Should You Only Talk To Your Direct Reports?

All right, so Neil and I were just talking and the question is, should you be, as a founder of a company or leader of a company, should you be talking to anybody you want in the organization?

Even if they're not a direct report?

Correct.

Or as you scale up, should you just deal with your direct reports and should you just deal with your direct reports and let them deal with everyone else underneath you?

Yeah.

And? I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer, but you know my personality at this point, 'cause we've known each other for more than 10 years easily. It has to be way more than 10.

15?

Yeah.

You know, I was just telling Noah yesterday before you go, like I was at a, we did an EO forum dinner yesterday. This is the group, I'm not an EO anymore, but Entrepreneurs Organization. And one guy in the group, I met him when he was 37, he's now 51.

Yeah.

I was like, damn, I was like 26. Like time goes quickly.

Time goes by quickly. And it's hard for me not to be involved in the areas, and I'm going to give that little disclaimer, in the areas I want to be involved in. You know me where if there's certain things like HR, I don't really deal with HR, never get involved in HR. And when you have a company at scale, there's always some HR issue. I'm not saying anything bad, but like, if you have 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 people, someone's going to complain about something.

Yeah.

It's just question one.

I'm not saying I don't want people to be happy.

It's just more so there's certain departments that I'll spend my energy on and certain departments that I won't. Not saying HR is not important.

You're just not good at it too.

I'm not good at it. It's not me. But things like finance, I get heavily involved in. Not everyone likes that. Things like dealing with leaders in different regions, I'll get involved with.

And when you say dealing, you mean working with them, managing. You don't mean like, you know, Not like problems, like them being a problem.

It's more so if I have questions, I'll just call people and I don't care to wait for a report or for something to be projected or whatever. And the same goes for if there's someone, it doesn't matter what level of company, they can be a new employee or they could be someone who's been at the organization for 8 years because we're 8 years old now, or we will be at the end of this year. I will get my hands dirty if I think I can fix something and it has some sort of impact on the business. I'm not talking about a small impact. I'm talking about what I think would be meaningful enough where it's worth my time. And I'm not saying my time's more valuable than other people's, but the way I operate my businesses, I think about what are our goals? It's obviously more growth. What percentage do we want to grow? Where's the biggest potential lever or impact or area I could go to or spend my time on to actually help achieve that. And I think when you hire operators, like we have a hired CEO, we have a hired management team, I think they're, at least for my organization, they're amazing and they do things a lot better than me for 98% of tasks related to the organization. But the 2% that I'm good at, or 5% that I'm good at, I like getting involved and spending my time and giving my feedback, whether people want it or not. And I don't care if they want it or not, but if I think my way is better, I will do it. And a great example of this in my organization, my CEO was actually right on this. So years ago, when we started expanding internationally, he's like, this is going to become a really expensive endeavor. And he said it would be cheaper to acquire. And the math on, we have X amount of leads, like a funnel, X amount of visitors, X amount of leads, average close rate, this is what it'll be.

Yeah.

It didn't always work out that way. We've improved it a lot over the years, but we did burn a tremendous amount of money. But when him and I talk, M&A probably would've been cheaper. But I think I still would've done it this route all over again. I would've acquired in certain countries where it's harder to start in because of cultural differences, but I still would've done it. And even when I talked to him, he agrees that our international expansion has really helped the organization and we were both on the same page on it. It was just more so he, you know, from his experience was like, if we just do M&A, it'll be much cheaper.

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Yeah.

And but to be clear, first you started NP Digital, you start from scratch in Brazil and you start from scratch in the US.

And then India.

You start from scratch in India too?

Uh-huh.

I didn't know that.

And then the UK and those regions, because I had people on the ground in Brazil, India, a lot of the people speak English and I have a big base of visitors from there because I'm also Indian, which helps quite a bit. The regions we started with, like the Australias, the Indias, the Canadas, these regions worked out really well because they're pretty much just English-speaking languages. We had a harder time for non-English speaking languages outside of Brazil, and they actually did work out. It just took longer than we expected to work out. Are you following me? So when you're projecting out expenses and burn, if you think it can work out in a year—

Should probably be conservative, 3 years.

And it, and, or we didn't think it was going to be a year, but let's say if we project 2 years, I'm making up the numbers and it takes 3 years, that's extra years worth of added expenses because things can go wrong in the business that you can't control, like lose losing a client and then you expand for them and you did these changes specifically for their growth and their requests, and then it starts burning money and you lose that client, like you're screwed, right? But yeah, all I'm getting at is, you know, the example I'm giving here is my co-founder Mike got involved in sales with our international expansion and it helped improve the numbers. But if I had to do it all over again, I would've done a mixture of what I wanted to do and what the CEO wanted to do. And if I really look back on it, I don't think the CEO told me this, but I don't think he was actually telling us to go and acquire in Australia, Canada, or US speaking.

Yeah. It's just, you interpret it in that way. You just interpreted what you wanted to do.

I interpreted it to whatever I wanted to do. And if I had to go back on it, He was right. We would've saved money and we would've been a bigger organization if we did it his way. So in this aspect, I would say my involvement cost us more money, but then there's been other aspects like with software or making marketing changes that have caused us to make more money. I don't win every single time, but I do like getting involved because it's my name on the door. I'm an entrepreneur. If I don't get involved in the stuff that I enjoy and I'm passionate about, What's the point of having a company?