Mastering Entrepreneurial Efficiency: How the Queen Bee Role Transforms Your Business

Entrepreneurship is hard, but the process can be simplified. You can achieve success faster, sooner, and easier. I'm Mike Michalowicz, and I'm on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. My goal for this episode and every episode is to serve you on your journey. Let's start right now on Entrepreneurship Simplified. Amy, what's your big, uh, intentions for, uh, this year? Like, if you achieve one thing this year, one outcome?

Oh gosh, I think I'd like to be prepared to take care of my aging mother.

I could almost predict it for you.

You know, I'm really— you— I've been on—

it's amazing, you are such a consummate family person. You care for your mom at such a high level.

Thanks, Mike, appreciate that.

It's atypical. Not that my goal is to avoid my mother, but I think that's more my disposition is like, you know, and you do it from my perception out of sheer love for your mother, appreciation for your mother. Maybe there's a sense of obligation. I think that's normal, but you're an atypical person in that regard.

I think it's amazing. Well, I appreciate this job, which gives me the flexibility to do that as I need to and take days as I need them so that I can, uh, of course, can I go do it so I can go do all that.

Have you gotten to the point where you know we'll never fire you even though you've asked to be fired?

God, no. I will never be convinced that I'm not getting fired.

Literally impossible. And I think you're the only person in my life who's asked to be fired.

Well, you know, it's kind of hard because you, you've been a friend of mine since we were—

yeah, kids, kids, kids. Like, I remember the first day I saw you.

Yeah. I remember Mr. Mercer's class.

Mr. Mercer's class, yeah.

We were kids.

Kids.

And so, you know, and then you gave me this opportunity to work with you and it has been such a wonderful ride. But, you know, especially as my friend, I think I would have this kind of earnest care to do good work wherever I was, but especially for you guys, I would want to make sure that I'm doing good work. So if I'm not, you know, I'm just worried about a mercy keep. I don't wanna be kept out of mercy.

Yeah, yeah. There would never be a circumstance.

You could be brutal and just—

Yeah, but I think what Kelsey's created in our organization is she is very attuned to what people have talent at, what they enjoy doing, and has been able to morph the organization. Today we're gonna talk about the QBR, the queen bee role, and the concept of the essence of organizational efficiency. So it's a perfect, kind of segue.

Yeah, before we do that, Mike, can I introduce you to the audience?

Yeah, yeah, please do.

Mike, you are the author of 8 business books with more to come, including "Profit First," "Clockwork," "All In," and Simon Sinek has coined you the patron saint of entrepreneurs. It's pretty great.

It is pretty fortunate. We shared this, I don't know, we did a first recording, but we had some technical issues, so it may not get out, but I will share the story at some point of why Simonson then. Uh, well, let me introduce you, uh, a lifelong friend. Like, literally, I've known— I've been on this planet knowing you longer than we have now.

That's so cool.

That is so cool when that happens, because you lose contact with a lot of people.

Yeah.

And why I was so excited— Kelsey's like, hey, maybe Amy can be your co-host on the show, because you know me, the before entrepreneurship, after entrepreneurship. You, you know my journey. Journey. And I know yours. And, um, I think it just gives a, a much more genuine perspective. But you're also— the one thing I want to share is you're an extraordinary mother to your— I want to start off with a little story. This is Jason Barker. So Jason owns a company, uh, just want to make sure I say it correctly, it's Fresh Start Detail. It's a car detailing company in Beaverton, Oregon. Why I wanted to start off with his story is I received an email from him, uh, titled thank you.

I don't know. This is in the beginning of Clockwork. Oh my gosh, this gives me goosebumps.

Oh my God, me too. And we as an organization are blessed. We get contacted by readers regularly. And if you're listening right now, my email is mike@mikemccallowitz.com. You'll figure out how to spell if you Google it. And we'd love to hear from you what you're thinking about this podcast and our intention to simplify the entrepreneurial journey for you. But I would say we get contacted at least every 30 minutes. Someone's reaching out. A book they've read or something, and it's amazing. And so this one caught my attention because it normally doesn't start with thank you, it's more of a commitment or a story, and they're all fascinating. And this one said thank you, so I start reading it, and Jason had implemented Clockwork. So he's in the revised and expanded edition, but he started implementing it. One of the core tenets is a concept called the 4-week vacation. I want to explore that in our conversation today. I think if you are a business owner and you don't take a 4-week vacation, you are intentionally harming your business. I want to Be pretty bold.

Powerful. Yep. Bold.

I wanna be bold about that. So Jason started implementing this strategy. What it did is it freed him up to participate in his annual buddies' college football trip. They love their Oregon Beavers and he was off to see them play at an away game. But what was interesting in this story, he said his annual trip is one he's never attended.

Right.

His friends go.

Right.

He gets invited every year.

And he says, I can't go.

Can't go 'cause I have to run the business.

Yeah.

We started implementing the fortification. He's been deploying this concept we'll talk about called the QBR. And he went. So you think that's the end of the story. I'm a crier, so here we go. His friend died during this trip. His closest friend. He said they had an amazing experience. They went to the game. They had a good time. They're having the final breakfast before they're all leaving. His friend had a fatal heart attack at the diner and passes away.

It's mind-boggling.

And he says, I know it sounds bizarre that I'm thanking you, but it's like, if I didn't do this, I would have never been with my best friend.

This makes me cry. This really makes me cry. It's so powerful. Life-changing.

It's life-changing. Yeah, it's life-changing. And, and why I wanted to include that story is there is this belief that entrepreneurship is all about— beyond devotion, it's a perverted commitment to the exclusion of your family, your friends. Your life. You got to be in this and exclude everything else. And that's a lie. That's an absolute lie. Yet we are groomed for that, you know, through the literature we read, through the Insta-famous people we see, through the, through anything. And so this becomes the belief. And in the beginning, you have to be devoted to the business to get off the ground. You have to somehow initiate that spark. But you also have to be very disciplined in extracting yourself. That's what I want to talk about today, extracting yourself from the business. And the result is not just what Jason experienced in this amazing moment with his friends, but also he set up the business that it can serve its customers at a higher level because the employees are more engaged. And his employees aren't now working the 80-hour weeks instead of him. It wasn't a swap out. He's brought balance to the organization. Fast forward, I'm still in contact with him occasionally.

Love that.

He religiously goes on vacation. He has a healthier organization than he's ever had before fiscally. It has more notoriety. They're getting more clients. The employees are more engaged because the boss man ain't there all the time. And they're not necessarily have to be there all the time. I think that's the cascade of benefits you can have.

And the key to that, the key to all of that is the QBR.

That's right.

That's right.

Do you know what QBR stands for?

Queen B Roll.

That's right.

But tell us, tell us what is the queen bee role?

So I had this desire to recently to start beekeeping. I called a beekeeper in town. Actually, I think I announced it at one of our huddles. I think Aaron introduced me to somebody, but I connected with the beekeeper and he said, "Why do you wanna do this?" I said, "Well, it's a great way to support our environment and the planet." Be pollinators, I'm gonna help the environment. And he goes, "Oh." Because I thought you want to do for tax purposes. So in the township where we live, it's in Boone too, there's a certain acreage if you have that, if you can qualify as a farm, if you have a certain number of— Yeah, right. So interesting. And then he goes, but he goes, there's a big bear problem. And so after hearing through that, I said, we're not going to do this.

Yeah.

But leading up to that, I've been studying the process of beekeeping. So sadly, I won't be a beekeeper.

You will not be. I was kind of looking forward to seeing you in the whole gear. Oh my God.

All of I didn't come with my smoker. I was gonna smoke you until you fell asleep, leave honey on everyone's desk.

There would be honey because snacks, you know.

Yeah, stay out. Yeah, who snacks?

I'm snacks. I'm snacks.

Kelsey, Billy Ray Cyrus.

Snacks, please.

You cannot assign your own nickname. All right, so, um, I'm studying beekeeping and there's this concept called biomimicry. Biomimicry is something that exists in nature can be translated to a personal or business or life application. And the realization is that Mother Nature has spent a billion-plus years, a billion, on perfecting something. And why not take those ideas? One example is butterflies, as I understand them. I'm probably gonna misrepresent this, but butterflies, the material that makes up their wings is actually mini mirrors, effectively. So to the human eye, we can see some color. To other insects, It is a massive explosion, exposure of colors, and it has meaning and significance. And so they've been able to use wings and create these like micro mirrors. Again, I'm probably messing the story up.

Yeah, but we get the—

just take nature.

Yeah.

I'm studying beehives and some stuff you may or may not know is a beehive has basically 3 classes of bees. You have the queen bee. It's a single bee with the job of producing eggs, thousands of eggs, I think, per day. You have the worker bees, females that actually get the stuff done. They're the pollinators, they go out. Then you have the drones, which are the guys, and they're internal to the hive. They never leave the hive.

Okay.

Again, I may be messing this up, but what's of significance is the queen bee. If she's not executing the role or function of producing eggs, the hive will die within weeks. So the average life expectancy of a bee depends on the species specifically, but they can live for 6 weeks, some a longer period, maybe 6 months, but it's a short lifespan as compared to the human lifespan. Therefore, the, the bees' core function to sustain a colony is to produce eggs, bring those larvae up, make them the next bees, and there's this constant generational turn, right? If you don't produce eggs, you're done. Listen, if 50 bees don't collect pollen today, they have storage of honey. There's all these things that if it doesn't work out perfectly, we've got a backup plan. We got a backup plan. If eggs aren't being produced, we're screwed. And this became the realization that in our business By definition, there can only be one most important task that must be done for the sustainability of the organization. But the word of most, it can only be one. The job of the entrepreneur is to identify what is this one singular task that is the most important thing that everything else is secondary to. So I want to go through a structure of how you identify it. Yeah, please. But I just want to finish out the queen bee. As I talk to entrepreneurs about this and stuff, they come up and say, "Oh, I'm the queen bee." And I'm like, okay, this is where the analogy falls apart. The queen bee role, the R is probably the most important function in that analogy or that acronym. The role is the function of producing eggs. If the queen bee is not producing eggs, they kill her. They eat her or kick her out of the hive at best. Then they spawn a new queen bee. They use a thing called jelly, whatever, there's a process, but they spawn a new queen bee and she starts producing eggs. Every single bee knows if we ain't producing eggs, we're screwed. Produce eggs. In a business, if we ain't doing something, what is that thing that if we're not doing it, we're screwed? Everyone needs to know what that is.

What that role is.

What that role is. And in an organization, we can have redundancy. You don't have to have just one individual doing it. You can have redundancy. For our organization, it's the creation of books. I got to, or we've got to, produce books that are transformative and impactful. If I write books that are inferior, it starts a cascade of consequences. We're not producing eggs. Now, I won't be engaged for speaking gigs. People less likely to listen to the podcast. It all cascades down. Now, here's the deal. If this is a crappy episode of the podcast, I'm sorry for the people that listen to this, but it's not like, "I'm done reading the books." It won't have as much of an impact.

This is not the QBR.

Correct. So the big question is, how do you get to the QBR?

Yeah, how do you get to the QBR?

Good question.

Thank you.

I appreciate you asking that. You first have to start off by asking yourself, what do you promise your community? What do you want to be known for? What do you stake your reputation in? Is there any products that you particularly like and/or enjoy that you buy? Like, Krista loves buying purses. She loves it.

Mm, I'm a shoe girl.

You're a shoe girl. Okay. What's like the nicest? Is it Louis Vuitton?

Yeah.

No, I'm just the one with the red bottom.

Those are the ones with the red, red, red sole. So yeah, let's just pretend I have those.

Pretend you have those. Because Chris's dream shoe.

Yeah.

Um, they're ridiculously expensive. I think like $1,000 or something like that.

At least.

Yeah. She's listening to— there's another podcast called, uh, oh, I think it's called Acquired. It's— I can't remember now. It's the history of these businesses and they were talking about shoes and purses and so forth. I don't know if it's Louis Vuitton me exactly, but I believe they're handcrafted shoes, um, that they're individually stitched. And, uh, as I heard the story, consultants came in and said, oh, you can use more efficiently, use equipment and stuff like that. They said, no, uh, we, we have to hand stitch and handcraft it. That's what makes these two specials.

Yeah.

And they have a rule now that will never hire consultants again. Yeah, again.

Oh, wow.

Because they understand that the crafting the shoe, um, that's the promise to the customer. That's right. The pro— the promise is that it's, it's unique, it's made special, it's, um, it's of the highest quality, um, which also, by the way, implores imperfection. Because I bet you a computer or a machine could do it better, right? But it would lose that imperfection, or the lack— I'm sorry, the perfection takes away the nuanced elements, right?

Right. The specialness.

The specialness. The specialness. So, I should have picked a— I should have asked you to identify a product I'm familiar with. So, I kind of messed that story. But in our books, the promise we make, and it's actually the title of this show, is Entrepreneurship Simplified, is to simplify the entrepreneurial journey. We have as a tagline on our website, Entrepreneurship Simplified.

Right.

That is the promise we're making to our customers. Once you know what is the thing you want to be known for, the one thing you want to be known for, extraordinary quality of work, handcraft work, maybe that's what Louis Vuitton is known for, handcrafting. For us, Entrepreneurship Simplified. Then I ask oursel— myself, of all the activities we do, what is the one most critical activity to deliver on the promise of Entrepreneurship Simplified? And There's speaking engagements, there's podcasts, there's the writing that, um, that Jenna's doing with our blogs. There's the communication that Andrew's overseeing, right? There's the— you shipping books and so forth and taking care of customers. All those elements. But of everything, I'm like, it all starts with extraordinary bugs. Put every ounce into it. And that's now the QBR.

Love that. Identifying that though, how does that relate to removing yourself from that role where you are chained to your company? Like, what's the— what's the relationship there?

Yeah, great question. So our First job is identify what's that most critical activity. Once you know it, make the team aware. Everyone needs to know that we have to produce high-end books. Not that we individual team members may be participating in it, but we have to know because if the queen, in this case, if there's a singular person, ain't producing those eggs, we gotta get a new queen on board or build redundancy. So the first thing is to make the team aware of it. The next step is we have to make a decision. And we started talking about this in episode 1, is this concept of the hustle and grind mentality where you do everything. At a certain point, you have to go through that chrysalis change of saying, I choose not to do everything. But as an entrepreneur, we have the right to say, you know what, it's just gonna be me and only me doing everything. I may have a few colleagues, but I'm everything. We have to make that transformational decision and then start navigating a path for building in redundancy, have other folks do it and so forth. So at Louis Vuitton, I suspect there's not one shoemaker there. You know, there's probably a few. I was on the precipice of that decision of like, do I— can I handle writing these books myself? The first time it came about was with my very first book. I said, if this is so critically important, I have to have redundancy. And I found a business partner or a writing partner, AJ Harper, who elevated the game, who works in parallel to me. And when you read Profit First or All In, our newest project together. For the reader, I suspect that when you read it, it is a seamless read. It's one voice throughout. And it is my quote unquote voice. It's not every word that I've typed. AJ's written arguably half of that book, and I've written half, right? And then she's taken my half and cleaned it up. But it's in concert. So the first thing was to identify, is there other individuals that can help move the craft along. But then the next stage, and this is also a choice, is do you want to go to some form of systemization? So with Louis Vuitton, they probably have high-end handcrafting skilled folks work on those shoes, and that's how they're scaling it. But for me, I was like, oh, what's the next stage beyond this? And I said, oh, there can be what's called derivative books. So Profit First right now has 15 published and probably 10 more in the works right now of other authors who've taken the title and expanded on the work I've done to address a larger audience.

Yeah, specific industries.

Specific industries and niches. We've done with the Pumpkin Plan. Dave Cavanaugh and Sean Walsh wrote Pumpkin Plan for MSPs. Fix This Next, Casey Compton wrote for healthcare providers. So that was the next extension. The next, next extension on our QBR Um, and this is, this is cutting-edge news, is we're in negotiations to have our own imprint. And this is now full removal of a single B, right? And now we're going to have other individuals in the organization producing extraordinary books that transform lives and entrepreneur— and simplify the entrepreneurial journey. For our imprint, we're going to have the QBR, effectively the Entrepreneurship Simplified. So it's still going to be in this space, but now there's no dependency on me.

Gotcha. And that's the redundancy that you talk about.

Yeah.

Okay.

You know, just riffing here, there's, um, it's been an interesting process. When, when Kelsey came on board, uh, she came on board originally as my assistant, part-time assistant. It took a big-ass risk, right? The pay was horrible. It was, I think it was below minimum wage, and we put that in the ad, which was a filter to find someone that wanted to explore, try, test things out.

Can you believe how that turned out. Can you even just— I can't believe it either.

I can't believe it. Yeah, it's funny, I attribute some transformative moments to Ron. As much conflict that we've had as partners, uh, there's also been these heightened moments of just joy and, uh, growth. Yeah, he's the one who found Kelsey. He called me, I was traveling, and said, I interviewed Kelsey Ayers, and dude, you've got to talk with her. I think she's exactly what you need. So I did a remote interview with Kelsey, like, while traveling. And she was a candidate. She said, I'm gonna try this out. But, but after a certain period of time, it was clear, you know, this is not affordable. So 6 months and doing it. Well, what happened is over the years— Kelsey's our president of our company, um, and she's given, um, guidance to our organization to extract me from, from being the, the, the sole source of revenue. Sure. And it's been difficult because I unintentionally, but also intentionally in the startup, I have to do a lot of things. You have to hustle in the beginning. You have to extract yourselves out. And while I've had that intention as an entrepreneur, it's very easy to slip back in.

Right.

So Kelsey's been kind of blocking and tackling. What products can we make minus Mike? How can we expand beyond me?

Right. Right.

And just through natural kind of growth, the imprint is something that's kind of come out of this. And these other— we started this thing called Prosper Group, which is an organization where we're investing in small businesses. But I have minimal involvement and they're now starting to generate revenue. Kelsey's managing our licensees, all these people that are teaching our principles, which again has minimal involvement to none of mine, but generating revenue and having the impact.

And getting the word out there, which is the promise of simplifying our speech.

Yeah, and then delivering on that message. Delivering on that message.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

That's amazing. I have to ask a question about that though, with the whole, you know, creating redundancy and getting you out of certain things, you know, pulling you out of the weeds, so to speak, so that you can continue on to other things. So I think you mentioned this way back when you were writing Clockwork, ego was a big thing, a big part of the difficulty in removing yourself from doing all of the things. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. I don't know if it's just limited to entrepreneurs, but I, you know, I think ego is necessary for survival. You have to think you're competent and capable, otherwise you wouldn't trust yourself in doing something. But then it can, you know, that old yin and yang is, um, it can go to an extreme, it can become a disease. And so for me, um, in the beginning of when I was doing everything, I started to believe that I was necessary to do everything. But the other thing too, at least in the space that we're in with the authorship and supporting entrepreneurs, there's a confirmation syndrome that happens. And it's those emails that come in every 30 minutes.

Yeah.

That someone's like, this is amazing. You've changed my life. And I'm like, oh my God, I haven't heard it. And it's real. It's really something I have to keep in check. Yeah. The most flattering thing is to go on. So here's an example. I just spoke at UFG, which is United Franchise Group. 2,000 people in the audience. I presented on Profit First. And afterwards, I was walking to an event, a meet and greet, but I had to walk through the vendor booth area and got stopped 2 dozen times with the host of the event. Like, oh, dude, you changed my life and so forth.

That's great.

It's amazing. It's amazing. And I just keep myself in check because if it happens, I default to saying, "Oh my God, I really haven't seen any of those guys." And I think I'm like a big deal. And then the other part of my mind, the superego, I think it is, comes in and says, "Dude, these are simply people that discovered a recipe." But it's the individual who actually cooked it up, executed it, applied to their life circumstances. The hero is the person who actually gets it done. Not the journalist who just kind of wrote this stuff. And so that's kind of this balance that I need to keep in check. In entrepreneurship, if that ego gets away, you start to buy your own shit and then you're in real trouble. You start to think that, oh, everything I think of is genius. Everything I do is right. Therefore it's this path. And we start tunneling our business. And that's a real risk. That's like the queen bee in the hive saying, I don't need— I don't need the drones. We don't need the honey. I'm just so good at producing eggs. I got this. And that's all I'm going to do. There has to be this balance organically, and ego becomes a risk for that. I'm also repulsed by it. So that's one thing I think that serves me is there— I see individuals, whoever they may be in the entrepreneurial space, that are braggadocious about their accomplishments or something like that and just point to their own singular attributes as being the reason behind it. And I'm like, ugh, that just feels so gross. And so when I see myself doing that and I do, I'm like, Oh God, that's disgusting.

Shake it off, shake it off.

Shake it off, Mike, don't be that guy. Don't be that guy. So ego, yeah.

Yeah, I was thinking too about when the business starts to kind of work without you too, there's a hit to the ego also.

Yeah, you wanna talk about ego hits, there's two I can think of. One is that, is the very first 4-week vacation I took, I don't know if you guys remember this, but I went to, it started off, I was in Perth, Australia.

Yeah, you were doing speaking, right?

Speaking down there, and then it extended. And I remember being in Perth and looking at email and there was no emails and it was like midweek and I'm like, don't you guys need me? And my ego kicked in. I'm like, and I, I think I emailed Kelsey, said, hey, can I get a report? Can I? And, and dutifully she sent it, but also is the worst thing. I started to, hey, bring distraction to the office, disempowering you guys. I don't know what the exact words were, but I remember after returning, after a week or so, I settled in and said, just relaxed.

Relax. Yeah.

You know, I thought the business may be on fire and came back and like, you guys, quite to the contrary, it was going and growing. And I don't know if it's Kelsey or you or someone was like, yeah, we, we feel empowered. Like we got this. I'm doing things I've never done before because you aren't here.

Right.

And that actually felt super good. But it also— there's an identity shift.

Yeah.

I had to pick a new character. It's, um, Todd Herman's book, uh, The Alter Ego Effect. Must read. If you haven't read that, please get that book. One thing I learned from that is, um, we can step into and out of, of, uh, alternative identifications of ourselves, and that for the moment, uh, we can be something and then choose not to be that person, move, return to our homeostasis of who we are. So one tool I've used for myself is when I'm on stage, that's the speaker guy.

Yeah.

Um, and I'm gonna be the best Speaker guy in that moment, I step into that role, but the second I'm off stage, I'm not a speaker guy. Uh, and, and in the office, um, one thing I've tried to be disciplined in, and I'm far from perfect at it, is I'm, I'm not the— I'm the owner of the company, I'm not the manager, I'm not the president. Kelsey's the president, you know, and, and removing myself from that, right?

You've done that well.

Thanks. I struggle with it at times, so I want to intercept and say, oh, I think here's what we should do. Yeah, it's hard to keep the piehole shut for me, as you can tell, because I've been speaking for 30 minutes straight.

Back to the QBR. Yeah, I want to know everything— when, where, why, how, all of it. What else can you tell?

All right, so QBR, remember, it's a queen bee role. Let's talk about the when to do it. The QBR is defined as soon as possible, but we have to have flexibility in it. It starts off with the big promise. So first, identify how you want to serve your community, and there's two ways to find this. One is to reach out. If you have existing clients, reach out and say, "What of all the things we do, what is the one most important thing?" And look for the common thread. We work with a lot of accountants and bookkeepers through the Profit First Professionals division. And, um, often they hear it's not the accounting, it's not the accuracy, it's not the tax compliance. It's you communicate well.

Okay.

If your clients are saying you communicate well, that's what you're known for. Step one is identify what you are known for by your clients, and then Exacerbate that, grow it. If you're great at communication, how do you get better at it? Secondly is you can, or alternatively, you can choose what you want to be known for. I want to be known for extraordinary professionalism. I want to be known to be the funny guy in the accounting space and just like, you know, your everyday buddy. You have the right to choose that. And I would just argue, choose something that's congruent with who you are as a human being.

Right. Genuine.

Yeah. Like you're, you're such a matriarch. If you started a business, It would be a touching, caring, warm—

It would be something I'd be caring for somebody somehow.

Yeah, it wouldn't be about like, we drive results instantly. Like that's not you. It's like we care more than anyone for real. Like that's you. So once you identify that, either your clients tell you what it is and you decide to lean into it or you choose your own. Then we have to say of all the activities we do, what one activity supports us most? So you said, when do we start? We start today on discovering the big promise. The QBR, will become self-evident over time. Here's when you know you're doing the QBR wrong. If you're saying, I got, you know, 5 things that are most important, fail. You just failed. You have one thing that's most important. I'm not saying the other things are not, are ignorable. No, I'm simply saying that when it comes to consideration of do we do this or that, the this better be the most important thing.

Okay.

You gotta be producing those eggs. No days go by without producing eggs. If we're failing it, Call everyone in and say, we're having a problem producing eggs. What are we going to do here?

Gotcha.

So for me, with the books, yeah, every day I work on writing the books. I call it offseason, onseason. Offseason, which we're in right now, we're just about to approach onseason, is when I'm not in contract. And I'll write for 30 minutes to an hour a day, usually in the morning, writing a story. I wrote one yesterday actually about AJ Jacobs. That's why I brought him up on our first episode, which we didn't record. So maybe we do it again. Onseason, I'll write 3 to 4 hours a day, usually on airplanes, just cranking on it. Um, that's the, the QBR. And what you got to do for it is you got to block and tackle in your organization. You have to allocate space for it, you know, proverbially or, or literally.

Or literally, right?

Yeah. So that's the when.

Okay, so we've done how, we did how, when, when, who, who.

Yeah, who. Great. It's a dialogue. Um, you as the owner of the business in the beginning, um, you can identify the QBR by going through this process, but you can engage your clients, talk with your team, I would argue the QBR itself is less of a selection. It becomes more self-evident. It's the big promise. But we can talk as a team. We have a quarterly retreat. We just did one a couple days ago. I always find those engaging in a way that I feel reconnected with you guys. But a few retreats ago, we went through some of our values. We call them the immutable laws. And what I believed our immutable laws to be was really a reflection of myself, ego. And then when I heard the communal immutable laws, I was like, oh my gosh, we have something stronger and better collectively than I do individually. And I think that's the same thing with our big promise in QBR. So engage the team, have a dialogue around it, define what you see it to be, but ask people to challenge it. It's gonna be hard if you're the owner for people to challenge you, but invite that dialogue in. So that's the how.

Okay.

Where?

Where?

Where?

Yeah, where?

Where? So that one I'm gonna have to do a little more kind of, uh, um, there's no physical location necessarily. So I, I had to kind of speak more, uh, esoterically.

Yes, that's where I was going. Okay. So then Kelsey can tell us later it's the wrong word completely.

Yeah. Is it the right word, Kelsey?

Is it esoteric?

So where you implement the QBR, or how you do— maybe it's more of a how, but the— is you have kind of the stringent rule of what it is, but then you have the flavor around it. So write great books is the rule, but how we apply it, so maybe that's more about how, is it has to have its flavors and elements. So a great book is subjective. I mean, at the end of the day, the readers will decide this is a great book or not. And apparently, I thought Surge was an amazing book, not so good. The readers have spoken, right? Surge, really?

They just don't know. We gotta just get it out there again.

Not so good. All In, conversely, is landing, and I'm so grateful for it. I think it is a great piece of work. But there's these flavor elements. So once you identify the QBR, identify kind of the rules around it. So our QBR is Write Great Books. But what does that mean? A book that simplifies complex concepts so quickly, easily, that within seconds or minutes, someone can grasp the concept and be implementing it. Another thing is we call arm over the shoulder. It's, it's got to be that someone reading the book feels that they are supported and cared for, not by someone sitting on a pedestal, not someone that has superior knowledge, just someone that has a different perhaps experience and we're in this together.

Love that.

So maybe it's not so where, but where you implement the QBR in your organization has some of these kind of guiding rules around it. So it fleshes out. It's a little more organic than this stringent rule. Yeah. Yeah, I think we beat the hell out of the QBR. Is there anything else that comes to mind? No, we're good.

No, I think we're good.

Good. Last thing I want to share is QBR should not change. It may over time. If your promise changes, then your QBR—

it's reasonable for your QBR.

Yeah, but it's not— you don't pick the QBR of the month, right? Um, or the year. It's, it's— we're going to master this. I will tell you this: if you get so good at it, your reputation will precede you. So I'll give one final example, then we can go into some news stories.

Sure.

Zappos, their tagline is delivering happiness. That's their promise, is that you're gonna have a joyful experience with us, and they sell shoes. The QBR is customer service commitment. So one expression of this QBR is the customer service department's carrying it, is we're gonna care for customers so extraordinarily that if you're on the phone with us, even if you're calling to order a pizza, there's a fabled story, we're gonna get that pizza for you, right? And so they do this. They've executed the QBR so consistently for so long that these moments, these stories have come out, and then their reputation now precedes them. It becomes folklore. If you nail that QBR so well, your business will start to create folklore around it. And that's when you become something that no one else can touch.

Gotcha. Love that.

Any news stories catch your attention?

It was in Inc. Return to office mandates are finally unquestionably dead for the tech industry anyway. The remote work productivity argument is no longer relevant. Thought that was interesting.

Yeah, listen, listen here. It says Dell had a stringent return to office policy. So this is post-COVID apparently, right? Which resulted in nearly half of its employees choosing to stay remote despite career limitations. Highlights the shift of employees. Yeah, here's why I see going on, is there was desires that now transforms to demands.

Yeah.

So I desired to work remotely, I desired flexibility. Now I demand it.

Yeah.

And if you're not gonna deliver on employer, I'm done, I'm out of here.

But I'm also amazed that I'm seeing that, um, even if it means that they're not getting promoted, that's the choice. Like, staying remote work, giving— keep keeping that option is, is coming in over, you know, promotion at work and things like that.

If COVID was this kind of great awakening— I don't know if it played for you, but it was Life is short. There's people dying. Yeah, we had friends pass away from COVID and it was, it was a wake-up call. Did that play out that way for you guys?

It was huge. And the fact that we worked from home really pointed out that to not have that option is a real pain point, to, to not be able to be able to get home. I mean, I, I enjoy coming into the office. You guys are a fun crew and it's a good time at our office. But, um, it's so nice to know, like, if I need to be home, I can be home. If even if it's just, um, a little, a little office burnout and you just need a new place to focus and, and be in a different kind of workspace sometimes. Yeah, it's really—

and there's home burnout too. Yeah. So here's what happened with our office, um, and COVID really instigated this. We have moved to a 4-day work week. I'm not sure when we officially instituted that, if we ever did.

I don't know when.

But we have a 4-day work week. Um, and it really started revolving around Kelsey's schedule. Kelsey was coming in, uh, 3 days a week and then consolidated down to 2. So it's Tuesday, Thursday.

Yeah.

And the office, you have an option. You can come in any day you want. Tuesday, Thursday is the in And Thursday everyone's in, which is nice because it brings about camaraderie. One of my favorite moments, uh, man, I don't know if I even told you guys about this. I walked in the office 6 months to a year ago and, uh, everyone was in. I think even Corday was here. She, you know, she lives in North Carolina. Even Corday was here and everyone's around the table just kibitzing. And I walked in and some people waved towards and started to say, hey Mike, what's up? And the conversation continued fluidly. There wasn't a blip. I walked to my office and said, there's connection and there's no— the cat's in the— Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got to quiet down. Everybody scurry back to their desk.

Pretend you're working.

Yeah.

And I had an office environment prior to that where I would walk in and people would quickly start typing and stuff.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh my God, I was defeating connection.

Yeah.

We get our work done, man. Yeah. We get our work done.

And it's important to each of us to get our work done. But there is no feeling like you can't connect. We have such wonderful opportunities to connect in our office. And we need to.

And I wonder if Dell imposing, you know, you must return to work, was basically this big brother, we're watching over you.

Yeah.

And we expect this from you. And I wonder if there was a little bit of this kind of F you.

Yeah.

I was saying, if we're forced to comply, we will seek to defy. Ah, and you know, when, when it's human nature, if I, if I don't tell me what to do. Yeah, if I put— yeah, exactly. If you've ever had a kid, you know exactly I think we got the topic done for today.

I think so.

Good. I want to remind our guests, hey, thanks for being here, listening to the whole show. I hope you extracted some core ideas. As we do our episodes, we're trying to cover all of the entrepreneurial journey. So we're going to jump forward, we're going to jump back. I would be honored if you would simply rate and review our show. It's the best word or best way to spread the word on our show. Maybe you can give feedback on this show specifically. I know it takes a minute or two. I'd just be honored if you do that. Selfishly, it serves us in spreading the word. And as always, I am supporting you in your success. The world is starving for your success. So get out there and do it, but do it the right way. Do it your way.

Sounds good.

See you guys later.

Bye.