Q1 Reflections and Updates - David Politis - Episode #42

Welcome to Not Another CEO Podcast. I'm your host, David Politis. Every week we talk to inspiring leaders and get the true stories, the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and come away with actionable advice for our own journeys.

Hello everyone. I don't have a guest with me today, it'll just be me and you. I wanted to dedicate this episode to sharing some really important news, some reflections on how the podcast has been going and goals for the coming months. So first of all, and maybe the biggest news from the last couple months is that we launched the Not Another CEO substack. You can check it out and subscribe atnot another CEO.substack.com and we already have 2,000 subscribers, which is kind of unbelievable, at least for me.

And the goal for this substack is to have a place where we can publish and share not just the podcast, but written articles as well. So going forward, if you subscribe, what you'll see is every Tuesday at 8:00am Eastern time we publish the newest episode of the podcast. And every Thursday at 8:00am Eastern time we publish an article. And the articles are how to guides, best practices, deep dives on specific topics that we think and hope that our founders, CEOs, leaders, aspiring entrepreneurs, all the people who are engaging with this content, that you are going to find it useful. These are things that should really help in operating your teams on a day to day basis, operating the business and like everything that we do. And I hope you see this in these articles and the podcasts. There's no fluff, right? This is stuff that like actionable insights and lessons that you can put to work immediately. And ultimately, and this is our mission is to bend the curve for CEOs and so I hope that you find that that's what it does. And really there's some amazing articles already there. We have one on how to define your icp, your ideal customer profile. We have one about how to put together a customer advisory board. We Even started getting CEOs other CEOs to contribute content to the substack. And so we've got a five part series right now running from Tom Biochi, who's the former CEO of Service Channel. And the entire conversation he was a CEO of a company before Service Channel. That company sold for a dollar. He then sold Service Channel for 1.2 billion. And so he actually is enumerating all the things that he did differently between the first company and the second company that led to such massive like difference in the outcomes. So if you're not subscribed Please, please go and subscribe. And please, as always, let us know what you think about the content. So, second major update, and you probably heard me and noticed me saying us, we, things like that. I have now partnered with someone on Not Another CEO podcast. So. And actually not another CEO more broadly. So I'm partnered with Nick Froind. We made the announcement about six, seven weeks ago, and Nick and I worked together at Better Cloud for many years and we were very good friends. And he actually left Better Cloud to start his own company called Workstream. Now, that company, they raised a bunch of money and they built product, they had customers, all of that. But after about four to five years, they actually, Nick shut down that company and he made a pretty big decision that I don't see a lot of people making, which is that he needed to share that experience with others. And so he created a substack called Failing Forward and was writing articles. And that was when him and I started to talk to each other about how can we maybe do this together. And so we decided that Not Another CEO was the platform to make this knowledge accessible to the next generation of founders and CEOs. So, honestly, if you follow and if you've been seeing on LinkedIn and all that, like, partnering with Nick has truly accelerated a lot of the things that I had started to do. And we're starting to talk about making some actually pretty sizable investments in time, energy, money in the coming months to take this entire thing to the next level. So we're working on the details that we will share hopefully pretty soon, but we're super excited about that. And then one of the other things you're gonna notice, since this partnership is you will notice that we will start to have episodes coming out of Not Another CEO Failing Forward Edition. And so these are actually going to be hosted by Nick, and he'll be interviewing founders who have failed and are willing to share their stories. So you're going to see that in articles, you're going to see that in on the podcast. So, really excited to have Nick working with me on this and a lot of really exciting things to come there. Lastly, I wanted to talk about something that I'm going to try to start doing once a quarter. I actually did a reflection episode back in December, kind of towards the end of December, on the holidays, and it was about me sharing some of the goals that I had for the first quarter of this year. And it was just a way for me to reflect and share what I was thinking about. But actually what I found is that by sharing the goals and putting them out publicly, it, it made me more accountable to those goals and made me refer back to them and make sure that I actually achieve them. And so I'm going to try to do this once a quarter where I look back at the previous quarter, talk about the goals that we had and then talk about, you know, how we did against those and ultimately where are we taking this going forward and what are our goals going forward. So let me, let me do that for, for what we said in Q4 and what we have achieved in Q1. So in, in December, I said that in Q1, one of the big goals for me was to continue to recruit a more diverse set of CEOs for the podcast. And I did a lot of work on this in January. A lot. I, I don't even know how many CEOs I reached out to, and I have. Now, they're not all published yet, but I've recorded episodes with multiple nonprofit CEOs, the CEO of a makeup company, two CEOs of fashion brands. You've already. We have our first failing forward addition coming into the podcast, and I have a number of other CEOs that are in different spaces, different, different locations. So I feel like, like I achieved this in Q1. There's, there's a lot of work because, you know, you got to constantly be, be looking for, for the next set of guests and, and finding interesting people and, and coordinating with people's busy schedule. So it's not the easiest thing to do. But I really, I've really enjoyed this. I, I've enjoyed having this diversity because I'm learning a lot about businesses. I literally knew nothing about and know nothing about now. Now I'm starting to learn. So, so that's the first one. I think we can say that we checked that one off, at least for Q1. The second goal was to do a much better job of sharing the knowledge that we're capturing in the interviews in the podcast episodes. I mean, each episode is 60 minutes. I know it's long. I know that people are busy. It may be hard to listen to the whole thing, or you listen to 2x speed, and there's so much gold. There truly is so much gold. I mean, there's stuff in there that I'm going to the companies that I work with, all the CEOs that I advise, and I'm bringing them this content. I know that it's there, but it's hard to kind of have it come out just in the podcast. So, of course, the Substack that I mentioned before is a huge deal for this one and more specifically the articles, because every article that we write, we try to pull out clips from the episodes that are relevant to that article topic and so you can actually consume it much easier. It's a two minute click or a three minute clip. So really excited about that. I think again, not finished. There's more work to be done. But I do think we've changed the way of distributing this knowledge where it's not just the episode. We're reusing that in a number of different ways. And then I said I wanted to find channels to reach people who would benefit from the podcast that are not just on LinkedIn. And so, I mean, I think I could get better at LinkedIn, honestly. There's a whole science now to how to make sure that your content gets out there and gets seen, but we need other platforms. And so substack again was a big thing here. I've done more public speaking recently at a couple of events that helps get the story out there and gets the content out there. This one, I would say. I'm not sure we executed this so well in Q1, but we made progress. This is one that's going to stay on the list. So now let me share with you some of the goals that I have for Q2. So first of all, I want to do more in person recordings. I recorded in person episode and it was amazing. It was like the experience of speaking to people face to face, especially with the kinds of conversations we're having. It's game changing to do that in person and I. And I want to do more of it. It is expensive to do to rent the podcast studio.

It's hard to coordinate because.

It'S more time that's required for me and the guest. But I really want to do it. I have a studio that I'm now starting to use in New York and I'm trying to get at least a couple of the New York guests to meet me there and to do it in person. So we're going to be doing more of that. We also really want to build community with our subscribers, especially on Substack. I think the part of the reason we did substack is because you can control that, the, the communication with the audience much better than you can on any of the other platforms like LinkedIn or Spotify or Apple or whatever it is. And so we're. I want to do more there. I, I give the advice to all of the founders I work with. That's like get in front of your customers, talk to them, understand them. And of course, I innately understand the audience because I, I was the audience. Nick understands the audience. But I really want to spend time engaging with that audience and understanding what kind of content would be useful, what kind of maybe events would be useful, you know, what workshops like, how can we help bend the curve for this audience? And then.

We have a number of ideas of how to continue to advance the, the way that we surface, the lessons learned and the insights and the tactics and the strategies that we're collecting through all these different sources. Like, we, we know there are other ways and there are better ways. And I just, I want to put the content in the hands of the audience when they need it, when they want it. And so we're playing with some things just from everything from the calendar in terms of when we publish what, all the way down to the tools that we use to publish it or surface it. So a lot more to come there. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for supporting us on this journey. This is a big deal that we've put in so much time into. Everything that is Not Another CEO. And.

When you send the text messages, the emails, you call and you say, hey, this piece of content, this article, this episode resonated or I used it, someone texted me and said, I printed out the entire ICP article, gave it to my exec team. When you send those kinds of notes, it means a lot because we never know how it's being used in the real world. We don't know how useful it is. We think it's useful, but getting that validation means so much. So I appreciate for all the people who are doing that, if you have any ideas of guests we should have on or, you know, you have ideas of how we can get in front of more people, anything you can reach out to us on LinkedIn, you can email me davidolidesprojects.com and.

Again, I just want to say thank you. We've got a lot planned for Not Another CEO. We're gonna, I hope you see and feel the momentum and the changes coming, you know, in the coming weeks and months. And I'll be back here to talk to you again in another three months about how Q2 went and our goals for Q3. So thank you again and you'll be hearing from me soon. Next week, next episode. Thank you.

That's a wrap for this week's episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. Thanks for joining. For show notes and more, please Visit not another CEOPodcast.com. we'll see you next week.