051: How to Replace Yourself as CEO with Michael Bungay Stanier

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

All right, I'm excited to jump in and don't be nice, Jenny. Be curious. Like let's, let's get to the edges of this conversation.

I agree. Listeners, welcome back to Free Time. I am here with one of my longest time friendors, mentors, Michael Bungay Stanier, affectionately called mbs. And no, not that one from Saudi Arabia.

I don't even think I need to introduce him to all of you. I'm sure you're a longtime fan of his work as well, particularly his book the Coaching Habit, which is the bestselling coaching book of this century, ticking its way toward a million copies sold.

Over a million now.

Over a million.

Oh yeah.

Oh my goodness.

I know, it's amazing.

See, we'll have to talk about that at some point as your long term sales machine. I didn't tell MBS this prior to hitting record, but you had a fantastic interview with Chandler Bolt on self publishing school. So listeners, we'll point you to that in the show notes. Michael, officially, welcome to the show.

Officially. I'm glad to be here, Jenny.

You and I were accountability buddies for writing our book. We started sending each other a check mark in Marco Polo every day if we did our hundred words. And now here we are, your book is coming out. It's called how to begin and it's so exciting. We did it.

Well, we're both exciting. I mean we're now just, we're both exhausted for different reasons. Cause it's exhausting writing a book. And then you get the book writing and you're like, I cannot be more tired than I currently am. And then you Go, wait, I've got to launch this and market it. You're like, oh, it's a whole nother level of exhaustion.

I know. It's a layer cake of exhaustion.

Yeah. But it's. I mean, we've both seen each other's books and we've held them up, and it's pretty cool to realize the power of calling in help and support with each other, to help you get each other across the line. Because you helped me and I helped you. So it was wonderful.

Yeah, I agree. I'm so grateful for that. You are featured in Free Time in the introduction in a section called Escape Velocity, and I talk about you. In fact, one editor suggested cutting that and I said, absolutely not. Because to me, the notion of escape velocity is that you, that any business owner can get their business to a point where they're free, they can escape. They could be there or not. They can be as involved as they want or as little. And you did this with Box of Crayons. It's a company you built over nearly 20 years. And so what I want to dive into today is a parallel story that you tell in how to begin. One of your thrilling, important, daunting goals is to stop being the CEO of Box of Crayons. And I just want to dive in together. How do we do this? Because that is definitely a daunting goal. And not everybody listening might have that goal on their radar, but I think working toward it is. Is freeing. And you've done it. You've achieved Escape Velocity, my friend.

I have, and I feel pretty proud of that because.

Most founder transitions when the person who starts the company goes, I'd like to hand this over to somebody else to run. They fail because founders are complicated, confusing people who have put themselves into the companies that they've started. And what happens is the thing that you build becomes something that one part of you wants to step away from and move on to something else or just be free of the day to day work of it. But there's still part of you always kind of wrapped around and entangled in that thing that you've built and created and you care and you've nurtured for. And so mostly these transitions don't work that well. So I worked really hard with Shannon, who's the CEO at Box of Crayons, to try and do a transition that gives both her and me and the company the best chance of success.

The first experience I had of Shannon was on your new podcast, Two Pages. Yeah, she is so bright. I'm going to link to that in the show notes, you met her, she was working in a restaurant.

She was.

So how on earth did you make the connection that she could come over to Box of Crayons and what role did she start in?

Yeah, so my wife and I's favorite restaurant is up the road from where we live in Toronto. It's called Dafina Pizza. If people are ever in town, it's on Roncesvales and you should definitely go there. They do great pizza. And we always sit at the bar because we like the people who work there. And Dom's a wonderful barkeeper. And Shannon was working there as well. So we're at the bar and we're chatting away with her. And it turns out that as well as working behind the bar, she's also doing a PhD in literature. And I'm like, that's cool, because I've got a master's degree in literature and Marcella, my wife, has a PhD in literature. So we're like, good a book geek. So we start talking about books and we kind of. There's a connection. Now, Shannon is a hustler, really an entrepreneur. So she was also working at an independent publisher here in Toronto. And the publisher won a big prize, but the company was so badly run that they had to lay her off so they could afford to print the additional copies of the books. So I went, look, I'm going to this new book coming out. This is the coaching habit. I need some help with the marketing of it. Just kind of the reaching out and the knocking on doors. Do you want to come and just do some work with me for a few hours a week to help with that? She was like, sure, I'll try that out. And it just turns out that Shannon really is brilliant. She's got a strategic mind, she's got an amazing work ethic, she's got core values that are deeply aligned to the values that I hold as well. So over four years, she went from being a kind of part time marketer to basically building a sales team and building a sales culture to then us going, what if you were the CEO? Now part of what's interesting about that is Shannon goes, this is my first ever job and I've never been a CEO before. I've really never worked in business before. How do I do that? What does that even look like? And then of course, there's my side of the equation, which is like, who am I trying to be and who will I be if I don't have box of crayons? So we've got an interesting mesh of swirling doubts and insecurities, but a sense that this could be something brilliant in this combination.

Wasn't there also a part of you going, can anyone replace me? You know, it's my brain. It's my baby. I know what I'm doing. Even as amazing as Shannon is, I wonder if there was a part of you that just questioned, how could anyone possibly do as good a job as me, you know?

Well, there's a. There's a nuance to that. So one of the things that I was pretty clear on is that I just wasn't that good a CEO like I was. Okay, okay, tell us.

I want details. Really? How did you know that or what made you feel that way?

I just didn't care enough about any of the details.

And I also. The ambition I had for Box of Crayons was more a kind of vision LED ambition, which is like, I want to touch a certain number of people. I want it to have a certain amount of status. But it wasn't really driven by things like, well, how's the money working? And how's the processes working? And I'm not particularly driven by financial success either. So I didn't have a. I need to keep growing this company so I can be a gazillionaire, or whatever. So I just recognized that I was. This is true about me as a salesperson as well. I got by on a certain amount of chutzpah and a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of kind of just blagging my way through it. But I really. If I didn't stop being CEO, this company would stall at about. It was like about a three or four million dollars company in revenue, and it would. It was amazing that it got to that amount of money, but it would stall beyond that because I just didn't have the structure or the discipline to really build the systems that were required for the company to move to the next level.

I can really. You and I remember talking about me bumping into similar things with Pivot, where I built it, with your help, learned more about licensing ip, and that's something you've done very successfully with Box of Crayons is licensing to all kinds of organizations. And it's true, you reach a point where the creative building is done, and now it's about sales and growth. That's really, truly the next stage. And I'm still stalled to have it in neutral, haven't done anything with it. And I can understand what you're saying that the details of that and the skill set of that. It just wasn't in your zone of genius, like what you love.

That's right. But there is part of me to answer that question which is like there's part of me going, yeah, but obviously I am irreplaceable because I'm amazing and my spirit animates the whole of this company. But a couple of things that helped. The first is that from the very start I had decided to try and build around a brand box of crayons rather than brand Michael Bungay Stanier. So I had decentered myself from being the hero.

Of the brand and of the company a little bit. I mean, just because I was the writer and the speaker, I still was the face of the company, but I hadn't built a company around my presence.

And I watched you even pull aspects of that out over five to 10 years.

And you even told me something. For listeners, I think a fun fact they'll like to hear is Michael's rates were often double. Whatever the workshop would cost with one of his facilitators would be double if you wanted to hire him. So he was always disincentivizing someone to bring him in unless they really just had to have him there.

Yeah, I tried to make me unaffordable by almost everybody because I wanted them to go, oh, we kind of want you, but not at that rate. I mean, you're not that good. So we'll hire somebody who is good enough. And the people who the other facilitators were always more than good enough. They were great at what they did and delivered.

So. And actually this is something that Shannon and I talk quite a lot about, which is like, how do we demichael the process? Because there were parts where I was particularly strong, pretty good at designing stuff. I had a little bit of flair around some sort of marketing stuff. And.

Trying to, as Shannon would put it, replace the Michael sized hole in the company was kind of like a two year process for her as a CEO to figure that out.

You told me something that you heard that your biggest strengths as a business owner or the things that you love the most are your business's weaknesses. That's probably where the systems and process are the least built out. And that has stuck with me ever since.

Right. Because you go, ah, look.

For me, I'm like, I'm so delighted not to do sales because I'm not that good at sales and I'm not that interested in it. So there's no chance of me meddling in the Sales process, because I can't be bothered. But as an example with marketing, Marketing, I'm like, oh, I've got opinions around the look and the feel of the brand and some of the words that we use and some of the style and the flair that I hope would be there. So I've always got a finger in the pie there. Which means that this is kind of counterintuitive that for the areas that you're strongest in as a founder or as a CEO, you have to really hire somebody who is significantly better than you.

Where you hire somebody and you go, ah, okay, that's what really, really good looks like. Yeah, okay, I will back away now because I can't compete with that. So it's that classic thing around, you hire an A player for those places and the temptation is to hire a B player, and then you can pretend that you're an A player and you kind of meddle and that it becomes a vulnerability to the company rather than a streng.

I can share another example of this just to give listeners something to wrap their mind around that occurred to me from this advice you gave me, which is that I used to talk to all prospective speaking clients myself. I thought, this is the biggest ticket thing I sell other than licensing, and it's important they want me to come speak. I need to get to know them, not put on charm, but, you know, like build rapport on these calls, land it, schedule it, et cetera. And because, because of that, the systems were so anemic when I brought on someone new to my team. Her name is Deborah. They were so anemic because it was all in my head. And I did eventually stop taking those calls. And there are a lot of benefits to that. And now people will thank Deborah. They'll say, you're such a great agent. And Deborah's like, agent, you know, I'm an executive project manager. She's like, never in her life has she been a speaking agent. But together it took us almost a year to get. Extract it from my head. And she is great at it. She's responsive to email, which I'm not. She's really warm. She's good with the logistics. She's good with letting them know what they're going to receive. And then when I show up, I'm the actual subject matter expert and it's nice. I thought that was something I could never delegate, that they would only want me in order to decide if they wanted to book the event. And that has not proven to be true.

Yeah, I mean, this whole Thing about what you hold onto and what you step away from.

70% is always obvious what you're going to step away from and you're delighted. And it works on all sides of the equation. 10% of what you're holding onto is obvious as well. It's like your genius work. Only Jenny Blake can give this actual talk. But it's that 20% thing in the middle, which is like, I should give this up, but I can't quite give it up. And that's where it can get messy. So for the transition with the CEO, with Shannon, one of the most critical things we did is we were very explicit about where decision making rights lay between the two of us. And we took a model from a book by Susan Scott called Fierce Conversations. Or maybe it's just called Fierce and it's a tree metaphor. So imagine four parts to a tree. The roots, the trunk, the branches and the twigs. And each four of those parts represent a type of decision that needs to be made. So we'll work from the top down. So twig decisions are just the miscellaneous stuff of every day. And I will never know what the twig decisions are like. I just never even hear about them. It's just the day to day stuff. The truth is, Shannon probably won't hear about most of the twig decisions that happen at Box of Crayons. Then there's the branch decisions, and those are the more kind of significant kind of strategic decisions that drive the company. I'm probably going to find out about those in the quarterly board report that Shannon gives me, or maybe in part of her weekly newsletter that she sends to the company and me as well. But it's never going to be something that's part of a conversation between Shannon and me. The trunk decisions, kind of the really big ones that Shannon will likely talk to me about before she makes a decision. But they're her decisions to make. And then the final decisions are the root decisions, which are the decisions that I can make. And part of our preparation and part of our ongoing discipline about managing this relationship is knowing what type of decisions fit where. And it will surprise people, I suspect, to hear that I only have two root decisions. That's it. I only got two decisions I'm allowed to make about a company that I own. One is to fire Shannon or not. So is she doing the job as the CEO? So that's one of my decisions, like am I happy with you and your role? And the second is do I sell the company or not? So it's my decision whether I sell it on to somebody else or whether I turn down an offer, should an offer come and that's it. That's the only two decisions I get. That means Shannon can reinvent the business model, reinvent the pricing model, redo the values, restructure the hiring, restructure the org chart. She can build this company however she wants.

I love this metaphor of the tree and these four types of decisions.

Right.

Was it hard for you to reach those two root level decisions? Did you get counsel from other business owners on that?

Yeah, we hired a coach for two years and Jill was not my coach and she wasn't Shannon's coach. She was our transition coach and she worked for a year leading up to it, to the moment where Shannon formally became CEO and a year following it so that she kind of managed the helping us avoid the traps, basically. Particularly me coming in and trying to stick my fingers in pies that aren't mine to stick fingers in.

Right. And I bet you have to bounce questions and decisions back to Shannon too and say this is on you now. Yeah, I'd love to dive into this because I think apprenticeships are so rare now in the business world. I mean, I guess mega companies usually have succession plans and talent mapping and things, but can you just as much detail as you want to get into around these two years, Year one, what were some of the biggest challenges? And then year two and then we'll circle back to the identity piece because I can imagine that's an ongoing challenge in year three and beyond.

We'll be right back just after this.

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The year Leading up to it was both of us just trying to get used to the idea. And it involved quite a lot of Shannon going, for God's sakes, Michael, tell me what the hell this job is. And honestly, me going, I don't really know because first of all, I don't really know what I'm doing as CEO. And secondly, even if I did, I suspect what you'll need to do as CEO is different from what I'm doing as CEO. But it was us kind of sitting with and getting used to the idea that Shannon's CEO and that I'm not CEO anymore, I've got some other role that's going on. It is also the year where I started up MBS Works because I knew that I would need something to distract me from box of crayons. So MBS Works was.

It's turned into its own little business. But really it was meant to be just a sand pit for me to go and play it. So I'd have something else to do other than kind of be involved in the ebb and flow box of crayons, which I'd been involved in in a really full time way for 18 or 19 years. So it was setting up structures around that. And so this set up and this is where we started in this first year. Started working through this tree model and kind of nutting out what would go where and.

Constantly looking to push decisions up the tree. So as few as possible in root the ones in trunk, we knew that the ones that might start there early on, eventually they would move to be branch decisions because she wouldn't feel the need to come and check stuff out with me as she grew increasingly confident about her own capacity to make decisions and to steer the ship. But the critical thing that we got clear of in the first year was Shannon wasn't managing the company on my behalf. She was running this company, she was running her company.

And it's a very significant and different way of seeing your role. And I suspect a good deal of founder transitions fail because there's just an explicit, an implicit thing that goes on, which is like, I'm kind of expecting you to keep running it like the way I would run it, but a little bit better and without me having to do any of the work. And then when those expectations get disappointed, chaos ensues.

Was there ever a point in this whole process where you had regrets to no fault of Shannon regrets or moments where you thought, am I doing the right thing? Just those last before fully letting go, taking your hands off the wheel you.

Know, here's the decision I came to that allows me not to have regrets. It was an awareness and then an acceptance that box of crayons might fail under Shannon's watch.

I hope she hopes that this company is going to succeed and grow and I think it will. But she could make a bet that doesn't come off and we'll have to close the company down because it's just failed. And so part of what's at risk in me handing this job over to Shannon is that somebody other than me drives the company into the ground. So coming to that realization and going okay, I think that's okay.

It's not my preferred outcome, but it's okay. That kind of allows me to go, look, this is actually your company now. And then Jenny, honestly I also just have a personal wiring that I am quite forward focused in terms of how I look. So I have a certain degree that I'm a little bit wired to be able to go look, that project is done for me. I'm walking away from box of crayons. My time there is done and I'm off onto some new adventures. So that helps as well.

And 20 years, it's like, it's just incredible what you built. I can completely understand how you can look at it with total success and, and keep moving and then trust that what happens with the business is kind of that its path like it does become a separate entity from you. You know, we are not meant to be one and the same with the business. And the whole point of Escape Velocity is that the business is now living on even without you as CEO, which is an incredible accomplishment.

It is. And you know, it's a combination of a bunch. It's a combination of me and some good decisions that I made and a combination luck because always a healthy roll of the dice, good luck that you need to kind of get through these things and succeed. Because honestly, just having a company that's been around for 20 years puts you into a minority.

And then it's also having the good luck of finding somebody like Shannon who I think truly is an exceptional person, an exceptional CEO. So I feel.

You know, when you, it's like I was saying before, which is like areas of strength for you become weaknesses for the company and you have to really hire an A player. Even though Shannon had no experience as being a CEO or an executive or in learning and development or anything, she has such a high combination of values based leadership and a strategic mind. She really does think at a high level.

And kind of holds ambition in the same way that I hold it as well that I just couldn't be luckier than finding her as a CEO.

It also seems lucky and strategic that you were not having to hire for an outside CEO to come in that she was able to work with you. And then you floated this idea because I think it's Andrew Wilkinson, someone, you and I both are familiar with his work. He runs tiny capital and he talks about when the company where they're trying to replace the CEO like, rejects the organ.

Yeah, exactly.

That if you hire the wrong person, the company rejects the organ. It just will not accept the CEO that isn't a culture fit.

Yeah, I've seen a little bit of research on this, and on balance, internal hires tend to work better than external hires. But external hires always feel like the shinier thing.

It's like kind of magical thinking, oh, somebody's going to come in and rescue this and it's going to be amazing and they're going to shake it all up. And you don't just want a culture fit. You want somebody who is a culture expander, who changes the culture, who shifts it. But they need to have enough roots in the culture that they're able to grow it like that. I can't really imagine what it would be like to try and bring in an external CEO to do that. So hard to get that right.

So risky. Yeah. Last question before we move to rapid fire on the identity piece. There's a book I read called Finish Big by Bo Burlingham. I'll put it in the show notes. And he also wrote Small Giants, so he was writing about small companies and how they succeed. And Finish Big was so interesting. The subtitle is How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top. And he said the number one thing that defined whether the founder was happy or not on the other side, or let's say had peace, was whether they had their next project. And the ones that didn't were floundering and having regrets and identity issues and were just miserable, honestly. So he's like the number one piece of advice. It's nothing tactical or financial. Well, tactical in the sense that have your next thing. Have your next thing that you're looking forward to.

Yeah.

So how has it been for you going from head honcho, CEO of Box of Crayons, 20 years, a best selling book or five under your belt pivoting into something new. A new podcast, a new book, a new platform, a new URL. And it's like, oh, that feeling of just being at the starting line again. You know, and I know that's what your new book is about, how to begin. But oh my gosh, how has that tension been for you of feeling like, oh, just.

Starting again?

It was hard. It was hard. And I didn't really have a project to go to. I had MBS works and so I had some broad ideas and I had some projects that I was kind of interested in, but I didn't have a grounding in what I wanted to be different. And.

It felt that a lot of the ideas I were having were coming back to be slight variations around coaching, curiosity, possibilities and all of that stuff from my box of crayons days. And you know, the metaphor I was using in my head was like, I'm still walking in the box of Crayons Valley. I haven't got out to see the landscape beyond that. And so I feel a bit stuck in terms of what I'm trying to come up with as my next thing. I did an exercise with that actually was the breakthrough moment. So this is with a woman called Erin Weed, W E E D based in Colorado, and she has a process called the Dig. And.

In short, it's two three hour sessions where you talk to her and she builds your, your operating system, your, your ecology based on, on words, based on some key, key language. I have to tell you, Jenny, I was so skeptical about this because I'm a pretty good facilitator. Which means, which is really just what I'm saying is I'm very intolerant of anybody who I don't think is a good facilitator. I'm like, God, this could be both a combination of weird woo wooness plus bad facilitation nightmare for me. But I have this time with Erin and she did a wonderful job. And what was interesting was that she came back and said, I think there are three words at the center of, of your work and your world and who you are. And I wouldn't have guessed any of the three of them. That was what's so surprising for me because I thought it was going to be coaching or questions or curiosity or something like that. But the three questions, the three words were confidence in terms of a sense of self that I have and also a way that I try and help other people be confident, be courageous, forward in the sense of kind of moving on to the next thing and being future focused. And then the keyword, the word at the heart of this trilogy is the word power, which is about disrupting power and kind of thinking that as.

Basically a privileged white Straight dude who holds lots of those cards. How do I dissenter myself? How do I give up power? How do I challenge the status quo? How do I disrupt the way things are normally done? And those three words were the thing that got me out of the box of crayons, Valley, over the lip, and into a different landscape, to have me think differently about the work. And from that, I could give MBS Works an identity that went beyond a distraction to actually go. It's to help people be a force for change. And that then helped shape all the projects that are flowing from that wellspring.

So powerful. It's amazing how just an outside facilitator on the person that is you. You know, it's like anytime translating something MBS Works is under your own name, it's like, just help reading that label from outside the jar.

Okay, let's do a few rapid fires.

Okay.

A favorite book you've read recently.

A favorite book I've read recently is a book called It's a Fictional book, and it's a book called Virgil Wonder V I R G I L W A N D E R by an American author called Leif Enger. L E I F E N G E R. It is.

It's a story of a guy in a town kind of finding his way back to his identity and back to happiness. And it is so quirky, and it is so beautifully written. Oh, my goodness. This man has the ability to turn a phrase like, just extraordinary. So I thought this was an absolutely magical, magical story.

Wow. I love this recommendation. And I know you're a lifelong bookworm, so I am. This is high praise for you to give.

This is high praise. This is a wonderful book.

Wow. All right. I can't wait.

One of the most transformational business books that you've ever read.

The business author that I put at the center of somebody influencing my work is a guy called Peter Block. Peter Block's written a number of books. He wrote a book called Flawless Consulting, which is very much about, in its essence, stop giving so much advice and ask more questions, which has become a theme of my work as well. He wrote a book called the Answer to How Is yes, which is a way of challenging received wisdom and provoking you to find a line between an artistic approach and a rigorous approach. The metaphor he uses is like an architect needs to be both structurally sound and also creatively imaginative as well. And he's also kind of just a grumpy guy who isn't trying to pander to capitalism, but is kind of trying to disrupt. I like that about him as well. He's kind of prickly. So basically any number of books by Peter Block would be probably my answer to that.

Awesome. I'll throw those in the show notes. What would you say is the number one skill for freeing up time for fellow business owners?

Gosh, I wish I had a good answer to that.

These are rapid fire on my end, not yours. I'm giving you the hard questions that are going to take real thought.

Look, I don't know if this is the number one thing, but in the end it's being able to step away from a fear of missing out.

And also, you know what, here's what I think the answer might be for me is like to be less responsible.

I'm the eldest son of a Protestant work ethic y family and I'm overly responsible and I try and get everything done and I try and do all this stuff and I'm like, you know what?

Time gets freed up when I learn to let things break and burn.

That is not easy to do.

No.

That may be your answer for this next question. Next and final. If you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something, what would it be?

Just drop something.

Just drop something. Anything. Every day.

Anything. It's just like I would go 20% of what you're doing you shouldn't be doing. So Stop that. Who's that comedian? The whole joke is like, just stop it. Stop it, stop it. Just stop it. So like there's 20% of what you're doing. Stop it. And I'm really, I'm giving myself this advice rather than anybody else. Michael, for God's sake, man, stop it.

We all need it. I love it. That's such a catch all permission slip. Just stop it. Every day. Every day. Okay. You have an exciting event coming up, listeners. I highly encourage you to get this gorgeous book. The design is as impressive as the content. Oh, it's just already an instant classic and favorite. Be sure you check out how to begin wherever books are sold and MBS. Tell us about your event coming up on January 20th.

Yeah, so I'm trying to launch this book in a way that doesn't have me spend my whole time going, buy my book, buy my book, buy my book. Although obviously everybody listening, buy my book. You'll find it@howtobegin.com but as a way of trying to make this more interesting for you to think about buying the book leading up to its launch on the 11th of January, I'm offering a ticket to an event with me, Whitney Johnson, who has a new book coming out, Smart Growth and has a number of wonderful books about managing the S curve. Apollo Ohno, who for Americans in particular, you might recognize that name as America US United States most awarded Winter Olympian. He was a speed skater and also Peme Basse, who is the Chief Learning officer of Kraft Heinz. And we're doing a live event, a live virtual event on January 20th and the price for admission is one of our books because we all have books that are new to the world or coming out shortly. Buy a book and you get access to this event and it'll be 90 minutes and it will be a beautifully crafted, beautifully facilitated learning event from 4 Interesting Minds and interesting people.

Amazing. Thank you. And do they go to howtobegin.com to sign up?

Yeah, howtobegin.com and you'll see how you can buy the book or buy other books if you want to do that as well.

Way to go. And because you're here listening to a podcast, be sure to check out two pages with mbs. It's a delight. It's so well produced. Little music authors read their favorite two pages from a book. So I told you he's a well read fellow bookworm, as I would think so many of you are. Michael, thank you for being you and just one of my favorite people and helping the freetime book exist. Thank you. And thank you for being here as our guest today.

Junior, it's a pleasure. Thanks for everything.

Thank you. Thanks so much everybody for listening.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my tech toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, Even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join Remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

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