CEO Says Running Company Is a Sh*t Sandwich Everyday

I was listening to the HubSpot CEO talk and he was just saying that running a company is like a shit sandwich every day. So I would almost say it's more than a shit sandwich because a shit, like you have the log in the middle and you have the 2 breads on the side. I would almost say the 2 logs are on the outside and the bread's in the middle, right? So it's a weird image to think about, but he was just saying that 90% of the time he's in a bad mood and people keep bringing you shit all the time. They keep dumping shit on you. And literally what you're doing is like you're the umbrella. And you're just trying— your umbrella is just like a shit deflector, okay? And so he's just like, dude, the whole time at HubSpot, I was paranoid. I've always felt like an imposter. And I'm like, yeah, running a company is a shit sandwich every day because everything eventually flows back up to you. Um, and here's the thing, like, Neil, I'll just bring it back to you for a second. All the stuff that you have to look at, if the numbers are off even a little bit, guess what happens, right? You start making phone calls and then you start to see, oh my God, it's not just a can of like worms, it's a whole bowl of worms, right?

Yes.

Um, and then you have to investigate more and more. You start to get more and more frustrated. And so do you agree with that? Like running a company is like a shit sandwich every day?

Yeah, because you're saying running a company. I would say, because I'm thinking about from an entrepreneur standpoint, like it's not actually that bad, but I actually don't run my company. So I don't experience a shit sandwich every single day.

There's problems that you always have to solve.

No, no, you're totally right. But would you agree that my situation is much better than someone who's a CEO?

Yes, yes, because the main shit that you have to deal with is people problems, and you don't deal with people problems.

Correct. I don't have to. I have to deal with executives, but we handpick really good executives. I don't really have too many problems. Now, my CEO and executive team really does deal with a lot of crappy problems each and every single day. But here's the kicker. They usually tell me about them after they're solved. They're like, oh, if you only know what we had to do 2 weeks ago. I'm like, what? This happened and this or this and this client and this employee and all this.

Yeah, you instantly shut up.

What are we going to do? They're like, oh, it's all solved. It's all good. I'm like, we lose revenue? They're like, no, we actually found an opportunity. We upsold and we made some more money here and we're above budget here. I'm like, okay, do I need to worry about anything? Nope. All good.

No, that's the dangerous question. They know if you ask that, they have to say yes. If you say no, that's when the problems come from you. Yeah, you know, I actually heard this quote recently too. It's, um, the price of doing great work is actually more work. And if you think about it, you know, people can hate on the most successful people in the world or whatever, but why are they all working right now? It's because Jensen doesn't need to work right now, has the most valuable company in the world. Um, Tim Cook doesn't need to work, you know. Uh, what is it, Satya Nadella doesn't need to work, Sundar doesn't need to work. But the price of doing great work is more work. I think you and I, we're not comparing ourselves to them. I'm just saying that As we continue to grow in our careers, there's always going to be more work to do and it's enjoyable. So you have to find, ideally you're finding something that you want to work on for the next 10, 20, 30 years or so.

I agree. When I look at life, it's about if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you're going to be screwed because you're not going to put in the time and effort. But speaking of some of these CEOs, You know, like if you look at the Google CEO Sundar, right? I not only think that he really loves what he's doing, but someone actually posed an interesting question to me today because Google is a massive ad giant, right? I think it's $116-ish billion or so in profit each year. And they're like, man, Larry Page is leaving California. Peter Thiel's leaving California. Did you see that? Because they don't want to pay the potential tax.

You know, one of our mutual friends saw Peter Thiel at a restaurant yesterday in Miami.

Exactly. He's already gone. Why? Because he doesn't want to potentially pay the 5% in wealth tax. But I think he'll move back if it doesn't exist, right?

Yeah, probably.

A lot of these guys already have houses in multiple places. And when you're looking at some of them, one of my buddies has asked me like, dude, what do you think Sundar is going to do? Because he's a billionaire now. And I'm like, well, Sundar made his money for managing Google and he made a crapload of it. So he'll have no choice but to pay the 5%. And that's His problem, and the executives probably look at it or the board looks at it, is you should be grateful that you're the CEO of Google and we made you rich with stock and you also made us rich. But our employees are here, so you're just going to have to deal with it. Because when you look at California as a state, it's amazing talent, especially for marketing. People forget, like, you know, a lot of these billionaires will say, we're moving out of California. Tesla is a great example. Did you know Tesla employs more people in California now than Before Elon actually moved out.

Yeah, you mentioned this.

Yeah, so it's just like, you can end up saying that, but if Facebook, if Mark Zuckerberg, if Google and Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to move out, if, um, James, uh, uh, uh, I always mess up his first name, uh, Nvidia CEO, you know what I'm talking about.

Jensen Huang.

Jensen, there you go. Uh, if you want to move out, the Netflix founders and all this, and they're like, we're moving out. Oracle, he already moved out. You can't just take your employee base with you. You know how hard it is to get the talent pool that there is in California. We have a great education system, great universities, great job pool. You can't just go and replace all those people in the middle of nowhere and expect to get amazing talent. I moved back from Nevada to California paying more taxes because I wanted my kids to have amazing education, and California has one of the best education systems. My kids go to a school that is probably, if not the number one, top 3 schools for elementary going all the way up to high school for education for children. It was extremely hard to get into. They don't care if you have money or whatnot, but you get a lot of that kind of stuff in California. Even Boston, Massachusetts has a tax for rich people. Dharmesh, Brian Halligan, all those people have to end up paying it. Where are you going to find a ton of people? You can't just pick up and leave and take all your employees with you. It doesn't work that way.

Yeah. To Neil's point, I mean, at the end of the day, look, if you're Peter Thiel or if you're like a David Sacks or if you're any of these people, you already have multiple homes and you can just keep domiciling in different areas. But a lot of these people aren't necessarily— like a Peter Thiel is not operating his business right now. David Sacks works for the government. He can kind of move around, right? But to Neil's point, if you're operating and if you're Sundar and you've worked and you work for Google, you're basically like, sure, you get paid a lot, You can kind of do whatever you— what you want right now, but you are an employee basically. Um, you kind of have to stay there and run the ship.

Yep. Yeah, you have to run it. And you know what, these people make a lot of money and they make the founders a lot of money. It is what it is. Founders can easily pick up and leave. The rest of the company cannot easily pick up and leave. All those offices, people have homes, kids, friends, like not a simple thing. Yep.

By the way, I mean, we can close off on this one and then I, I don't— I want to talk about the Nick Shirley thing. Do you know what I'm talking about? Nick Shirley?

Uh, no, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Okay, I'm gonna show you in a second. You might have seen this. If not, you should watch this with your, your family tonight. This would be entertaining. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. So, um, We've talked about the best investment we've made is in people, right? But the 2 best investments you can make, what do you think they are, Neil?

The 2 best investments, are you talking about business-wise or personal or?

Both actually. The best investment you can make personally and the best investment you can make business-wise.

Personally, picking the right spouse and getting married. I think that can end up really changing your life in a positive way. Business, probably the same. Pick amazing co-founder. I think it's really hard to do it on your own. Having an amazing co-founder that can do— is great at the things that you suck at, and, um, is really, you know, worth its weight in gold.

Yeah. So here's what I would say. So I don't know if you can see my statues behind me, the Warren Buffett one, but Warren Buffett has always said that the greatest investment you can ever make is in yourself. And so It's investing in learning. And then through the learning, you eventually learn how to do things. And through the doing things, you eventually gain experience and you figure out what you want to specialize in. And through that, you gain the competence and you're able to eventually attract the spouse of your dreams. Okay. That's at least, you know, on the man side of things. So the best investment you can make is in yourself. That's number one. Number 2, from a business standpoint, the best investment you can make is in people. And to Neil's point, Neil's actually talking about 2 spouses, right? Your co-founder is technically your spouse because you're talking to them all the time. You're complaining all the time to them, right? And they know what your other problems are. Um, I will say yes, I, I agree with that, but all of it comes down to— it is finding the right co-founder, that's, that is recruiting, and then recruiting the team underneath, that is recruiting, right? So it is your team at the end of the day. So my, my 2 best investments you could ever make is one, yourself, and 2 is your team.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. It's, you know, if you invest in yourself and you double down on it, I think that's a huge investment. Um, People underestimate it. You know, like I was sitting with some people earlier today and they're telling me how they're making 10% returns on this money doing some margin stuff with Meta and Tesla stock. And there's like, dude, there's almost no risk. And I'm like, I don't believe that. You know, I'm like—

When they say that, there's always a risk.

There's always risk. There's no such thing, especially when you're doing stuff on margin with borrowed money and all that kind of stuff and leverage. I actually think that would be even more risk. But the point I'm getting at is it's like some of these people, they talk about the returns they're making and I'm like, man, if they just put this money in themselves, they would make double, triple their money. And one of them opened up a restaurant and is doing really well. And whatever he put into the restaurant, he'll probably make back double that every single year. In profit. Okay? So you're pretty much doubling your money the first year. The second year you're getting double again, but you've already returned your capital to year one. I'm like, these are way better returns. Why not just keep investing in yourself? And people tend to not like that kind of stuff because like, oh, it's not easy. And I'm like, it's actually less risky than putting your money with someone else who's promising you 10% using leverage. And I also think that if you keep improving yourself and getting better, instead of making double your money each year, you may end up getting to triple or even more than that because you'll figure out how to be better and continually just level up. But very few people want to keep investing in themselves because they look at it as hard. And this is the way, the reason I think you and I have done decently well as marketers is because we've continually invested in ourselves for 10, 15 years. Now, nor Eric or I think we're the best marketers. We always think we can get better and continually improve. But what's allowed us to do well is we continually invested in our own craft for 10, 15, for me it's been 24 years. I don't know how many years you're in, but you have to be over 10.

Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day. So how many years would you say you've been lightning focused, or not lightning, but laser focused? Um, NP Digital, would you say you've been focused, laser focused, 8 years since you guys have been in?

I would say, yeah, probably been laser-focused for 8 years straight.

How long have you been laser-focused for? Last, what, 10 years?

No, 8 years only.

8 years, okay. So I was thinking about this the other day. I was like, okay, how many years with Single Grain have I actually been laser-focused? Okay, whereas I was— because there's many years where I would go off on a tour and do something else, right? I would get the entrepreneurial ADD. And by the way, almost all of you listening to this, if you're in your 20s or even a teenager right now as an entrepreneur, you're going to have that ADD. You're going to have to learn how to conquer that. Both Neil and I had to learn how to conquer that over time. And I would say for me, single grain, I was maybe, okay, I've only been focused on single grain, laser focused for maybe 5 years total in aggregate. I had a spurt in the middle. And then in these last few years, I've been laser focused. And so my point of saying this is I think year 10, when you look at Neil, what he's built in 10 years for NP Digital, Yeah. It's going to be very, very— it's already impressive, right? But it's going to be even more impressive, more impressive than he would've ever dreamed of since he first started the thing. And I'll tell you, you give me— you look at the next 5 years or so, like, my hypothesis is if you can give 10 years of laser focus to one business, you're going to build something amazing. That's my bet.

I agree with that. But most people don't want to put in the time.

Everybody wants to get rich. Nobody wants to get rich slowly.

No, no one wants to get rich slowly. Seriously. But I do think that's the key to success. It's not going to happen overnight. And Warren Buffett always breaks this down. He's like, the key to getting rich is just slowly over time and it just compounds. And people forget that. And a great example of compounding, like people believe that when you— law of large numbers, it's harder to grow. But yet the Googles of the world, the Microsofts of the world, the Nvidias have continually grown and compound. It is hard, but it doesn't mean it's impossible. You can still grow at 20%, 30%, 40%, even at large numbers.

Dude, speaking of large numbers, so you know Costco, right? So Costco, they founded it, they were founded in 1970. How much revenue do you think they do per year right now?

Costco?

Yeah.

Per year, maybe $200 billion?

Close. $230 billion. Okay. And about $7.5 billion of that is operating profit. Okay. So their margins are like, just call it like 11% or something like that. But my point of bringing up Costco Is they started in 1970. And then if you smooth it out over a long period of time up to now, it's been 10%, 10% return over time. Sure, they exploded in the beginning, but after that, it's just been 10%, right? It's because they have a very good business model. And then they're very focused on customers and their membership model. I think it's 96% retention on that. And then whoever spends on their memberships, if you're like executive level or higher, you end up spending a lot more. So all that to say is that, um, it takes a very long time to build something generational, which actually brings me to my next topic here. So Neil, you haven't seen this yet. Have you seen this guy over here, Nick Shirley?

Oh yes, I have seen him. He's the one who did all the Somalia, uh, like, uh, I think he found like over $100 million of— $100 billion, I think.

$110 billion. Oh, sorry, $110 million in one day. Yeah. So here's the deal. This guy looks like he's probably, I don't know, mid-20s, late 20s or so. But this video on X has 94 million views. You have like J.D. Vance, you have a lot of these politicians, a lot of powerful entrepreneurs are saying this is the type of journalism, citizen journalism that we need because you don't see any of the other large media companies covering this.

Right.

And so this actually gives the opportunity to a lot of kids right now. I don't care which side you're on, to actually take up your phone or take up your microphone and go do the type of journalism that he's doing. Because on this video alone on X, you have a lot of smart people seeing this. I guarantee you next week, Neil, maybe the week after, a lot of people are going to be talking about this, right? Because you look at the— when I was talking to my relative who works for the government, he's like, dude, the fraud that we see right now, the billions that we spent on homelessness, it's going nowhere. It's going to all these NGOs and things like that. This is just— this guy, this older dude in this video over here, he's just like, this is ground zero. He feels like Minnesota is ground zero. And this is not a political podcast, but I'm just saying, if you can take your crew out there and then bring awareness to these things that media companies aren't willing to cover, I think you're going to be able to do well for yourself. And if you do it for a long time, I think you're going to be able to build something very significant.

But here's the kicker with him. So he reported on this, it's all over. You're seeing a lot of wealthy, powerful people like the Bill Ackmans of the world retweeting this and pushing it out there, Elon, et cetera. You're not seeing any of the news outlets covering it though, still today, even after he uncovered a lot of this, they don't want to cover it.

It is like the holidays and Sunday.

No, but okay, you're telling me people at New York Times, you know, uh, Fox, ABC, etc., NBC, none of them want to have reporters going right now? They just don't want to cover?

Yeah, I mean, I would hope something starts to happen tomorrow when it's Monday, but I mean, you look at this stuff, like, you've seen this? The Leering Center. Quality Leering Center. It's not even Learning Center.

But he hasn't been here. This has been out for more than a day.

Yeah, it's been out for 2 days.

Yeah, it should have already been covered.

Yeah. So my point is, this is, you agree though, this is real news that should be covered by the outlets, right?

Yeah.

I think more and more people need to do this type of stuff because otherwise many people are just not going to know what the truth is.

No, most people will not know the truth.

So you've actually seen this video then?

I've seen a lot of the videos that he's put out. Yes.

Yeah. Anyway, I'll just leave it at that. I think it's—

Because on X, they've broken them into short clips, or at least a lot of people have, and I've watched a few of them. He may have like one long version that's an hour or something. Yeah, it's, it's only, it's only 42 So, I watched it on 1.5x yesterday.

It is fascinating. Basically, he's walking around and all these learning centers, these childcare centers, right? They're all black. The windows are all blacked out and nobody's really working there. The doors are locked the whole time. And then when they try to talk to the people, they're just like, hey, can I check my son Joey? And they're like, no, you can't do that. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's like the weirdest thing.

Did you see one of them? They couldn't even spell learning right.

Yeah, I just showed it to you. Leering Center. Quality Leering Center. And then he talked to one of the guys on the street. He's like, dude, the one of the guys on the street is like, dude, I've been here since 2017. I haven't seen any kids go into that thing, right? And so they have these transportation businesses or they have these child learning things and there's just all this front. And you and I have talked about people that are, you know, making use of other government services and building 9-figure businesses that way, right? And I think a lot of this stuff is going to come to roost next year. And I think this is just the very beginning. So I'm just saying that, look, if you're listening to this right now, and I think there's a good— citizen journalism is on the rise and, uh, Now's a good time to kind of, you know, take up, uh, take up your, your microphone and your camera.

My favorite is how people get the government contracts and not everyone performs. And when I say not everyone performs, some people get government contracts, get paid an arm and a leg, and they just couldn't deliver, period. Like they couldn't deliver at all. If someone paid you or me and we couldn't deliver, what would happen to us?

Oh, we get, we get chewed out and fired.

And? We'd probably get sued and people try to recuperate all their money.

Yes.

Agree with this, right? How the heck are people just able to get money from the US government, not deliver, and, uh, they don't have to return money?

Yeah, that's why the IRS has its handful— has its hands full right now with all this fraud. And one more thing I'll add for this. So each of these learning centers, um, is getting like $1 million to $3 million to $5 million a year, okay? And they're not verifying. Nobody's coming in to check to see, hey, do you actually have kids there? Are you actually doing what you said you would do, right? I saw someone respond in a tweet yesterday. There's this gal in Florida and she had a child learning center and they're like, dude, in Florida they would check us at least every month, if not every other month, to see if we were doing what we said we would do, right? And so this is negligence that we're seeing. And I just hope more of this stuff— I don't care which side you're on. I think this stuff needs to be brought to the front and then we can make our decisions as humans. And I think the fact that this got a lot of reach and exposure is a good example of, I don't know, call it newsjacking. Yeah.

Yeah, but the biggest thing that people should take away if you're listening to this podcast right now, people believe that if you have a tiny budget, it's impossible for you to get the traction because you can't run ads, you can't get the Foxes, the NBCs, the CNNs, BBCs, etc., whatever they may be, New York Times covering you. But look at this guy who's able to post something on social media. I don't know if he had followers or whatnot. I never heard of him before this. And now everyone is talking about him because he shared some content. And what Eric's talking about is how can your business be relatable to something that's trending or news related and you can trend jack and ride that wave and it's a good way for you to get eyeballs. But the key here is it has to be related because if it's not related to what you do, you're going to get the eyeballs, but then those eyeballs will never convert into revenue.

All right guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.