115: Successfully Taking Over as CEO from a Founder (MBS) with Shannon Minifie

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One of the struggles has been sort of maintaining an identity that's separate from the work. And I think that that's really important. Like there's a lot of work about just how intertwined our identity is with what we do. And on the one hand, work is a huge source of purpose and meaning and all of that is true. But it feels important to me to maintain a sense of who I am and outside of the work. So finding my own spin on why I think curiosity and curious cultures are important and what's interesting about curiosity that seems untapped in organizations and in the future of work has been an area where I feel like I've been able to sort of evolve and kind of create my own room in the house.

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Hello hello free timers. We are in for a treat today. We have Shannon Minifie here with us today. This is the first time I'm getting to connect with Shannon, but I heard her name for so many years as this shining beacon unicorn of a person that MBS found while she was working a whole portfolio of jobs while doing her dissertation. Shannon is the new CEO of Box of Crayons as of 2019, so you can imagine what she has been through the last few years. I interviewed mbs in episode 51 on how to replace yourself as CEO and multiple times during that conversation we said, you know, we should really talk to Shannon as well to understand her experience because here on Freetime we're always talking about making the business ready to pass on or could someone new step into the business and operate things. Well, Shannon has actually been doing that not just for the last few years, but through a pandemic. So Shannon, I'm just thrilled to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jenny. I'm so excited to be here.

I think one of the most impressive things about you is that you were doing your doctorate in literature and somehow pivoted to running a small business now with 14 full time employees and dozens of contractors. How did you get the confidence that having had this career heading toward academia, that you could take on this role as CEO at Box of Crayons?

When I find the confidence, I'll let you know.

Funny, I'm the same way. I'm like, where's this confidence? I just do things.

Sort of.

And also it was gradual. You know, you just said on episode 51 you spoke with Michael. It was a really gradual move.

Right.

It wasn't like I woke up one day and I decided, you know, I'm not going to be a literature professor, I'm going to be a CEO instead. You know, what happened was I met Michael and his wife Marcella, who owned Box of Crayons when I was finishing my doctorate and like you said, working a portfolio of part time jobs and when I started working for them on a very part time basis, it was a decision that ended up being one of the biggest decisions that I've ever made. And I didn't know it at the time and I just slowly started taking more on. So starting with some publicity and then some sales. And then when Michael eventually a couple of years in said, you know, I think maybe you could run this place, I thought about it more as a kind of managing director role. And so by the time I actually became CEO, it had just felt very gradual getting there rather than something I'd set my sights on and had the confidence to go and pursue.

How was it starting that first role with him doing book marketing? Because that's also a kind of gnarly thing to get into. It's not easy figuring out how to market a book, measure it, what's working. And we know, my listeners probably know Coaching Habit has been a smashing success. It sold over a million copies. It really grew the box of Crayons consulting and training business. So take us into the eye of that storm. Like joining even for that pivotal moment is really interesting.

So I came into that again, not having any background in book marketing aside from having worked part time at a small literary press here in Toronto. Not as their marketer. I was reading their slush pile. So reading all the unsolicited manuscript that came in and helping with other filing and small duties and things like that. So Michael had a professional publicist and he had a marketing team at Page Two who printed and published the book for him. I was helping him with finding journalists who covered comparable books to the Coaching Habit and helping to get that book to them to make it easy for them to review and to get them excited about it. So I remember it was a lot of emailing freelance journalists writing for Fast Company and publications like that and just convincing them, hey, you've got to check out this book. I saw your review of X book and you'd really love this, and here's why, and here's what you can write about. And a lot of chasing. And I remember Michael ran into a journalist at some event and they said, oh, yeah, you're somebody on your team. Emailed me. She sent me a copy of the book to review, and she just keeps emailing me to get me to write that review. And she's a bit of a Rottweiler. And Michael said, that's good. I'm glad she's doing that. We sent you a copy of the book. So it was a lot of that kind of work at the time. And I remember Michael, we'd have these funny conversations where he'd be like, I want to get a copy of his book in the back of every seat on every Air Canada flight. And I was like, I have no idea how to do that.

Did you make any headway to that goal?

No, we didn't make it. I tried finding some people on LinkedIn to message. Yeah, that kind of strategic partnership was way out of my experience.

I wonder if they would have accepted that if it was free. Kind of like the Bible in hotel strategy. Did you try to give them away?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was all giveaways. I just couldn't get any responses.

Darn, that's a good idea, though.

I know. Yes. He always has these big and great ideas. That's the thing.

So at the moment where he probably had his own internal aha moment that sparked about, hey, maybe Shannon could take this over. As you were growing your role within the company, and I have heard him say, everything he gave you, you just knocked it out of the. Even though you had never done it before. Can you just take us to the moment that you had that conversation and what were you feeling at that time? Did it seem like some impossible thing, or were you also thinking, yes, I agree, I can definitely take this over and figure it out?

When he first brought it to me, I remember where I was sitting and when we had the conversation, and I remember thinking, yeah, I could probably do that. But again, I was thinking about it as a more of a managerial role, if that makes sense. When he first brought it to me, it was like, I think you could run this place. And I know that I have a strength in juggling a lot of things, spinning a lot of plates. I love days where the things I'm doing all day are very different and I can sort of fluently move in and out of different activities and ways of thinking. And so a role where I was overseeing and working with different people in different areas of the business was exciting to me. And when he brought it to me, it seemed small enough to be feasible. And by the time we actually affected the transition, which was about two years after he'd initially excitedly phoned me and said, I think you could run this place. What that meant, what it meant to be CEO had evolved quite a bit. And so thinking about, okay, now how am I going to think about strategy and culture and all of these things? Those were things that I wasn't even thinking about when he first brought the idea to me.

That's interesting because. Right. Did that coincide with when he first brought it up? I know the business really grew as the coaching habit increased in popularity. So that's really interesting to think about that at the time he had the idea and ran it by you, the business was even in a much different place than where it grew to two years later.

That's right. Like, so when he first brought it to me, we were starting on that trajectory of getting a lot busier and revenue increasing. But we didn't have employees yet. So everybody was a contractor. Michael was everybody's client in some way who worked at Box of Crayons. And I feel like maybe one of the differences between me and a lot of the other people who were working at Box of Crayons back in those days is that I never thought about my role as serving Michael. And he was never the client who I was working in the service of. Because I had moved into sales. I was always really focused on our buyer, on our client as the stakeholder. Like, I was just so focused on how do we become this client centric company and keep the client at the center of what we're doing? That thinking about also, what is the internal team like and who are these employees and what is their experience like, and what culture do we need to succeed. Those things just hadn't even shown up on my radar yet.

That's so interesting. So in a way, you and Michael went through that together, knowing all the while you were going to take it over but bringing on full time employees, the infrastructure, the culture around that.

Yes, that's right.

I talk a lot in the book Free Time and on this podcast about documenting everything, having clear systems and process. So now's the time we peel back the curtain. What was the state of things at that time? Like were you coming into kind of well documented process that you could take over? Or maybe that was your responsibility, was building a lot of that. But I'm wondering. We all do this almost as a conceptual exercise, but you actually went through it where you needed to get the business out of Michael's head and as you've both said, demichelify it. You know, look for the Michael shaped holes and plug them. And I'm just wondering, that must have a lot of friction in that process because you kind of don't know what you don't know until you bump up against it. And so how did you navigate and how was it taking over all these processes large and small, and the systems and the documentation and even the principles behind it?

We had quite a lot of good documentation and process from early days, I would say. I think that Michael and Marcell, whose title was the VP of everything else, so she ran operations in the earlier days, they did quite a good job, I think, of documenting process and setting out process that could be self led and self followed. And I would guess that was mostly because as a company that was all contractors rather than employees. The way to get people coming in and doing the role that they were hired in to do is to get them up to speed really, really quickly and in a sort of surgically precise way. Whereas now, like what you approach onboarding employees as like you're onboarding them to the company, to the company's purpose, to our mission, to our values and culture. And then also on top of that, there's sort of functional specificity. So we had a wiki that was very well populated and that was open for any contractor who was working with them to go in and sort of find their relevant area. So we had a really well documented process for, you know, how we book Michael's travel, if you were the person doing that and how we do the sales process. Like I helped create the sales process with Michael and a great coach, we worked with Ernest Oriente, but that was all documented really carefully. So any other people coming into the team, it was like, go to the wiki on the sales page and follow the process. So you were left very much alone. Right. I would show up and Michael would say, okay, it's all in the Wiki, have at it, and then occasionally pop his head up to coach me or correct me or something like that. But it was very, here's the documentation. Go read it and go do it. And it's very different now. We're still very documented, and we need to be because we're a distributed company, and sometimes that's difficult. Had to adjust as a reader myself, to the fact that reading and reading at length is not the best or easiest way for a lot of other people to learn. And so finding other ways to document and create process and share process in ways that aren't so reading based remains a challenge, but it's one that we're working on.

What have you found that works best? Or at least what are some other strategies? You supplement it with some alternatives.

We have videos, so some of our functional leaders will shoot videos that replace writing. Sometimes it's holding meetings. Right. So the idea that someone can show up and then you can just say, here's all your onboarding material. Go and read. Some people need to have a conversation. They need to ask questions. They need to have a conversation in order to learn instead of reading. So what are the kind of the soft spots? So I've said we're really pretty well documented company, I think. But I remember Jill Murphy, who coached us through our transition, kept saying to me, you've got to get everything off your desk, Shannon, because on July 1st, Michael's desk is hitting your desk like a ton of bricks. And I was sort of holding on to things, oh, I'll manage this account. Still, I don't want to push too much onto this person's desk. And she's like, you need to push it all onto their desk because his desk is going to hit yours. And I was like, but I don't know what his desk looks like.

Right.

His desk looks like podcast interviews and speaking engagements. And that's not the CEO that I'm going to be. So I don't know what his desk looks like, but it was true. His desk hit me. And it hit in the form of not quite understanding some of the partner relationships we had and some old contracts that existed and, you know, a bunch of other sort of unsexy details that I had some great people around me to dig into.

I love that Jill flagged that. I'm just picturing a tsunami. Yeah, it seems like that would be so unavoidable that no matter all the prep that you both think you've put in, you think you've covered everything, there's just no way to fully know until his desk hits yours.

That's right. That's right.

Oh, my gosh.

I had this great bit of coaching from one of our former program leaders, Stephen Hai. He's awesome. He's a novelist now in Texas. And he said to me, he met with me, offered to meet with me after I became CEO, and he's like, okay, there's an exercise you need to do. You need to go into your calendar and cancel every single meeting you have that isn't related to your core contractual CEO responsibilities. Just go in and cancel every meeting without apology or explanation.

Wow.

Because it's July 1st now and you're in a different role. And it was part of that, getting things off my desk to make room for the new things coming.

See, that's more good advice. Like, just preparing, being ready. So what kind of stuff did you remove then? What was not core to your role?

Just looking at what are the. Some of the functional meetings I don't need to be in anymore. I'm not the sales leader, so I'm the CEO. I can have somebody else let me know what's happening in the sales and marketing meeting. So, like, we're small enough that maintaining visibility not as a matter of oversight, but for me, as a matter of staying really close to our customer. Like, if we lose sight of who we serving, we lose sight of what we're doing and who we're doing it for, in my view. So figuring out how I stay connected to our customer voice through the rest of the company, working with our clients without necessarily being in every meeting, that is tricky.

How do you stay directly tuned into that without being involved in the weeds in every meeting?

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember when I was getting prepared for the role and asking Michael, sort of, what does this role look like as CEO? And he's like, I don't know. It's going to look different for you. He set up all these conversations for me with other CEOs that he knew so they could just give me advice about how to spend my time or talk about their transition. And I remember one of them told me that you want to divide your time into four buckets. The first is staying close to the client. And that can mean either selling alongside your sales team in a really light touch way. Right. Like, if you're a small enough company and the client is a big, important enough enterprise client, it makes sense for you to be there and to show the interest in partnering together. The second bucket is to stay close to the competition. So for this person giving me advice that meant eating in competitor restaurants, and for me that's meant talking to indirect competitors and sort of keeping a network of people who are in the same industry that I'm tapped into what other people are doing. The third bucket was about calibrating my top team. So one of the ways that my calendar should reflect time spent with my leadership team and making sure that developing them in the right way, they're really doing the things they need to be doing and just constantly be calibrating that team. And then the fourth bucket of way to spend my time was just ways to make us smarter. So that means working with coaches, talking to other consultants and things like that.

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Another thing I'm curious about, I have imposter syndrome all the time. As a business owner. It's been 11 years. It doesn't really go anywhere. It just changes and evolves. How have you grappled with your own imposter syndrome? If it comes up about being CEO of box of crayons and then did you also have a layer of like non MBS imposter syndrome because you have this kind of direct person that you're taking over from to compare against. Not that he would want you to do that or anyone else would, but I would find myself naturally making that comparison a lot, probably. So I'm just curious what your journey has been like stepping into these shoes in your own way.

Totally. And I'm curious to hear about your strategies too. But I think I'll give you a sort of long winded answer because I think it hits on something really interesting. Imposter Syndrome does about identity and working identity. So let's start with mbs. So it was absolutely difficult to come into the role after Michael for a couple of different reasons. One, so much of the culture is based off of just how he is, how he shows up in the world, which is, like, brilliant and energetic and generous. And so coming into that role and knowing that I didn't need to do a Michael impression, but I needed to maintain the kernel of what made Box of Crayons. What it was was always a little bit intimidating. But I think we've done a good job of keeping that culture there, even as we've evolved it. I also feel like there's been a lot of times where I felt like I've had pushback on decisions we've made as a business or that my leaders have made. And I sometimes wonder if that pushback would have happened had Michael made those decisions. So I think that he met less resistance, at least from what I could see, when he was trying out different things or making decisions. And that can sometimes be a little bit hard. I know that's not directly related to imposter syndrome, but it is in the sense that it makes you question your decision making or if you're doing the right thing. But most of the time, I think that that resistance has less to do with me than it does, than it has to do with the people who are bringing that resistance.

That's so true. And then you're also leading during such a tenuous time of everyone's kind of on edge and tired and a little bit bur out, or if not, a lot burnt out. And so trying to lead through that is so, so difficult. I mean, yeah, we were saying before we record just what a doozy you stepped into unknowingly, but what Forging these fires of personal transformation on every level. Because you also had maternity leave somewhere in here, Your second one. Oh, my goodness, yeah.

2019, 2020 were big years. I successfully defended my dissertation in the summer of 2019, about a month after come moving into the role. And then we had this great, you know, six, eight months. Year was looking good. And then, of course, Covid came in March, and that was the big pivot, right? Like, we deliver live programs that we had to figure out how to do virtually like everybody else who had a live service had to figure out. And that was hard, but it drew a partially new team together really, really quickly, and it showed us how quickly we could get something done. So I thought that was a huge triumph, but it was tough.

Were you Worried at any point, were you like, oh, my God, a pandemic has hit? Because I know for me in the training business, all my trainings were canceled. Some pivoted to virtual, but a lot was wiped off the books. Still, to this day, it's impacted. Were there moments where you're like, great, I took this company over and now it's gonna fall apart to no faults of your own. But just due to the economic circumstances.

I will say this might sound a little bit bizarre. I was less afraid than I might have been if it had just. Just. I'm putting in air quotes. You can't see it just been a recession. And the reason I say that is because the threat was so existential and so big and so all consuming for everybody everywhere. Because I knew that if the company. I felt that if we were to fail because of the pandemic or during the pandemic, it wouldn't be because I didn't know what to do as a business leader. It would be because Covid was going to bring a lot of people to their knees.

Yes.

And so there was something sort of freeing about that, about everybody being in that same position. That made me hold it a little bit more lightly. And like, we had a plan and we worked the plan. We were like, okay, we just have virtual things to sell. We need to create a virtual thing. We need to convince our clients that they shouldn't wait until they can go back to live and that they might be waiting a lot longer. So that took about a quarter or two quarters to get our clients back on track. But then it ended up being okay. I was less afraid than I thought I would be because it was just so global.

Yeah. And no one knew what to do. Nobody knew how to navigate this.

Yeah. It wasn't going to be my inexperience or imposter syndrome that was going to ruin us. No one knew, or I shouldn't say no one knew, but no one knew what to do.

Yeah. It's interesting, too, with a literature background, all the. What was it, 20th century, 19th century literature on, like, plagues. Yeah.

Yeah.

So in a way, you probably are well versed in some of the just cultural, historical, historical conversation.

Yeah. I didn't read a lot of the plague literature, but for sure, even like 21st century, there's people who've been predicting this for a while.

I love what you said about not trying to impersonate Michael. And I was listening to the two of you together on the podcast Brave New Work, which I really appreciate. Aaron has been a guest on this show before, so I'll put that in the show notes for listeners. I laughed out loud when you said you're not fine tuning a museum.

As in like this museum of monument to mbs. Your job is not to come in and fine tune this museum and nothing can ever change and nothing can be done differently. And actually a pandemic hitting kind of forces that like you're definitely not fine tuning a museum anymore when everything gets tossed up into the air and you have to rethink it all. But that seems like such a good reminder to self that that's not your job here. So I'm curious how that came in handy over these last few years and any other mantras that have helped helped you lead this company in your way.

Yeah, one of the other big things to help me lead the company my own way has been sort of finding my voice and my identity in relationship to the company. So I think one of the struggles has been sort of maintaining an identity that's separate from the work. And I think that that's really important. Like there's a lot of work about just how intertwined our identity is with what we do. And on the one hand, and work is a huge source of purpose and meaning and all of that is true, but it feels important to me to maintain a sense of who I am outside of the work. And that's sort of novel idea to me because when I was an academic, your ideas are constitutive of your identity. And that's why when people, you know, attack your ideas, it's eviscerating because you just identify yourself with the quality of those ideas so closely. And so there's something sort of liberating about, oh, I'm going to be an arm's length CEO and you know, my job is not who I am, it's just what I do. And then pretty quickly I found that there was a need or desire for me to sort of evolve and have my own perspective on the ideas that box of crayons is now known for bringing into organizations. So finding my own spin on why I think curiosity and curious cultures are important. And what's interesting about curiosity that seems untapped in organizations and in the future of work has been an area where I feel like I've been able able to sort of evolve and kind of create my own room in the house.

I love that it's funny because I was trying to connect the dots, as I do with my previous book and podcast, Pivot, of like just reverse engineer your career because it's been so interesting how many different things you've done. But just now in this moment, it's interesting to hear how your academic background actually can play a role front and center. Because you're leading a training and development company and so studying something like curiosity among organizations or within organizations, organizational culture and design, you probably have a lot of that rigor that you can bring to contribute research in this way. I mean, I don't want to put words into your mouth, but it's just cool to hear that academic background serving you in this way as you put your unique spin on things.

Yeah, I think probably the skill or the practice that has been so honed is just of asking questions and not being afraid of getting into arguments or disputes about things like just interrogating and questioning everything. That's the sort of rare, terrified environment that I came from. You know, any idea needed to be stress tested. And so that is any decision, any idea. And that sometimes that can be difficult for new members of the team, for sure. And so we talk about interrogating ideas, right? Like, it's all, we're always assuming positive intent and we're never interrogating a person. We're just trying to look at an idea really carefully. And I think that is the practice that's the carryover from my academic career here.

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Not that you're going anywhere anytime soon. We don't want to give Michael a panic attack.

No.

But do you think about just conceptually someone taking over from you? And I'm wondering, is that on your mind just again, as a thought exercise? And what would you do differently if you were gonna pass the reins off? Having gone through the experience of taking over from someone else. The Jenny sized hole in my business is so big that I don't even know. I've kind of like given myself permission to run a more bespoke creative shop. I have licensing programs too, and a lot of that was coached and guided by MBS over the years. But I don't aspire to be the size of box of crayons. So I realized I'm just running a kind of different type of thing. And I don't even know what to call it. But I still think about what would it be like if someone were to come in or could they replace me? What aspects could someone take over? And am I making it easy enough for this mystery future person? Just again, as a thought exercise. So I guess I'm wondering how you build some of that into your day to day, if at all.

I guess I think two things. I think a different CEO might do things differently for better or for worse. And also another CEO might come in and take a look and decide that we've made some assumptions or some decisions that need to be reversed and need to be changed and then that would change the way that they spend their time and that would mitigate what I might have created as a Shannon shaped hole. Now so one example of that is the face of the business. And our thought leader is still absolutely Michael. And I know Michael talked about this early pivotal decision that he made around not building the brand around Michael Bungay Senior, but around box of crayons. But for a lot of our clients and I think a lot of of people in the world, box of crayons and Michael are still so conflated. And one of the things that some of my colleagues said to me early on was a company needs a thought leader and needs a face. And I was like, we have a thought leader and a face. It's Michael. But I was really encouraged to step into having new ideas and having a point of view on our ip, on Michael's IP and adding that sort of new spin. And that's a decision that we've made maybe in part, as you point out, Jenny, because of my background and my interest in talking about ideas and researching ideas and contributing to a history of ideas. But another CEO might come in with a completely different approach with no need or without any, you know, seen need for the business, for them to step into that kind of thought leadership role or to try to replace or augment or add to the thought leadership visibility.

You and I were talking before we hit record about you coming on podcasts and how you were saying it's not something that is natural to you by default. Like maybe you've done about, I think you mentioned 10 or so since taking over.

Do you want to be more out front? Do you like being behind the scenes as CEO? I mean, you still have a huge role in what you're doing, so there's no right or wrong answer. But I'm just curious if you feel pressure to kind of get out there a little more and be more of a face of the business and brand or this is another place where you just kind of go sideways. MBS is doing his thing that always still helps. And just where do you fall on this? How do you think about this aspect?

I think one of my strengths is stepping into things that are new and that I'm sort of afraid of doing. And it hadn't even really occurred to me the sort of public facing part of being a CEO because we're a small business. So it didn't, you know, I was like, oh, we're small and scrappy and Michael's the public figure and I'm nothing like a public figure. But it hadn't even occurred to me that I'd be going on podcasts or I'd be doing things like this until all of a sudden I was doing it. I'm embracing it more. And I would credit our marketing director, Mary Sheldon, a lot. She comes from publishing and so is used to sort of propping up authors and propping up not just their work, but who they are as people. And from the beginning, she's always been interested in, hey, you have a unique story. You have an unconventional path to success. You have an interesting working relationship with our founder. It's a success story that you've had a successful founder transition. We've got this cool culture rather than just being out there talking about the ip you out there talking about what ideas are exciting and what needs to change in organizations and what it's like to lead an organization as a young woman. And she's like, you have something to offer there. So she's really pushed me into that and we're going to start looking for more opportunities for me to sort of be out in the world and generating interest in the kind of work that we do and, you know, ultimately offer box of crayons, but through the slightly different lens of my experience running the company.

I love everything she said because it's true. All these aspects are so interesting. And it's not easy to have a successful founder transition as you have and both of you have navigated it with such grace, which of course is a testament to the work itself that box of crayons does, because it's about coaching and conversations and feedback. Do you ever think about writing your own book someday, having your PhD in literature as you do?

Yeah. I mean, I have written a book that three people on my dissertation committee have read. Do I think about writing a different book? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what was the topic of your dissertation? I always just love to know.

I wrote on David Foster Wallace, who is an American author. I wrote about the ways in which he. Even though he was a sort of poster child of postmodernism. Right. So anti metanarrative, anti religion, anti any kind of politics, all that kind of stuff. He had a sort of religious tendency in his work that I thought was really interesting and sort of showed a sort of bifurcation in the effortlessly secular, postmodern approach to art. I was trying to find a way in which he was showing a departure from postmodernism as we understand it.

It fascinating.

Yeah, I guess that's incredible. Do I think about writing a book sometimes? I don't know what I would write on yet. Michael and I have talked about this as well. I have some ideas, but they're too inchoate to talk about at the moment.

Interesting. Well, I feel like you'll have a lot to share if and when that day comes. And it sounds like you're also surrounded by people who know what they're doing in this arena between Mary and mbs and.

Absolutely.

If you were to give advice to somebody who is in your shoes, they're trying to come into a business, maybe not even as CEO, like those calls that MBS set up for you where he had CEO friends call you and give some advice. What advice would you give to somebody who is even the right hand in someone else's business and the owner still holds on to a little bit or. I don't know, I'm just curious what you would counsel others if you were going to have a call like the.

Ones you had if they're coming into the business new. I think the best thing that you can do when you first show up is to listen for a while. So I went on a listening tour. I wasn't even coming in new to the business. It was just a new role and new relationships with some of the people in it. So I went on a listening tour with all of our employees and our facilitators. In addition to going into that with just, you know, the purpose of this is to let people be heard and to try to make connections about where the challenges are and sort of take a pulse on what's going on. To hold lightly the idea that everything you hear is quote unquote true. Right. But also that this idea that you need to action everything or correct everything that you hear. So to be curious, to listen really carefully, to try to find connections, you know, to understand what's going on, but to not feel a sort of bias to action right away or an assumption that one perspective is the only perspective. True.

I've had to tell my team that related to customer input as well. Because sometimes someone would write in and then they would jump to correct whatever thing that person had said. And at a certain point we can take it all into consideration, but we don't have to take action on everything. Like not everyone's word is the end all be all. And we would just be leapfrogging from one thing to the next if we took every single person's opinion as fact, as you're saying.

That's right. It's a data point. Yes.

It's like interesting. Okay, food for thought. But we still need to see if that aligns with the bigger picture.

Yeah.

Shannon, if you could give fellow business owners or leaders, CEOs permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

This is an interesting one because I've realized the last few weeks just how much I need to be given permission myself. So this is tough. One of the things I've been working on is this idea, working on this idea with my coach that I'm earning my paycheck deck over a long period of time. So I have a sort of highly developed sense of duty and I like to get things done. And that can mean that if there's a quiet day where things didn't quite go down the way I thought they were going to be, or maybe one of I have two young kids, maybe one of them was sick and so had to stay home from daycare and the day was a wash when things like that would happen, I would really think I need to make up for this time.

Right.

I could always do more, can always turn it on. Need to get this done. And so this idea that I'm earning my paycheck or I'm having impact over a long term, over a year, maybe it's over multi years. This goes back to the imposter syndrome, Jenny.

Right.

Like every single day needs to be evidence that I am critical and I need to be here and I'm having impact so sort of being gentler with myself and giving myself permission to know that there are ebbs and flows and the impact is earned and proven over the longer term.

I love that. I love this permission and thank you for sharing it with us. It's so powerful. I have to remind myself that too. Even with this podcast, like every episode can't and just isn't going to be an 11 out of 10. It's a long arc of production and doing things and overall, on average, it will have a certain quality. But I can't obsess over how incredible because I do the same thing in different ways. I just get really hard on myself if anyone is somehow subpar. So I really love this. I'm going to be taking this permission slip for myself.

Yeah, do it.

Shannon, is there anywhere that you would like to send people to learn more or keep in touch?

Yeah, just boxofcryons.com Amazing.

I just am so impressed by you. I know that's like probably not even the right word, but ever since, since Michael told me about meeting you and these transitions over the years and all that you've navigated and how you've pivoted in your career left and right, becoming a parent, navigating a pandemic, taking over this company, it's just so freaking impressive. So if you do write a book, count me as a reader. And thank you for being here and sharing your story with all of us today.

Thank you, Jenny. I'll definitely count you as an early reader so you can help shape something.

You'll know you'll sell at least one book. Plus, you know the parents.

Excellent. More books than I've ever sold, so that's great. Oh my gosh.

I know. That's what my brother had to tell me. He said even if you only sell one book, you're still an author. That's right. Thanks again, Shannon. And big thanks everybody, for listening.

Thanks, Jenny.

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