300: Getting Real with Shawn Hill — Nice Job

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Hopefully the music's working that time and I'm on the right microphone. Sometimes the music's only playing in my head. I don't know if your life is like that, but sometimes I'm like rocking out. The guests look at me like I'm insane because it's picking up some other microphone. And not the one with the main music mixed in. Hi everyone, I'm Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. We're talking to an entrepreneur about their journey, about their business, about all that and more. Hang in there. I love doing our live shows. There's something about like recording and going live that brings like some urgency and connection. I guess it's like when I had a radio show when I was very young. There's something like, and even if, like nobody's listening live, right? We how we get high. Oh, there's somebody, somebody listening, watching. But of course, we get our biggest audience later. We're talking to an entrepreneur today about their experience growing their business. We're getting real in this episode with Sean Hill. Sean is CEO of a company called Nice Job that really looks at reputation management and reputation tracking. We'll talk about that business and more in just a second. Shawn, welcome to the show and thank.

You very much, Bill. You were kind enough to call on our podcast Nice Job podcast. So I'm glad I could return the favor.

Yeah.

So talk to us about a little bit about. Well, where are you today, first of all.

Yeah, so I'll make a slight correction. So I'm currently not the CEO of nicejob. I currently have the title as Community Director. However, when Nice Job was just a startup, we were just recently acquired. It was kind of in that inner circle, really helping to grow and expand. So our CEO, Lars Christiansen, previously pretty much put a Couple of us together and said, hey, here's the drive, here's the direction. This is where we want to go. So I can speak confidently, you know, to the origins and a little bit of that story in particular. But I wanted to make that correction there because Lars worked pretty hard. And obviously with just recently being acquired, there's another CEO in place. So I don't want to, you know, disrupt the new guy just yet. Right, yeah, like I said. But you know what, I am the most entertaining one there. So I go with Chief Entertainment Officer and we'll make it all factual in the end. But, you know, nice job in its origins with Lars Christensen. And what he kind of asked us to do was, you know, he worked in big ads, you know, big marketing, and, you know, clients like Samsung, the NFL, you know, things of those nature, big dollars, bigger budgets, you know, big expansive projects. And what he kind of saw was a lot of people were able to throw money at problems and kind of get around things that weren't really the core of who they were. And so, you know, kind of the natural story wanted to kind of flip it on script a bit, but he wanted to focus on, all right, well, how do we take one thing that you can never really own, but you absolutely need to be in charge of, and that's your reputation. And that was kind of the shift and kind of the foray into reputation management at the time. And now where a nice job is headed, our new direction is reputation marketing, which is kind of taking your brand marketing, taking your reputation management, only really the good parts. Reputation management. A lot of greasy, you know, dark stuff has come up in that field and really driving forward with the goal of customer driven growth. Right. That simple concept for one customer should allow you to get another one. That's where nice job was founded on. You know, the terminology has evolved. Our mindset has really only continued forward, but has gotten a little bit more narrow in some cases, a little bit more broad in others. But ultimately it goes down to getting people the reputation they deserve. Because again, you'll never own your reputation. But if you can harness it, if you can know what it's saying to you and know how you can use it properly, it's really going to empower you to customer driven growth.

It does seem like it's incredibly valuable, and yet it's also a thing that's sort of fraught. Like a lot of people are like, wow, I have kind of a reputation, but it's being kind of smeared by like one super vocal person on my yelp. Or maybe even some bad actors or bots or fraudsters like, you know, in something like that. What do you say about that?

Well, you know what, some of that I think is a little bit overblown, right? Because in particular, you know, one bad review, two bad reviews, I'd even go, you know, depending on how many reviews have. In total, you get up to 10 bad reviews. Don't necessarily have to sync you ultimately because we have to look at reviews.

Unless that's all you have, right?

Yeah, well, yeah, for sure. But realistically, you know, your reviews are who you are. If you have all bad reviews, that's who you are. I come from the sports world. That's where nice job kind of recruited me from. And the records. The records, right. Hey, we had a good game that day, but we lost. You're owing one. That, that's what it is. But how do you get better? How do you improve? How do you stay competitive? Well, it's about learning from those. You made mistakes which caused you to lose the game. Perhaps it's mistakes you made throughout the. The whole game and you lost by big. Or it was one key moment. Well, in theory, in the spirit of competition, you fix those things, you become a better competitor, and then more often than not, those lucky bounces tend to go your way. Right. It's a little bit of a, you know, you rather be good than lucky because luck can run out. But if you're good, you're going to generate more luck. So how that results in the business world is when it comes to reputation is all those things are narratives in your story. Right? So I, I like to use this. You know, the most boring movies are like, Hero was good, continue to be good, still good at the end of it. Right? There has to be that part that kind of comes down and brings them back. So bad review, bad feedback. Honestly, something as extreme as, like all your employees quitting, like extreme turnover, those are all things that you can mark as a chapter in your story and you can write or you can help craft the narrative of that last little bit. So that's the big change between reputation management, rotation, marketing. Reputation management got bogged down into things like review gating. Right. I'll ask you, what do you think of us on a scale of 1 to 10? If you say 5 and below or you're going to my private inbox, you say 8 above. Well, you're going to my Google, my business or Google business profile. A lot of that shady tactics came in and people got so focused on only showing their Best, only showing their best. That it became kind of like a dating profile. Right. You looked really thin in those pictures then I actually experienced it and not so much. And that was killing small businesses that need to have a culture of trust with their community. And so we kind of realized that, you know what reputation marketing is. Taking the reputation that you're able to create, knowing how you can expand it, make it better, amplifying the key parts of it, but not hiding or shutting, but instead turning bad into good in certain ways.

Yeah. It's an interesting thing to think about, about embracing all of it. Right. Like, you know, owning it all is a useful thing to like taking responsibility for it makes a difference. Right. There are things, there are kinds of customers that you should have and ones that you shouldn't have. There's a few. A famous response from the Southwest founder when he got a letter complaining about their sort of flippant, irreverent way of handling their funny safety briefings. Right. And he reportedly wrote back, we will miss you. Because he knew that that was sort of core to their brand identity and he was willing to own that. Well, there's an unhappy person who's going to give him a bad review, but he's very clear about that. Right. And I think over time, like we learn things about ourselves, about our companies, about who we are and who we aren't. And trying to be somebody that pleases everyone is going to be someone that delights no one. Right. Like sort of gray committee driven nonsense that like, so being something that's powerful but not being for everyone is not a bad thing, really.

Yeah. And that's why we are really focused in on empowering people to get customer driven growth. Because the more of a fan base you cultivate, if the opportunities are there with this type of customer, you may not have thought that that was your type of customer, but the data is now coming back to you. This type of customer is going to have a better long term value. This type of customer might be easier to acquire. If this one's going to build a foundation, well, then that becomes a different institutional choice. If you're like, yeah, but I don't want to serve those type of people, then you might change things in your culture, your branding. To go away from that might not be the smartest business decision, but if that's what you're driven by, you can do that. And so that's where customer driven growth is ultimately. And I'll go back to my sports days at all. I use the NFL as an example. It's the same product most of the time on the same day, most of the time the exact same time. And those companies make billions of dollars. How do they do it? Because they, when they're bad, they sell different things than when they're good. Right. So when they're bad, they sell the experience. They come in the game, bobbleheads, bring out the family. Four hot dogs, four drinks, four tickets. This price, when they're good, it's come look at our world class athletes, get an experience like no other. See championship competition. Those are two different types of people that are going to buy those ticket packages. Right. Well, go down into a small business, even a service business, you might not think there's a big difference from there. But if you're someone that can be quick and efficient at a lower price point, that's going to be different clientele than perhaps the higher level. But if you find that you know what, you're really able to churn out this lower price point and you might be able to get a point where you can expand. Maybe you wanted to be the high luxury brand, but if you can build an empire on that smaller entity, it's a chance for you to scale and really get at it. So finding out who you are and finding out how you got there really allows you to navigate the best decisions. And sometimes you might make difficult ones or sometimes you might be saying, hey, you know what, I founded this business to serve this type of person. Finding out how to get there. If you're off track, you can only find out by being close to your reputation and being not blinded by what you're promoting as your brand.

Yeah. So let's see if you can get real for a minute. So let's talk about the things that you've learned about your company in the process of it. And I certainly mean you personally, but I also mean you collectively the company. What are the mistakes that you've made or the things that you thought were going to go one way in. So what have you learned in the process of doing this and growing this business so far?

One thing in particular, that for me personally and I feel it started to kind of among other thought leaders in our company as well, is the push and pull between automation and manual processes. Right. We are huge on automation. We absolutely think there's things should be automated. It makes your life so much easier. We also have the ability now to pull some data that it deserves your attention, we feel as a business owner. And so how do we now make a little bit of a pivot of Being a product that could be set it and forget it. Right. We got a lot of loyal happy customers that they set up their nice job, they get it fully going, they don't think about it, it's going to automate it, run in the background and give them success, collect more reviews, you know, give them the reputation. They deserve that regard. But now we also have, you know, topic insights and you know, so the machine learning that tells you what's being said in reviews, what percentages, things like employee leaderboard, what employees are gathering the most reviews. Well, these are things that I think personally is worth a little bit more time being spent. But how do we re educate customers that we got on set and forget it. And so I don't want to say, I mean mistake I think might be a bit too long, but something we're definitely looking at that I think you would have asked me a year or so ago, I'd have been pretty definitive that we wouldn't make an adjustment on is how much do we present that balance between automation and manual processes. Because I think most people across the board feel that automation can be great. But how do you make sure that you get someone not over reliant on automation and missing out on things you can only get in the manual processes. So that's something I would definitely change say in the past little bit at least my entire career here is probably the strongest position that I've now come off of.

Well, you know, it's interesting like so there was a company for a while called Clout and Clout was really important for tracking your online reputation and social connection and that kind of thing. And then I got acquired by a company called Lithium and then in turn by somebody else and so on and it doesn't even exist anymore. Right. But for a little while I remember everybody was like, ooh, what's my clout number? What's your clout number like?

Yeah, and it's funny because that that's a lot of things. We also look at what drives it now. Right. You know, there's also, you talk about reviews in that sort of regard. I think from the Internet that video has definitely taken over. But in the review space it kind of hasn't. People don't watch multiple reviews. They'll read 10 text reviews, but they don't watch multiple video reviews. However, how to's things like that thing still watched.

Yeah, right, that's, that'll probably be around forever.

And so that's, that's interesting sort of thing, you know, especially look at the social platforms you know, a lot of them are getting more personality and less text based. You know, things like TikTok in particular. And so looking at how, where does the word of mouth go from there? Because I think the reason video doesn't work in the review space in that regard is people like presenters, people like people that are good on camera. And sometimes your client's not the best on camera. Just it is what it is. But then ultimately, you know, it's matching the medium. You know, if you're trying to get a TikTok nice short and quick or a reel, you know, pretty good, and you get someone that's a little bit long winded or how do you cut that down in the snippets without losing the authenticity of an unedited video? It's an interesting sort of thing. So with things constantly changing, you know, I would almost say one thing we've at nice job always said is we'll be very passionate about things, but we're never going to lock ourselves down until we get blind. And going back to the first part you kind of asked about, you know, the mistake we kind of look was, again, I don't think we've made any mistakes, but there's certainly things that we've changed our stance on slightly.

You know, it's funny we touched on their video. I think this is something useful. I'd like to tell all of our listeners, viewers, CEOs, clients, like all that. Something that I've learned in doing this show, the guests that we have on the show, and that's this, because I think it matters in fundraising, in hiring and selling and everything. Become a great storyteller. Wherever you are now is your starting point. But you could get better at telling stories and leading with stories. Talking about things is a drag. Describing things, reading people, bullet points, that's all a drag. It takes a maximal amount of things. Now there's a time and place for that to follow, to summarize, but lead with stories. I've had people come on the show to talk about great storytelling and then describe it instead of telling a story about it.

That's amazing.

Tell me a story. But I think that. And so what is it that makes a great story? So some emotions, some heart, some soul, some feeling, right? And that can include like letting yourself get excited or letting yourself be despairing or sad, or like letting yourself, like learning to be expressive of something and not detached from it, but to let it be real in life. Sharing actual specifics instead of talking conceptually about a company. If I bring it to life and say, this is a woman named Sandra at a company that had been growing for a couple of years. They're in the Midwest. And the more I like, bring it to life and create a picture. Right. All of those things make a difference in connecting to and bringing something to life. So actually sharing something, adding some details, letting some feeling come in, telling the story, opening at a crisis point, like, all these things really matter a great deal.

I 100% agree. Because with storytelling in particular, even if you are, say, like, making a movie, right. So not a true story, you're pulling out of it. The more authentic that story appears, the more intent, entertaining, engaging it ends up being. And so the thing about using storytelling or that sort of mindset, and almost everything you sort of do is, even if you are manufacturing, the way you're going to get that actual connection is by hitting those key points of storytelling. I 100% agree with that, Bill. That storytelling, I think, is something that often kind of gets overlooked, especially on the sales side of things. There's so much about systems and structure that often we forget about what. What's the story and what are the narratives kind of being told that guide people along. And I guess that's why you see things, you know, the recent studies about reviews being, you know, 90% more impactful than something in a sales folder or something a salesperson says is because there's that authenticity automatically built in with a true storyteller in that regard. So I 100% agree with that.

Yeah, I think that. So all of these things I do. I do think they actually do then impact that reputation. If you look at lead with storytelling and humanity and all your selling and all your pitching and in all your hiring and in your partnering and that kind of thing, you'll create a deeper emotional connection, which is probably likely to raise your reputation. Some people may not work with you, but even people that don't work with you, that recognize the heart and soul of what you're all about, will say something. I know people that say good things about me that are like, you're not a fit for us, Bill. And that's fine because they respect, like, you know, the integrity of where we're coming from.

Yeah, for sure.

So tell us a story about nice job, how the thing's grown, what you've grappled with and what you really care about.

Yeah. So from the beginning, one thing that Nice Job has kind of founded on was the type of company we wanted to be. So we knew from, you know, the product or the software or what we wanted, what problems we wanted to solve. But ultimately we wanted to kind of. I don't want to say unique because it's a word. It's kind of always thrown out because obviously we took inspiration from a couple others. But I'll start with the initial way of how I end up at nice job, which really kind of sets the whole tone because it really lands to why I'm here. Coming from the sports industry, I was to my own horn. But I was pretty successful in that regard. Probably the biggest claim to fame was being part of the creation team of the Philadelphia Flyers, NHL mascot Gritty. So it became this global sports sensation within 48 hours of release. You know, as the head writer in season one, pretty much as things are created, it was dumped onto my lap to help take it with the team as well, to really take it to the next level. But throughout all that success that made a billion dollar company even more money, it didn't trickle down to me, right? Didn't feel like the respect was coming, didn't feel the, you know, the monetary value was coming. And ultimately it came to a situation where they were mortgaging my reputation for their own sort of use. And it was not something I wanted to be in. So I was looking for a new situation. And I knew the biggest thing to me was going to be the company culture, right? What did this company, it didn't even matter what they did, right? The old Roddy Dangerfield widgets, you know, from that which came a real thing. But the, the whole thing was about what, where was I going to land and knowing that I would make an impact, you know, I didn't want to work for, you know, something that did nothing but making an impact, but also having the right culture. So my interview process was, I found it randomly on a job listing. They had a video interview. Within that video interview, I answered 10 questions a minute each with a little video answer. They got back to me within 24 hours. Had my next interview within 48 hours. And the probably one of the quickest hiring processes that I ever went through. Joined a very small team at that time, around 12 people or so. And we grew. So this was about 2019 when I first joined.

Nice job in that particular ancient history before the pandemic.

I know, I know. It's real funny how far away that got considering what the last two years went from. But within that, that became very important because we were already built to do things like remote work, right. We had a good, you know, tightness within our team that didn't matter at the time. Nice Jobs, headquartered out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, my hometown there. And so even being that far away, it still felt more connected than any other company I'd really been a part of. And then as we grew in scale, ultimately getting that in March of 2021, nice job was acquired by a company called Paystone. The main reason that they acquired us, besides a whole bunch of other financial stuff, was they looked at how our culture, they looked at how we're building our team and that's what they wanted to import the most from us. And so as we're scaling, it manifests on the product side of things, of just like internally we talk about, all right, well, what will our team love when it comes to snacks in the break room or events on the weekend or something like that? We start everything with what our products love from the products or what were our customers love from the product perspective. And by doing that and taking that unique thing, sometimes it puts a lot of work into stuff that people quite don't understand or might not be this big, biggest bottom line buster, right, that this thing is going to explode us from the growth side of things. But it is thing that always kind of keeps this communal feel and keeps us intertwined with what we're doing. And as we've grown along, that'll kind of always be the narrative. We went from a, you know, simple review campaign, you know, drip campaign generator to now things, you know, with the automation connected with different, you know, CRMs across the home service industry, including other things that expand other businesses like QuickBooks, Clio, which is legal software and things like that. We've added more machine learning to it. As I mentioned a little bit earlier in the show, topic insights really diving in and something that's quite industry leading and not just keyword tracking, but reading context and sentiment so you get a real total view. A website product that focuses on conversion rates and really making it affordable. Everything we've kind of done and built has built off this thing of we're here for a reason and we want to do it in a way where we feel complete ownership. So despite if I have real equity in the company or not, I can tell you that everyone at Nice job and now everyone amongst Paystone feels as connected to what they're doing. And that I honestly can say puts us at a competitive advantage because if we were just people chasing dollars or we were making decisions and not worrying about who would affect it in the global community scale, then we'd fall into Some of the dark spaces that some of our reputation management old competitors fell into by having practices that skirt around terms of service or doing things at higher price points just because they wanted to be this catch all kind of half assing everything instead of being really, really good at what they were doing. So the nice job story, while We're a big 200 person company now, it really still feels like, and I think the connection for the customer is it feels like that small little company where you know everyone's face and no everyone's name.

So what is that that you actually do? Is it huddles, is it messaging? Is it some particular way that you talk to each other on Slack? Like in reality what's actually happening? That that is a nice culture.

So the big thing in particular is I will kind of relay this through, through my sort of story and that is I also had an opportunity for fun department out of Wilmington, Delaware that really respond to the teachings of delivering happiness. So you know, Tony Hsieh Zappos, that sort of mentality, a little bit of the fish philosophy built in there as well for all the culture people. But the whole thing went around. The reason the company was called the fun department was you have an accounting department, you have a marketing department, you should have a fun department within your business. And so what we do and how that manifest is is we make sure that fun is ingrained in our culture. We've done, you know, not the forced family fun, hey everybody, come to the break room for the team building. But what we do is, you know, throughout our meetings we built in small little times to allow it to go off the rails on the social capacity. We also have opportunities where at any point the lowest member of our team can actively request the highest number, our CEO, get them in the room, have a discussion and go through it. It's really about putting people first, you know, nice job. Paystone in particular has also made the decision to go with people first mentality of we are one of those companies that isn't moving away from an office but is allowing people to make sure that they are able to work wherever they are most comfortable, whether it's at home, whether it's, it's part time and making sure all those resources are available. So what we're doing is really sort of merging in of what does your everyday life feel like, shouldn't feel like, well, now I'm in work mode and now I'm in other mode while making sure to not expand. So we're also very conscious of, hey, this is these person's work hours. After those hours, we're not asking for a little bit more. We're making sure to always investigate to make sure we're not putting extra pressure because we have a bunch of above and beyond people, but we don't want people grinding themselves out. And in the short term it's. We have, you know, a small thing and I chuckle as I say this, we have a no plan meetings on Wednesdays, which for me, as someone that loves meetings on Wednesdays in the middle of the week, it was a little bit like that. So how is something that I didn't agree with manifest? Well, now what it allows to do is the people that work directly on my team that know I like my meetings on Wednesdays and things like that, it allows them to kind of structure things out and know that this is the only type of meeting that they're going to have on that day. Right. Or often go about it. It also means that, for example, most people work on my team are actually located on the east coast at the moment, whereas I'm on the west coast.

So having that split concept, you're not in Phil anymore.

I'm not in Philly anymore. No, I'm, I'm just outside of Vancouver. So I'm in Canada. Yeah, yeah, we made it. Like I said, we were the small company, we had to actually be really, really close. But now we get a little bit bigger. So yeah, I moved across two countries.

So did you consolidate, did you just free up Wednesday or did you consolidate meetings to a particular day or a few days of the week?

So on the company prints, what we do is we, we don't have any regular meetings on Wednesday. So monthly check ins, scrum meetings, things like that, it's not possible. Obviously people are still open to, you know, to meet if needed, for collaborative sense, obviously outside entities. But the biggest part of that is by making that was there were some departments that felt that they were getting bogged down in meetings. Like, I'm on the marketing team, we're majority extroverts. Anytime we can go talk to one another and build off each other's energy, we're all about it. But we found out that we started bogging down our engineers times, bogging down our product teams times because we were like, oh, hey, let's get together and come about it. And that's also the balance with, I talk about having fun, making sure that we had times for meetings that potentially go off the rails, including, I will say another thing. And this is like a free little thing. I Do is every so often on Slack I play Google Meet hide and seek. Are you familiar with the game, Bill?

No.

Okay. Do you know how Google Meet works? You send a link, people join in, they join that Google Meet.

Yeah.

So here's what you do. Create 15 of them. Really only have to create one of them and then just change random letters. And in our Slack channel I'll post 15 Google Meet links and I'll say I'm hiding in one of them. Whoever finds me first wins a prize randomly, sporadically, things like that. Sometimes I'll stay in there for 25 minutes, just see who comes in. Even though someone finds me right away. Sometimes I've extended it to 20. You know, one time I forgot and accidentally had the same one in there three times and people found me very easily. But that small little thing takes maybe a minute of my day. But it does become a talking point, does come a fun moment and become something that really keeps bonding us together. Even if I never work on a project with some someone for months, we have those small little moments. So by encouraging fun and encouraging us to you know what we need to work, get things done. But if we encourage this, I don't say clubhouse sort of vibe because I think that's when people take it a bit too far. But we encourage them, hey, what is your work style? Bring it to us and doesn't mean everyone's got to work that way. But we want to make sure it's conducive within our environment. And that's the biggest thing. From day one, that nice job has always tasked us, the entire team to make sure that we're holding whatever we feel is management to that standard.

So it could show up a lot of different ways.

I mean, for certain, I think from the functional standpoint the biggest thing is you can't take people that work in different styles and try to force them into it. So for me, if you're putting me in something that's, that's overly, I don't say overly structured, but just kind of number based. I hate meetings where it's like here's our slides for the meetings. Now I'm going to talk at you because it doesn't feel like a meeting, it feels like a presentation. So don't take up my time for a presentation that I can't decline. And by doing that there are times where I have to sit in there. But knowing that's not the norm, knowing it's not the expectation, and knowing that the people that love that style of presentation will sit through Mine where we're doing some games off the top. That's what makes it so much better. So the way I'll expand it out there for everyone listening, if you want, like the actual takeaway is get your team involved in your culture. Let them tell you how you should be structured. Doesn't mean I don't say it. Doesn't mean it doesn't. But doesn't mean revamp everything you're doing. But you'll find those middle areas that start building real good company culture.

Yeah.

And what portion of the. You said, I think 200 people and roughly in the company today. What portion of those are in the main office or offices versus working from home these days?

So right now with again, our new like kind of people first mantra, that's kind of how we tagged it. I'll say our, our people and experience team there. Right now I'm not so PASO is headquartered in London, Ontario. Unfamiliar with what the kind of split is there, but I can say from nice job located here in Vancouver, I would say there's probably maybe 3:30 or so roughly in this area. And I would say on a given day, there's probably maybe 8 to 10 consistently in the office. But for example, like myself, I do love going to the office, but it became a little bit more conducive my space here to set up to do a lot of these things, you know, So I haven't actually been in the office in a good long while there, but I know a couple of our engineers that work on some products projects together were really happy, you know, to kind of get into the office. But we did downsize. Not downsize, but we did change from a, a dedicated office building that we had in downtown Vancouver to now working out of a WeWork facility. So kind of a. We have our own private space within there, but kind of the collaborative, more open, you know, space in that regard. In Ontario, we do have. Paceone does have its own, you know, dedicated office in that sense. And so I'm not really quite sure how it goes in, but the mantra has been told to us that if we never want to go in the office again, we don't have to. And if we want to go in the office every single day, they will make sure that we have everything that we need at that office and we'll never just be left on our own.

Interesting. Yeah. It seems like so many companies are trying to navigate this and what will emerge and what's the right hybrid. We have clients now who want to do all their meetings on Zoom Clients who don't want to do any meetings on Zoom want to do everything in person. And then we have where I think more will end up, where we're doing a blend of the two. Couple meetings a year in person, a couple on Zoom, lots of check ins with a mix of modalities, phone, zoom, whatever. And I do really love having a room in my house. Like I can cross a hallway, close the door. Business is closed, business is open. Right. With the opening and closing of the door. But not everybody has that kind of space and luxury and not at all levels of the company do you have that? Plus my kids are grown, so they're not going to come running in and interrupt me and want help with their homework or that kind of thing. They might send me a text.

I do wonder if we're going to see a little bit more. The future of office spaces is really almost, I don't have the exact term, but almost like equipment areas, right? Because the biggest thing is that what I really need is like this type of lighting, this type of desk, this type of thing. But you know, I live about via train 25, 30 minutes outside of Vancouver. And sometimes when I really stopped going back into the office was when I realized that the time between, you know, wake up, shower, breakfast and starting my day could be cut down to like a minute as opposed to 30. But then I also realized that when I need to be in a real creative space, real collaborative space, the human interaction is nothing I'll be able to replace. Even through the lens.

Yeah, it's not the same at all. But yeah, it's interesting. It'll be interesting to see how it emerges and how many people can really have that kind of a home space. Which I remember one leader on one of our teams was like, I've been working in essentially closet. And then she sort of changed the angle and I could see, oh, she's literally like in a closet. Every time she has to go on Zoom, which is a considerable amount of her time, she does that. The rest of the time she sits out in a chair, in a room, in a shared room. But because of the size of their urban apartment, she didn't have anywhere to go. And so she was working like that. And I can remember many CEOs having kids come and jump in their lap and we had a very across. You know, I've had a number of companies last few years, last couple decades. We always had our offices in this one building for 25 years. And then we finally moved out shortly after the pandemic hit. And closed our offices and moved people home and distributed that kind of thing. And I find myself today wanting to go back not for my everyday and not for equipment because like I have like a little mini TV studio here, but for the human connection. So I want to go back for meetings. So now I'm interested in like well, what's a great meeting space? And I've reached out to the people like we work and others and they like want to lease me a regular space. I'm like, I don't want that. I want like a meeting space. I don't want a regular office. I don't need a place for Monday through Friday 9 to 5.

Well that's almost what I talk about when I talk about the equipment pods. Things like that is like, okay, well this is, you know, nice jobs facility for meetings. Right. And it's built this new thing I also wonder if we would ever see almost like the dormitory hybrid sort of thing, right? So if you're hiring someone fresh out of college, you're like, you know what, you're going to work in this building, it's part apartment, but then the floor above you is the office and so you can have your room and board. We built that in as part of your employment package and things like that. You're living kind of near your co workers, things like that, while still having your own private area and then your workspace right above or maybe it's even mixed within there.

Right.

So maybe there is members of the public also in your real estate space. But it's interesting because the things I don't like sometimes from working from home is that it's harder to kind of separate. Right. I find on Monday it's a little bit harder to get out of weekend mode because where I was during my weekend is, is right around the corner there. At the same time, you know, the, the thing of like dressing up a bit more for work or some of those things, I, I've never. For today, yeah, this is, this is my, you know, executive hoodie. It's actually funny, this goes back to my sports days where as long as you had the company logo, you were considered dressed for a wedding work. So it could be shorts, socks, anything that's long as a company logo. But no, like for me is, you know, I do like, you know, putting on dress pants and things like that. You know, I'm not against kind of with that, but I found that depending on what I'm doing that day, it wasn't always the most conducive. So it'll be interesting to see how those change. But I agree. It's getting people together is what I really miss and what I feel like at Nice job. What we've done is tried the best on the digital sense while encouraging people based on safety or based on that, you know, to come together in person. So early on in the pace of night shop relationship, they put on a kind of a beach outing, an outdoor outing, kind of spread out, things like that. We got a little beach chair as ours, our little company takeaway and things like that. There were some people that couldn't make it. Our people experience team worked as hard to make the people that couldn't make it or weren't comfortable kind of going out of that time to make sure that their experience was just as good as home or as best as it could be as it was kind of in person. And that's I think what you're going to see a lot more companies start to focus on and is how do we take that shared experience and actually make it truly shared, no matter what the medium, no matter what the platform is. But I think all of us will come back a bit. I think one because people will love kind of having that separation a little bit more. But then I also think, you know, the human connection is so much more. Part of the reason I love when podcasts do video, even if they're only taking the audio, is because those natural cues of you not talking over one another and things like that. Yeah, you get a laggy zoom meet there and you watch how unproductive it ends up being because you're interrupting your waiting, you're going. So the human connection will absolutely come back. I think we want to wait until it's absolutely safe on that regard. But it is also interesting of this narrative we kind of put in our own head that we have to go to a separate place to work and it has to be this style of thing. Perhaps in some industries and other things, the hybrid model should have been the model all along.

Yeah. Before I get to my last question for you, so I want to talk about things you could do over, advice your younger self, that kind of thing. But before we go there, I want to just let folks know if you love the show, like it, subscribe, but please share it with somebody else. Tell somebody else about the show, the episode, whatever that you get out of it. If you want to drop us a line, some feedback, say hi. Tell us how you use something you heard on the show. Send us a note to infocalingcoach.com course you'll find our 400 episodes and more@scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your podcast content. YouTube, Stitcher, iTunes, et cetera. So whatever it is, that's your spot, is the place to go get it. And of course, we do love good reviews there as well. With all that said, scalingcoach.com if you could do it over, what would you change? What advice would you give your younger self like that? I mean, look, you've been part of a team that's grown this company from a handful to a couple hundred now been acquired. What would you change?

You know, I think. I think purely from the nice job. Purely from the nice job chapter. I think the one thing that I don't. I would say that the one thing we might have changed is I would have loved to have seen us push a little bit earlier and a little bit more aggressively. And what we absolutely love when it comes to things like our podcast, you know, some of the community things that we do. Obviously, as a community director, it seems like a biased answer, but for me is I feel like that's where we've gotten the most fulfillment as a company because ultimately that has created more relationships and more things that help us actually tap into what will our customers love. How do we see the expectations more so than kind of getting bogged down in ads and. And things like that? I think too often as marketers especially, we get caught up in being pulled towards that sales side instead of really separating the two. But the only reason I'd say I'd really kind of do that is, one, obviously for me, it's kind of biased in that regard. But two is I think it's the one thing that we're really seeing more companies really go towards. And I felt like we were a little bit ahead of it, and we could have been even more ahead of it in that regard. So that's probably the one thing I look at my personal life. What I tell my younger self is, quite honestly, you never know where it's going to go. I would say my job in sports was my dream job, and I actually got to a point in my life where I decided to leave it, and I never thought I would get there ever. And even now, I don't fight about my salary or kind of worry about that. Whether I'm overpaid, underpaid, or anything like that. I really look at how much it's really contributing to what I'm doing. But not knowing where it's going to go is, you know, the things I thought were important when I was younger are still important in a sense, but now they're kind of weighted a bit differently. And so ultimately I find that people that take big risk or people that look and really listen to that nagging voice or that nagging heartbeat in their head, they may not know it till their final moments, but they tend to be happier. And it's kind of weird to say is I don't know my happiest moments. I don't know if I was in my happiest moments prior. But I do know, as I've kind of built forward and seen all the challenges and opportunities that have come my way is I know that I was always kind of true to who I was. My younger self, I think, bought in a little bit more of projecting out and trying to live up to something instead of kind of being present in the moment going forward. So who knows, I could end up in sports again, you know, in a couple of months, right? And then realize I was all wrong. But the feeling at the time brought me here and the experiences I have are are ones that again, make an incredible story. So my life as a storyteller, I think I'm creating a pretty good one thus far. So I'm telling my younger one, hey, you're still in the early chapters. Don't worry about it. You got a good story coming.

Well, go for what you love, Be bold, lean into those kinds of things. Play a big game that and you can't tell. Look, you're awfully young. There's still a lot of time for things to go in lots of surprising directions still in your life. Big thanks to Wanda Mitchell producing our show in the background out there. And to Verna Harnish, author and creator of our Scaling up framework that we use to help companies 10x100x hit a billion dominate their industry and more. Our audio is edited by Albert Burge and the team at Podfly Productions. The show notes are written on Byron Kadena and proofread by Tim McGowan. Thanks again everyone for listening. We'll talk to you next time. Keep Scaling Up.

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