The Cost of Hustle: Your Team’s Burnout Is Killing Growth with Paul Austin-Menear

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Well, at some point, hustle stops helping. At some point hustle stops helping and it starts actually hiding problems. Paul Ostomanier shows founders how to trade their adrenaline for systems and create a kind of growth that compounds without burning people out. Everybody. I'm Bill Gallagher, Skip Scaling coach, host of this super excellent Scaling up business podcast show. We come to you every week and we try to help you grow your business. Hopefully here's something, a story, an idea that helps you see yourself, your business in a new way. Gives you an idea to move forward to up your game. So come see every week you'll find 650 plus episodes wherever you're getting this. And if you go to our own website, you can find out about our workshops and our coaching programs, things like that. That's all scalingcoach.com so, so that's where you'll find the rest of it. Otherwise, like subscribe where you are, turn other people onto it, share the love and everything's much better. All right. All right. So my guest today, Paul Estamine. Did I say that right? Sure did.

And kudos to you. Like most people kind of butchered the, the first half of the second part of the name. So like, good on you, man.

I, you know, it's, I usually check when it. But we were talking about other things and I just forgot I'm talking to Paul today. So. Paul is founder of a company called six Callous. It's a Toronto based advisory that helps founders scale and with a little sanity. He's also writer, host of the Journey. It's a publication, a podcast focused on, you know, more sustainable kinds of scaling. He's a former leader at a company called nanoleaf and helped shift things there. And he does some work as a fractional exec consultant helping direct to consumer product kinds of companies install systems. Right. Create things that are sustainable, that actually work, that work more than just your raw energy and hustle. Paul, welcome to the show.

Great to be here, Bill. Thanks so much for having me on.

So here's my opening question for you. What's the first moment that you noticed that hustle was maybe a problem? That hustle creates noise that masks problems? Did you notice it in yourself and someone around you? Talk to me about the first time you noticed hustle was a problem.

Yeah, all of the above. You know, I would, I would say as a leader, one of the kind of clear signs that you can, you can kind of pick up on that hustle's becoming a problem is when your people who have been hustling their butts off for. You are sick more often, you know, more sick days, more absences or even you're kind of working with them. They're just not at their best. And you can, you can kind of tell, right? Like even the most nose to the grindstone type individuals ultimately eventually need rest, they need a break. And I'm also, you know, one of those people, I've been in loops where I've just been go, go, go, go, go, 60, 70, 80, 90 hours a week and it catches up with you and you just kind of fall apart. And one of the things that I kind of came to eventually, this is probably about 12, 13 years ago now at this point I was working with a marketing agency in Ottawa Nation's capital. It was a small team that I was working with. There were probably 10 of us or so and there were two designers who had been just hustling like they'd been given it. And one of them had a repetitive stress injury kind of come up and she was out. So she had a couple of days off work, went to the doctor, wasn't working. And the impact on the team was felt kind of immediately. Right. And that ended up costing us bit of business because the client was unhappy and we, we missed a deadline because that one person in the two person kind of little mini group within the team was out of commission. So, you know, a lot of the time we tend to think, hey, let's, you know, let's not kind of overload on salary here. Let's, we'll just kind of like push and we'll grind and we'll hustle through it and whatnot. But what happens at the other side of that when things break down and you lose business because you didn't invest in resilience and capacity? That's kind of the question that I struggled with back then. And it's been a bit of a recurring theme. So it's something that's come up quite a bit over the years with me.

You know, it's interesting in our cultures, cultures to varying degrees have two more or less hustle built into them. Right? We think about, some of the European cultures are better about taking their vacations and stopping work, you know, for dinner and that kind of thing. Some of them are better than others. Even some fairly hard working ones like, like Germans work very intensely speaking, broadly, right. Not every German, right. Just like not every Spaniard takes a siesta. So there are, but there are, there are cultural norms, right? So they work really hard, but then they take a vacation and they're pretty serious about it. Right. United States, in particular, Canada, a little less degree. I think we will tend to have some of that, like, early Puritan work ethic, like, oh, we have, like, an obsession with hard work and we're just lazy if we're not working hard. But then that creates problems. In Japan, right, they had this thing where I have to work obsessively, and they had young people dying on the job recent, you know, in. In recent years just out of exhaustion. So some places, like, happen in a bad way, and other people know that, like, too much hustle is a problem. Like, we needed to take a break.

Yeah. And the, the rush to get to the finish line, which, you know, very few of us know what the finish line is when we're rushing towards it.

Right.

That rush to get to the finish line is so all consuming that we often get a bit of a reduced view on, you know, this is a part of our life. So, yeah, you absolutely have to work hard to be successful. You have to have goals, you have to be ambitious. You've got to keep your eye on the ball. But when you start going too hard, things fall apart and things break down. And you're going to find eventually that that kind of hustle culture is actually a bit of a barrier to reaching your goals. The things that you want to get done, the objectives you want to meet, you know, your vision for your life. I've always kind of felt that it's more important to pay attention to the steps in the middle than it is the beginning or the end. You know, it's more important to focus on the journey. That's kind of why my podcast and newsletter is called what It Is, because if you don't really appreciate what's happening in the moment, then when you get to the finish line, do you really kind of look back on it and say, wow, you know, that was. That was worth it? It's something that I kind of encourage all of my clients to think about broadly.

You know, let me underscore something before we move on. We're going to talk about the journey in just a moment. But the finish line, Right. Let me just get to the finish line. Let me get over the finish line. The finish line in life is death. Maybe a slight finish line before that is retirement. In business, the finish line is when you sell and exit the company. And those are not necessarily to the same thing. Right. I could sell the company for it for three years. The real finish line is three years after the sale when I finally exit or Two or whatever it is in your case. So your finish line is not the launch of the product. It's not the rebrand, it's not the launch of the rocket. Like, whatever. That's just an end of an event. And then Monday comes and you do another thing and you get onto the next launch and the next product and the revision and the next trade show and whatever. It's ongoing. So if you're so obsessed with like burning yourself out for the launch or the whatever it is. Right. Just remember this can be just something else after that. Right. Like until you sell it, retire and die.

Yep. And I find, particularly with young founders, you know, people who are in their late 20s, early 30s, you know, they've got a business that really is, is taking off and it's going. They're. They're not thinking about that finish line like, like you're just talking about. And, you know, I also kind of think of it that way. When you're the owner, the equity holder in the business, they're thinking like, well, the finish line is down there somewhere. I just need to run right now for the sake of running, because that's what everyone else is doing. That's not all the way. Always the way to, to get where you want to go. Right. Like owning a business, starting, building, running and exiting. It's more of a marathon than it is a sp. Right. So you got to be prepared for that.

Yeah. You know, a past guest of the show and a good friend is a guy by the name of Warren Rustand. And you know, Warren played for the Golden State Warriors. Warren served in the White House. Warren led multiple multi billion dollar companies. Warren's had a big life, big career. Warren is the first advocate for resting, taking time off, exercise, take time for your family, for your relationship. You know, he's a big advocate for all these kinds. You can't go 24. You have moments of peak performance, then you have to stop, then you have to eat, then you have to reflect, then you have to, you know, go home. He works, he works an intense schedule. He gets up very early in the morning, but he also goes to bed early. Right. Like, you can't burn the candle at both ends, as they say, and have that.

And one of the things that was actually my wife that kind of gave me this advice, oh, six, seven years ago, she said to me, like, you know, you, you feel a little bit, a little bit squirrely when you're taking time off. And, you know, like, I, I catch you kind of checking your phone, looking at the Emails and stuff coming in, whatever, all that. I said, yeah, yeah, that's, that's me. And she, she said, well, why? And I said, well, I just, you know, I want to get things done, I want to move, I want to accomplish things.

Right?

And she, she said to me, but, you know, you need to realize that you're off time is also a part of your on time. Because you're off time allows you to be better during your on time. And you know, six, seven years ago, one of the wisest things she's, she said to me, and I try to live by that a little bit more these days, and I think we all could kind of do that a little bit better. So, you know, one of the things that I did in wise, whether it's.

A husb or a wife, listen to your partner. They are looking at you in your life outside of your skin, and it's good because they're really committed to your winning.

Yeah. Yeah, it absolutely is. One of the first things that I did when I was at nanoleaf running a kind of a marketing subgroup and I noticed this trend kind of taking hold was I said to the people who are kind of working with me, you know, when you are off on the weekends and you know, for not at a trade show or something silly like your email is off, you know, your team should be off, everything should be off. Like, I don't want to hear from you until Monday morning. And you know, if you've got something really, really critical that's broken and on fire like that moment, sure, take care of it. But it's got to be like a five alarm kind of thing, like there's business peril here. So I kind of implemented that rule and, you know, reinforce that with people over time. And what I found with that team was that, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about kind of the absences and people getting sick and burnt out and whatever. Like that went down pretty dramatically. There was one, there was one guy and loved him, great guy. But I actually had to turn off access to his email over the weekend to make him like play ball. And eventually he caught on and things got better.

Like why my email doesn't work.

Yeah, sorry, you're not allowed.

Well, the journey and why you created the journey and what you do there, this is your writing and your podcast. Share a little bit about that.

Yeah, you know, I'm sure everybody who, who's listening to this is familiar with that, that Simon Sinek talk about. Start with why I'm a big believer in that Right. Like, unless you know why you're doing something, you can't really excel. So for me, you know, kind of, I thought about that a lot about a year ago when I was kind of preparing for this transition into being an advisor and a consultant, kind of working for myself. And I thought, you know, what would make for better communities? What would make for more. More resilient, happier, more kind of fruitful communities around us. And, you know, the answer for me is, has kind of always been an ecosystem of small, of strong small businesses. And I feel like people who are getting into business, I kind of think of them as accidental entrepreneurs. You know, they, they might buy up a business, they might start something as a side hustle and kind of get going, but they don't really have any guidance. You know, they're not making enough money to hire a mentor or a coach or an advisor or be a part of a mastermind or a, or something like that. So I said, okay, well, why don't I build as a part of my model something that is educational for that accidental entrepreneur who's just starting out, or people who have really thought about entrepreneurship and starting a business, but they haven't taken the leap because they just don't feel comfortable and knowledgeable enough about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, to run a business. So I built that for those people ultimately because I believe that more small businesses in communities makes those communities better places to be, to live, to work, to love. All of that.

My experience. There's a couple reasons people go into business. One is they have an idea for something and they, they see a problem and a solution. They're inspired by some new possibility for the future and they just have to go build it because nobody else has got it or going to do it. So they're going to go work on that problem and they become entrepreneurs kind of by accident, without thought of it in pursuit of a problem. I think that's actually really powerful reason for doing something more focused on the problem. A secondary thing would be focused on their solution, which is very much secondary because that if you're more interested in the problem than you are your own product or service, your solution, then you will be flexible when it turns out your initial idea doesn't work. So keep at it, that kind of thing. If you are fixated on your solution as the answer, you may get disappointed when in fact it, it needs work to, to work and it's not going to work as originally conceived, which is almost certain, right? Almost, but not entirely certain that you will. It will not work the way you expected it to. It will need changes to design, etc. The other one is they just can't help themselves. They go and create businesses and money making opportunities, you know, for whatever. They just, they have to keep like making things. Like they are compelled to do it. It's, it's like a, you could call it an affliction, an addiction. Like they go and create businesses, they see opportunities and they're seizing them all over. It's less of a focus on any one thing than just creating business and stuff in general. And those people probably need more than anything else to learn self control, self awareness, learn to say no to their ideas and get better at filtering out opportunity.

Yeah, when you're an innovation driven kind of person entrepreneur, you want to solve that problem. There's a, there's a huge risk that you can't step outside of your own brain and outside of your, your perceived solution being the best one, as you say. And I've seen, you know, I've seen that problem just absolutely sideswipe, you know, literally dozens of entrepreneurs because they can't really bend around the idea that maybe there's a different solution that's necessary. I was working with a client earlier this year actually on that kind of topic, and they were trying to figure out how to make vertical farming at small scale modular indoors work on the money side, the unit economics of IT work because it's a very difficult problem. Right. And one of the things that they were stuck on was, okay, we need to be able to build and deploy these things on site. So we need to have assets in local markets that can go and put up a shed or something like an enclosure that's appropriate for this kind of condition. So we need to have partnerships because we don't want to have vertical integration in construction for a small company. That's kind of crazy. When you're trying to serve an area as big as Canada, even if you focus on one or two big markets, it's a bit of a challenge. And one of the things that we did early on when they were trying to figure that out was we did a bit of a roadshow, a bit of a tour around and talked to people who would potentially use this solution. So, you know, we went to, we went to schools that might have something, you know, in their colleges, we would call them like community colleges here, but we went to kind of CJ colleges here and said, okay, you know, if you had this solution as a part of your program for your agriculture students or for some other program that's relevant, what would it look like? And they kind of rattled off, you know, the different things that they would need, that they would want. And nowhere along the way did it say, come and build it for us. So that kind of got us thinking and we went back to the drawing board a little bit and said, okay, well then if we don't want to build these things, centralizing the production of them makes a whole lot of sense. What about a 20 foot shipping container? You know, you can get those things, Corget Steel shipping containers for a couple grand on the resale market, modify them and then they're done. You can ship them to the site. So ultimately that's what they went to market with. And the unit economics worked at that point because they didn't have to partner with these local construction companies to put everything together. So that's kind of an example of how when you think that your idea is the best, talk to other people. They will often give you perspective and insight that you didn't have on your own. It's a very powerful thing.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking to my wife yesterday about our past and. Or no, it was the day before and, and one of the business innovations that we had in my mind, and I tell the story all the time, it went a particular way. In her mind it was totally different. And in both cases, the evolution went through a bunch of different things before it led to a huge breakthrough. But there was iteration. There were many challenges on the way and we had to get feedback and, you know, like, like that. So it wasn't. And we each were kind of recall it a little bit differently probably. Well, there's probably some merit to mine as well, but she probably sees some of it more clearly than I do.

So if her and I are talking about it, I will absolutely side with her. Hers was right. You're welcome, Bill. I've earned you three points. Carry on.

Talk to us about some of your experience and stories. You did some work for nanoleaf and shifted things there. Tell us about that. What does that company do and what'd you do and how did.

Yeah, nanoleaf is. It's a really interesting company. They're engaged in consumer IoT, Internet of things. They started out with high efficiency LED lighting that was just your regular kind of LED lighting, but an order of magnitude more efficient. This was back in 2014, 2015, I think, when I joined the company. And that's a tough business to be in.

Right.

Like if you are making an LED light bulb and you're going up against a Phillips or a GE or any of those guys that are just giant and they have scale, you're really locked into a losing battle because of commoditization. Right. So one of the things that we kind of came across was, all right, well, how do we take our core technology, the very, very, very efficient LED kind of system that we had designed and patented and whatever, and put it into a form factor that is different, where we can add value? You know, how do we kind of break the mold a little bit on this? And we went through a process of talking to customers, talking to consumers, and ultimately settled on something that was wall mounted. You can actually kind of see behind me on the wall there. That's an example of what that technology kind of morphed into over time. And with it being a smart home product, you know, just a different form factor, slightly different kind of features. Right. Like you can now control it with your phone, with your voice, all of this other stuff. So you've broken out of that mold of playing in the screw in light bulb game where all of the giant companies that came before you are kind of, you know, stuck and they're racing to the bottom. We instead started racing to the top and diversifying and taking that technology and packaging it up in different ways and ultimately, you know, that turned into a very innovation driven company. And one of the things that, that I was kind of deeply involved in, you know, kind of around 2018, 2019, was figuring out that use case for the like, not how would you use this, but what are you doing in your life? Trying to tease out those patterns of unmet needs. Needs. Right. So we were, we were doing a lot of that over the course of my time there. You know, I led marketing groups, I built the kind of e commerce program. We went from selling in maybe 10 companies or countries when I started to just over 100, 110 when I left last year. It was an interesting journey. So I touched, I touched kind of supply chain, I touched marketing, internationalization, operations management, which is kind of where my passion for support people with systems so they don't burn out kind of came from.

Where did your own career go through a change? Where did you realize you weren't on a traditional corporate track? I think there was a conversation or something that was pivotal for. Pivotal for you. What was that?

How did you. Yeah, yeah, you know, I was talking to my brother. Geez. Probably back in, probably back in 20, 2011, 2012, you know, we just got out for a pint and we were Sitting around. He's maybe 20 years older than me, give or take. We were sitting around, and he kind of got the entrepreneurial bug early on, and he kind of innovated in, like, the legal space. And so he was a family lawyer for probably the second half of his career, but he. He never liked working for other people. So we were sitting. I'm just having a beer one night. And then he kind of said, what are you. What are you gonna do with your life? And I said, I don't know, live it. And he said, okay, but, you know, why? Like, what would you want to get out of this? And I said, well, you know, I kind of wanna. I kind of want to do things that matter. And, you know, I don't really want people saying to me, you know, you can't do this. You can't do that. And he said, okay, well, this job that you just started working for, this ad agency is not going to give you that, so you should probably think about something else. And I said, but what? And he said, don't know. That's a part of the journey. Brotherly advice, right? Like, do something different, but I'm not going to tell you what it is. Yeah, but.

But he highlighted. He helped you see for yourself that.

You were going to follow a nonprofit, traditional path. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think a part of me kind of. Kind of knew that, you know, to. To go back a little bit further. When I graduated university, I thought that I was going to work for the country's intelligence service and be an analyst. So I was recruiting with them for just 13, 14 months, something like that. It's a very long process. I assume that it's kind of the same with the CIA in your country. But that didn't work out. So, you know, after that, I kind of figured, all right, well, what do I do now? Between when I started and when I finished, I kind of de facto worked for myself as a consultant. Couldn't take a traditional job because I had to be on call for this recruitment process pretty much anytime, so I couldn't go out and get a job. I had to go to all these little businesses and, you know, schools and whatnot and say, hey, do you need someone to write stuff for you? So that's kind of what I did and caught a bit of a bug. You know, after that. After that, all kind of went sideways. I started a company with a couple of guys that I've met at university, and, you know, we built a marketing analytics software platform for retailers using QR codes. It was about 10 years too early. Nobody bought into it because it was just a little bit too crazy these days though, all over the place. So I always knew I'd have a bit of a non traditional pathway. And it was really only after that conversation with my brother that I embraced it rather than trying to fight it.

It's funny how some things will struggle to find their home and then something happens and they're, they're good forever. QR codes, right? QR codes were never going to go anywhere until the pandemic. Pandemic happened. People started pulling menus and things like that. Everywhere you went there were QR codes. And we were scanning things to see it because we were in the beginning afraid to touch anything.

Yep. And it's, it's funny technology too. Like, I really love that technology. Technology, it's been around since the 70s. You know, Toyota originally used that technology to track inventory through their supply chain. So, you know, you've got 2 million little like plastic knobs or whatever that go on your cars. How do you keep track of that in a manufacturing environment? Especially when they're, you know, three countries over for them, you know, trying to build out that just in time supply chain? The answer is QR codes. Patent expires decades later, people start fiddling around with them, using them for other things. But consumer adoption, you know, in the pandemic, you're right, they really exploded. The key technical kind of barrier that disappeared though was support for QR codes was built into every smartphone. You know, your camera app can read them. That wasn't always the case when we were building our company, Clever analytics, you know, 2012, 2013, around there, you had to download a special app to be able to read these things. And that was a big barrier. Right? You're a consumer, you don't know what this thing is. You need to be educated. You're in a retail environment, there's lots of hustle and bustle. You got two kids in tow. Are you going to up and download an app? No. No, you're not.

I remember coming into a company and starting to like for the first time learn the company and what they did and shadowing all the different people. And there were things in the, around the packaging and labeling of the products. And then, and we had a, a person whose job all day was to label and relabel things. Like some items would get labeled more than once. And I just thought that was insane. I'm like, here's a whole job of something should never be done on shore, should always be done at the factory should be done once and never again. Like why would we ever do this? And people told me, well, barcoding is very difficult. There's like special equipment and software. And I'm like, is it really though? Like, let me, let me look into this. And I didn't know a lot about it. So I look into barcodes, qr, like the whole all manner of visual coding and then also the embedded codes, right, the, the little base things. And I'm like, actually this stuff's pretty easy. Like a lot of people, they, they make fancy industrial scale printers and scanners and things like that of all kinds, but it's not that complicated. There's a symbology like we could do this. And so like we did this and people are like, oh my God, it's going to be a big investment. I'm like, no, there's scanners for like 50 bucks you could buy them and hook them up and like, oh, you need special software. Well, you could, or you could just hook it up and put it on a entry point in your existing site. It's going to be fine. And like we revolutionized. Now I had to tell the people involved, you are a good person, we're going to find another job for you, but we're getting rid of this thing you do. Your job's going away. Like we'll find something else, don't worry. Help me get rid of your job.

Yeah, and it's, it's crazy to think you're absolutely right. Like it's, it's not difficult. Especially now, you know, you, you look at those classic kind of 1D barcodes that you see on absolutely every package good everywhere in the known freaking universe. And all that it is is like the, the width of the line and the width of the space between the lines represents a number between 0 and 9. That is it. It is very, very basic stuff. And the software that you use to generate those barcodes, it's open source. Now the thing that's always been difficult with manufacturers, especially established ones, is the legacy hardware and the legacy software. Because those producers of that equipment, they're not super quick to update their stuff right now, like GS1 in the US and I think probably North America as well, they're starting to shift to 2D barcodes at retail. So by like 2027 that's supposed to kick off, you know, the migration period runs through 2030. So it's a great time to be a brand if you want to innovate with barcodes, which sounds absolutely crazy to Say because it's a flipping barcode, who cares? There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with those barcodes though, right. Like kind of the classic example that I was talking about with, with a CPG food company they do a little bit of work with here to get them prepared for that was okay. When you guys sell your stuff into these small indie shops or these kind of like regional chain grocery stores, your terms are that you have to, you have to kind of just take, you know, shrink of 2 or 3% for spoilage or whatever. Like it just comes off the bill. There's absolutely no accounting of any of that. And that just comes off your bottom line. You got to build into your price, right? Yeah. Okay, good. That's always how it's been done. And a big part of that is they need to account for the best before and the expiry dates through the supply chain. So what they're basically saying there is like, okay, you need to give us 3%, like, you know, margin per shrink. They're saying 3% of the time. We're not going to be able to get this onto the shelf quick enough to sell it to a customer before it goes bad. But with these 2D barcodes, you have all this information embedded in that little code that speeds up your supply chain. And on the safety side, you can also put a block in with the, the retail, like the software where you're kind of scanning stuff at the checkout. And if the best before date in that product is like passed, they will not let you check it out and sell it to the customer. So think about the cost savings on recalls. Right? Like, how much do grocers spend on recalls? You know, producers of dairy products especially, how much do they spend on recalls for stuff? It's a lot.

Yeah. I think all those kinds of, like you could have bad things, you could track things. Right. And then, and then today with AI, you don't even need barcodes to read and interpret certain things. Where in the past I might need a barcode to convey a machine readable information to get your device software to read something. Today I can take a picture of something and like read that, add that to my calendar, you know, and AI agents are going to be able to do that for you. I mean already, like I can, your AI can already read a picture of your handwriting, even if it's as bad as money.

Yeah. You know, I'm kind of there with you. My, my joke, my wife kind of jokes, you know, anytime she sees me having written something out Especially in cursive. She kind of jokes with me like, you've got the, You've got, got the, the handwriting of a doctor. But I don't see our boat in the harbor. What went wrong here?

As we were getting ready, you talked about a story about consumer feedback with a consumer tech, business tech to us about that.

Yeah, you know, I, this, this actually kind of stems from a lot of my work with, with Nanleaf over the years, being involved in, pardon me, in product development. Development. I came to realize that a lot of the time feedback that comes from your customers just kind of collects dust somewhere, and that's not really useful for anybody. So if you're, if you're a business and you're trying to think about, okay, you know, what are my competitive moats? How do I stay. How do I stay ahead of the competition? Right. You know, like pricing, that can be a moat. It's a really tough one to maintain. Innovation, I find, is a very powerful moat, but even more powerful than innovation as a moat is a culture which generates innovation and innovation, you know, for the folks listening at home, like, we. I find that we tend to take that word innovation and really kind of put it up on a pedestal and think, oh, innovation is really only the domain of big tech companies. It's really only the domain of industrial companies that are trying to send stuff to the moon or whatnot. It's not the case. Innovation is just taking any domain knowledge, any expertise that you have, applying creativity to it in order to solve a problem. So innovation happens all of the time, even if you're not thinking about it. And it's often hard for companies to say, how do we actively innovate to maintain that competitive moat, that strategic advantage. When you're thinking through that mindset, right, where it's like, like it's the big moonshot thing. But if you can use feedback to help create a culture of innovation, then it makes it much easier to develop those innovative solutions. And the way I kind of think about this is like, you know, you need to create a central system that encourages that innovation, brings in feedback from customers, combines it with your own kind of like creativity and domain knowledge, and kind of applies it on top of that knowledge about the market, about what customers need to come up with something innovative and new. So it's about like getting the snowball rolling as opposed to, guys, we need to innovate and throwing darts at the wall one by one until something kind of hits the mark, right? And I started to do this at nanoleaf. What we were doing in the middle of the pandemic was we started up this, this program, I called it a beta program, open beta program with customers. And we recruited about 5,000 people to kind of work on product development with us. And we said, hey, you know, this is kind of what we're doing. You got to sign an NDA and you know, there's all that kind of stuff that goes along with it. We were a little bit selective about who saw things that were pre production, but we worked very closely with those customers and brought in their insights, their feedback in a very detailed way. And that led to some very powerful innovations coming out that kind of fundamentally changed our core technology. Like just this past, oh, geez, I think about six, seven months ago now, there was a motion sensing light switch that came out and that was largely a product of that process of iteration and taking in customer feedback. So good things kind of came from that. And I find that when you create a system around that, good things happen. So I took this kind of work and applied it to another manufacturing organization that I've been working with and we kind of said, okay, how do we create a system and how do we make sure that all of that feedback comes into the business, gets upgraded with insights and with our own domain knowledge, but then also gets communicated out to the people in the business who can actually do something with it? Because there's some major failure points there, right? Like a feedback comes in, sits in the folder, it's dead. It comes in, doesn't sit in the folder. If you think about it and you put some paper down and you write about what you can do with that feedback, but then it doesn't go out to change makers, it's also dead, right? So you need that full circle. And what we ultimately kind of came up with for this, this company, and I call it the scalable feedback engine now three, four months later, is a system where you have an internal champion. And that person is like, they're your champion, right? They're in charge of making sure that the feedback is coming in, whether or not they're collecting it themselves. They're in charge of going through it personally themselves, grading it, classifying it, thinking about what you can actually do with it. And then they're also in charge of facilitating the conversations with stakeholders, holders in the org who can make change around the insights that they put together. And it's, it's a remarkably effective system at getting things flowing and keeping them flowing. And when you incentivize your people and you say, okay, we're going to let you share in the wealth that's created from this through a certain structure of bonusing or performance incentives or whatever else. You actually get people kind of orientated towards innovation and you get them thinking about how they can help build the business and how they can help grow the business because they share in the upside. I'm a big, big fan of incentive structures like that.

It's interesting that getting feedback loop like actually acted on and pushed all the way through just oh, we had this inside and there it sat and did nothing. I think is really interesting and I, maybe there's a relationship here, but one of the other things that I noticed in our research was you talked about unsexy GTM or unseen market. Right? What do you mean by that phrase? Why is that important? Is that related all to this?

Yeah, a little bit. You know I, I think of go to market and I think a lot of folks think about go to my market as like hey, we're launching a new product or we're going to enter a new country. So it needs to be big and we need to plan. We need to put a lot of financial investment into it and get ready to make a splash. That's one path. And you, you can absolutely do that if you have the, the capital and the resources and the staff capability to do that, the expertise and knowledge. But another path is to take the unsexy route and for, for, for e commerce companies in particular, you know, it's never been easier to kind of take what you do to an international market. You know, kind of the first phase is like you just ship it from wherever you are to wherever they are and you, you have them, you know, have the terms DDP so that there are no surprises. They don't have to pay duties. When it shows up on the door, you kind of go at it that way. Then as the, as that market kind of grows, you start investing more into it, right? You start investing more into localized marketing. You grow those sales further. Eventually you'll hit an inflection point where it makes sense to start doing the sexy thing and to say, okay, we're going to now bulk load product into that country. We're going to sign, you know, with the 3PL contract warehousing provider who's going to be our agent for receiving and shipping to customers and all of that. So you can, you can take like the lesser known pathway when it comes to go to market. And product is kind of the same thing. You know, you don't have to build and manufacture, you know, Like a half a million devices. If you're selling something into a consumer market, you can take a very, you know, kind of measured prototype kind of approach. You know, you can have like small runs of stuff created, you can treat it as prototyping, you can sell little bits and bobs. One system that I came up with with them at one point to prototype new ideas was create a digital twin of a product that was kind of on the drawing board. And instead of putting it on, we didn't put it on the client's website or anything because we weren't sure how it was going to go, how it's going to impact the brand. What we did do though was create private checkout pages, landing pages that were off the main site tree so you never even really saw them, and then just advertise, you know, buy paid ads, traffic, send it to that landing page and see how the product did. And if people were willing to put down like real money to buy it, that was kind of a stronger buying signal. Right. So you can kind of take that small winding, unsexy path to figure out if a product is worth investing, a full manufacturing run into. You don't have to just like bite the bullet and go to market with a big order right away.

You know the thing I hear in that, whether you're expanding internationally or just launching something for the first time is, is like kind of the MVP of the minimum product. It is, let's just like sell it in the simplest way possible. Let's just something to someone and then see if that goes a little further and then take it a little further rather than let's grand build out all this stuff and then what if it bombs in that country or that marketer? That kind of.

Yep.

And you spent all this time planning something, it just ain't working. So now let's take a simpler approach. Let's just ship a few orders remote, then let's get a rep, then let's get a distributor, then let's get a warehouse, then let's localize things. But, but sometimes people just want it so much they'll take it with, you know, instructions and labeling. That isn't in the native country, right?

Yep. And it's, it's that snowball thing, right. Kind of to get back to that analogy, like you, you don't have to build, you know, like a 2 meter wide, 4 foot wide snowball before you kind of kick it down the hill. Like you can build something smaller and roll it down the hill, see what happens. And if you're if you're a fan of preserving capital and not throwing your money around, like, if you want to take a measurement approach to the bets that you place, going that road rather than, you know, placing a big buy can be quite advantageous.

Yeah. Well, so it's time to start to wrap our show a little bit. But I heard a couple of like, big takeaways that we should do. And we'll put your link up in just a second. But first I heard if you start to notice you're hustling too much, your team's hustling your, like, whatever, start now to think about building a process or like putting in a system or some kind of thing to reduce the hustle. Right. When you're, when you have to, there's moments of hustle, but when it's becoming hustle is the norm. It's time to design something out so you could take a break so you could go home for the evening. The other one I heard is talk to customers, get feedback about how things are really working and then operationalize that, get that into the production, the design of the product or service. Like, like bring that back into. Actually do something with that. I heard that and then I also heard where we were just finishing now. Like go like, do the unsexy thing. Like just keep it simple and don't blow all of your investment money on something until you iterate on it, until you prove it a little bit. Like take it step by step.

Right, Absolutely.

His show is called the Journey. His show and podcast called the Journey. You can find that wherever you find it, your show and your shows and, and that kind of thing. But 6 catalysts.com is the company 6 catalyst.com it's there on screen. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Not too hard to.

To remember.

Spell it all out 6catalysts.com and that'll take you to the company. You can find out more about Paul's, Paul's, work, Paul's company and that kind of thing and, and his show's linked there as well. So, Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show with us today and sharing a little of your stories and your wisdom and that kind of thing. So appreciate it.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me, Bill.

And thanks again to Wanda and to Anna who get our show produced and scheduled and sent out every week and that kind of thing. It's more than I can do on my own for sure. Makes a big difference. And 650 plus now of these shows out there in the world and we, we bring one to you every week. So it's a, it's a, it's a pleasure. It's a passion of ours. I want to find all those shows and more. You can find them wherever you are right now, like subscribe, notifications, all that kind of thing. Or go to scalingcoach.com our website scalingcoach.com where you'll also find out about our coaching and our workshops, that kind of thing, the ongoing stuff that we do as well as some, there's some tools and downloads, that kind of thing you could find. Scalingcoach.com thanks to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish who created this whole scaling up mess that we have used and continue to use. Thanks again everyone for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align. It's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill Gates one more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.