$300B Man Hates the Worship of Wealth

By the way, this one's interesting to me. So this is the death of the corporate job. So get this. The most honest person I met recently was a VP at a tech company who told me, I manage a team of 12 people who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents. I make £150,000 a year, £150,000 a year. Okay, so let's call that like $180,000, something like that, right? It's completely absurd. And I'm riding it as long as I can while I'm building something on the side. So this, this, this is a Substack post and it's called The Hidden Economy of Nonsense. And I literally, I met a friend recently who works at a large multi-trillion dollar company, right? And he's— I'm like, so what do you do there now? He's like, oh yeah, like I go into meetings and I make sure that everyone's connected and they know they're aligned. And then I go into other meetings and he's like— I'm like, you sit in meetings all day to make sure people are aligned? He's like, that's my job. I'm like, oh my God. So this person's posting this. I'm like, man, the death of the corporate job. There's a lot of nonsense going on.

There is, especially bigger companies, because they're making over $200,000 a year.

Yeah.

For creating documents for— you lost me here. Creating documents for someone else who creates—

I'll read it again. So I manage a team of 12 people. This is a VP at a company, at a tech company. I manage a team of 12 people. All 12 of these people create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read the documents. And this team leader gets paid, let's call it $180,000 a year.

No, no, $200,000 plus.

$200,000 plus? Is that— I don't even know what the pound is, the exchanges now.

I know this because I have—

You look at it?

No, I have so corporations in so many countries. Yeah, $202,000 as of today.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

When you have all the offices in different countries, you have to manage money because when things go up and down, it can cost you money.

That's why I know my treasury strategy. I'm sure you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, um, $200,000 a year to create documents for another department who uses that to create more documents for senior leadership who doesn't read the documents. Dude, this straight up, you know, when my team, They don't send me documents anymore because you want to know why?

I don't read the documents.

So you know what they send me instead? Text messages. Text messages with stats and data of our business. And I'm like, I don't want the fluff because they just waste their time creating it. Like you get other stuff done.

Dude, I had someone on my team, she made, and bless her heart, she made a 22-page slide to show. I'm like, dude, I'm not going to read that, man. So, so to your point, if executives only have time to get to the point, this is a whole nother thing, but I do believe the death of the corporate job, a lot of these jobs are going to get replaced. Yes, we looked at the avalanche of layoffs happening again. We talk about Accenture, we talk about Salesforce, we talk about all these companies. It's all starting now.

You saw the ADP jobs report, right?

This is yesterday, right? I missed it. What happened?

It was either yesterday or the day before.

I think it's bad, right?

I think 2 days ago, ADP, they announced a 30,000 job decrease. They only manage the private sector.

Yeah, right.

Not the government.

And now we have to wait a little for the government one.

Yes. But if you look at the revision that the government released, they also released a negative negative for the previous month.

Down a million. Didn't they say it was down a million? Remember jobs? There was a revision over like the last year or something like that. It was revised down a million net.

No, I was just talking about the previous month. Oh yeah, yeah, right. And what you're seeing is I prefer looking at the ADP numbers over government numbers because I think it's more real-time and more accurate. That's just my two cents.

You can also game the government numbers too, which is why they revise it all the time. Yeah.

What are they considered unemployed? Oh, you stopped looking for a job after X amount of time, so you're out of the system. And it's like, well, are still looking for jobs. But, but yeah, I don't even know where we're going with this conversation.

It's okay. I got a good one here just so we can end on this one. So here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products that just We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Bullshit business advice. So this is, this is something we can share off the cuff here. So I, you and I have heard a lot of advice over the years. I think you're generally more skeptical of people where I'm, I was, I've been more optimistic and more believing of people in the past. So I'll give you an example. So let's talk about some bullshit business advice. One, Hire an operator and get out of their way. Literally, someone tweeted this the other day. I was like, yeah, you know, the best way to make money right now is to start a holding company and buy a bunch of businesses and just hire a CEO and get out of their way, buy a bunch of boring businesses. And then one of my friends, a YPR, he's like, God, this guy's an idiot. Like he replies, he replies, this guy. I'm like, yeah, like, I used to drink the Kool-Aid where it's like, yeah, you can just hire these people. They're more experienced than you, and then get out of their way. It doesn't work. Yep. You and I have both felt the pain.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you also have to look at some of these experienced people. Someone yesterday was talking to me about one of their friends working at one of the big holdcos. It was either Omnicom or IPG, but they're merging anyway, so it doesn't matter. And this person's the CEO of, you know, a big division. When I say a big division, I'm talking about billions and billions and billions in revenue. And if you look at their background, they're a financial person.

Mm-hmm.

They used to be in all financial roles and now they're an operator. I'm not saying they're not good at their job. There's a lot of CFOs that, or financial people that go into CEO roles, but would I put a financial person in a CEO role? No, that's just me. I'm not saying I'm right. Omnicom and IPG are bigger companies than, you know, my own business, but I would definitely be micromanaging that person and giving them ideas because a lot of these people have worked at other organizations, have a different way of running things.

Yep.

And some of them are great at quote unquote maintaining or just cutting costs. They have different strengths and weaknesses. And no matter who you hire, they're going to have some weaknesses. I don't care what their experiences, you got to fill in those weaknesses. So you got to be involved.

The CEO, by the way, one of their CEO's jobs is to be the keeper of the vision. And oftentimes, unfortunately, the vision, if you come from a financial background, your vision is numbers, right? And your vision is optimizing for efficiency. If that's what you're looking for, that's fine. But if you're optimizing for creativity and growth, you're going to have to probably have someone else. And you mentioned a key word here. So this is number 2 bullshit advice, and I'm keen to get What else do you have in terms of bullshit business advice? Micromanagement is bad. I used to think like when I— because you've never worked for somewhere, right? Like, at least—

Not really.

When I worked for companies like, oh yeah, you read all these books like, yeah, you know, micromanagement is horrible. We don't micromanage here, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Micromanagement is actually not a bad thing. It's not good or bad. It's just a tool. Like if it's a— if like, you know, your kids are responsible for the nuclear codes, you probably want to micromanage that, right? Right. It's like, it's too risky, right? So like micromanage is not bad, guys. It's just a tool. That's the second one.

Yeah, you already know I like micromanaging, but I pick and choose. And I'll give you an example with my CEO, Mike Gullickson. He and our CFO, Paul, report on financials and they'll talk about projections and what happens if you lose a client or gain a client. And when they talk about half the stuff and send me those emails, I ignore most of them. You don't pay attention. I don't pay attention. Why? Because they know the numbers like the back of their hand. And when they say in the email, It was a good month and we're ahead of forecast on X, Y, and Z. I just ignore the rest of the email.

You tune out the rest. But if it's bad, you're like, oh.

Yeah. So when it's bad, I mean, like, and I start diving into the numbers because they send the numbers and I look at division by division, country by country. I'm like, where was it bad? Why? They have their summary. And instead of reading their summary, I just skip to the data and I draw my own conclusions. Then I read their own summary and I try to see if there's any differences. The reason I skip their summary is because I want to— I don't want their summary to affect what I think is wrong or messed up. So I want to look at it with like a clean slate with no preconceived notions of why something went wrong. And then I'll look at their summary because sometimes I may see something that they don't, or they'll see something that I don't. And then I'll get in the weeds and I'll work with them. But, you know, I don't believe in micromanaging where someone's better than you. But I do believe in micromanaging where someone has a weakness and you can help them in that area.

Yeah. And so my take on it, this goes back to number one, hire an operator and get out of their way. So my new CEO was like, so like, you know, in a year or two, like you're going to, you know, not be as involved. I'm like, no, no, no, I'm going to be involved the whole time. And like, I think she was trying to get to like, oh, like I'm going to like let go. I'm like, look, if I see anything that's like broken or it's big, I'm going to jump in and you're going to gain a lot of leverage from that. I just want you to know that I'm not backing out at all, right? I've tried that like 4 or 5 times.

Doesn't work.

Yeah. Last one here. We've talked about this kind of, but bullshit business advice again, like, oh, if you're burnt out, you need a vacation. But we talked about this. If you're burnt out, usually that means you don't have momentum. Something's not working in your company.

Yes.

So you come back from vacation, that shit's still going to be there. Yeah.

And then you're going to be like, oh, the vacation was so great. And then, oh, come back and now you're feeling it all over again. For people like Eric and I, and we're not saying this is wrong or right, if something's going wrong and we go on a vacation, all we're thinking about is what's going wrong and how to fix it. So we don't really enjoy a vacation. And I remember my wife told me, you know, the first time we were in Hawaii, we had such a wonderful time. This is when we were dating. And then the second time we were in Hawaii, she's like, it wasn't as good. You weren't there mentally. And I'm like, yeah, because my business had a lot of fires that I had to put out. So I couldn't think about anything.

Yeah.

And I was like, the first time we were dating, I was having not just a good week or a month, but I was having a good year in business. So there really wasn't tons of fires to put out so I could focus on her and having fun in Hawaii. And I would still work each day, but the work was crammed down to maybe like 3, 4 hours in a day versus like 10 or 12.

Oh yeah, you weren't there at all.

So then the second time I was like, dude, I was working like 12 hours. And I was like, she's like, oh, I set this enough. I'm like, cool. So when's it going to be done? When do we have to leave? And then when I was there, I was on my phone working all the time. And she's like, what's wrong? And I'm like, oh, business isn't performing well. Don't want to bore you with the details. I got to fix problems.

Yep. Look, do you have any other bullshit business advice that comes to mind? Those are just 3 off the top of my head.

The riches are in the niches. I've heard that advice too many times. I've never seen anyone get wealthy off of a niche.

Yeah, maybe you start in one.

Start and then you can expand. But some people just get into too many like small niches. Like someone tried selling me a business one time and they got pissed off that I didn't buy it. It was on best man speeches. And I'm like, too much of a niche. I don't know how you expand that out into a non-niche. You know, bride and Maid, I don't know what it's called on the other side.

And by the way, there's nothing wrong with it. If you don't want to scale it, it's okay. But if you want to scale it, the total addressable market matters.

Yes. And with some niches, people believe like, oh, I'll start with a niche and then yeah, I'll scale it out to be not in a niche. But some things like a best man speech, that's too hard to get out of a niche. Even if you do the bridesmaids version, what are you going to do next? So bar mitzvah speeches. You know, like, uh, funeral speeches, funeral speeches. You can start picking them, but they're all niches and they're too small. When you add it all up, it still doesn't make enough money.

Yep. And the demand's not quite there for those either.

No, it's not.

Yeah, that's funny. All right, so that's it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.