and that person then wakes up at 6am, they read their email, which they probably shouldn't do first, and then they go into a whole panic because they've got to do something that you hadn't really thought through clearly at 3am that's like a bad company. And I saw that happening with a public company. I coached once where the CEO tried to do stuff and eventually, although the company was sold and moved on and the industries change, that kind of thing. That guy did a terrible job because he kept doing that, kept trying to be that kind of. I'm going to do everything all the time. I've got another company that I'm starting to work with now that has got a CEO flying all over the world and they have a really cool product service that, you know, makes a difference in the world and is awesome and they're on a mission and the team's passionate in there. It's innovative, but they're trying to do too much and that's not good for the team.

It's like trying to do your kids homework for them, you know? Exactly. It'll work tomorrow, but then it'll catch up eventually.

Well, you're going to teach them to hire people, definitely.

Yeah, right. Or buy papers.

Yeah. Listen, if you want to find out more about Ari's work, you should go to lessdoing.com that's an easy URL to remember less. And it's all there, right?

Yes, everything is there. The, the books, the podcast, the coaching program is all on lessdingwing.com and if.

You want more of our stuff, scalingcoach.com we have, I don't know, probably 190 of these episodes on every subject around Scaling the people, strategy, execution, cash and your leadership. Lots of stuff there there. We do a new win every week, so go to scalingcoach.com subscribe, get our regular weekly updates. I'll also give you a copy of the book Scaling up for free. You just pay the shipping and handling. The book is yours. So it's been a pleasure to have you on. Have a great week, everyone. Thanks, Ari. Talk to you later. Well, big thanks to the originator of Scaling up, the Rockefeller Habits Growth guy, Vern Harness Finish. This show was produced itself by Lucy Summers. The audio production is done at Podfly Productions. Our audio is edited by Albert Burge. Our show notes are Compiled by Encodina. They're proofread by Tim McGowan and if you loved it, we'd love to hear from you. If you'd like more from it or whatever, please drop us a note to info scalingcoach.com let us know what you loved, what you hated. Like that. Share the show with somebody else, go on online, wherever you get the show, and give us a review. Click to subscribe. That really helps us when we have reviews. So if you want to do something nice for us, go ahead and give us a review. Thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up. Sam.