201: Never Lose a Team Member Again with Joey Coleman

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Try to figure out an activity, an exercise, something that that new team member can do on day one that makes them feel invested into the code if you will, of your organization, the operating system of your organization, the actual substance of the products and the services you deliver.

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.

Welcome back free Timers Jenny Blake here with one of my favorite people, Joey Coleman. Joey is a previous guest of the pod Episode 83 on Breaking Through Buyer's Remorse. We were talking about his earlier book Never Lose a Customer Again and folks he is back with a follow up. His brand new book is called Never Lose an Employee Again the Simple Path to Remarkable Retention. Joey has helped organizations retain their best customers now employees and turn them into raving fans. He himself has such a varied career history and set of career experiences and he's just such a dynamic speaker. He's a podcast host. We'll put his show experience this in the show notes. He's a former criminal defense attorney and one of the most generous, energetic people people I know. Joey, welcome back.

Oh Jenny, you are the sweetest. Thank you so much for having me back on the show and thanks to all the free timers that are listening in and joining for the conversation today. I couldn't be more excited.

Before we hit record, I was telling you, as you already know that most free timers don't have full time employees and don't want them. And yet this book still applies because you yourself just brought on your very first assistant in over 20 years of flying solo. So can we start there? What finally tipped the scales to get you to dive into having a part time help on the team?

I mean we could say that tipping the scales included an overflowing inbox schedule Requiring me to be in three different time zones at the exact same time. Not lighting the candle on both ends, but rather taking the candle and throwing it into the bonfire and just letting the whole thing burn at once. I mean, there were any number of reasons that were the catalyzer for making this shift, but the main thing being I had this realization I was hanging out at a Savannah Bananas baseball game. If anybody who's listening, who's A fan of TikTok or SportsCenter probably has seen clips of the crazy Savannah Bananas baseball team, they're amazing. They're run by my good buddy Jesse Cole. And I was sitting in the stands, standing in the stands, actually cheering and watching everything that was going on. And it dawned on me that, that Jesse's impact has been dramatically enhanced and expanded by being willing to have other people on the team, literally and figuratively, people on the baseball team, but also support staff and supporting him. And I realized that if my end goal in this life is to have as much impact as possible, I was only ever going to be able to have a degree of impact that was in direct relationship to the number of hours in the day that I had myself and what I was doing that if I wanted to expand that I needed to get some folks on the team. And so I made the leap. I got my first employee in as you said, 20 plus years as far as like my first assistant. I've had other people that I've worked with and other team members, but this is the first person who's kind of in the role or the capacity of purely supporting me, not doing product work for clients or things like that, but just helping Joey be the best version of Joey that he can be.

What an amazing shift. And there's always turbulence in something like that. Trying to extrapolate your mind, you know, in these decades of business and how you run things to a new person you focused so much on for these last many years prior to this new book on helping people ensure a smooth process for customer onboarding. And one of my favorite aspects about that is acknowledging buyers remorse. I would imagine that even when a new team member joins, just like with a new client, despite all the excitement on both sides, there might also be some questioning at some point. It's almost like dating where the fantasy falls away and you realize, so true. Oh, this person has flaws. How have you thought about that as you onboard this team member? How have you been mapping? And I know the whole new book is about this, but I would love to just hear your real time experience of Trying to create as smooth an onboarding process as possible and even like eating your own dog food, as they say, from what you've been researching for the new one.

Oh, absolutely, Jenny, and you're so true. I think a lot of our free timers are probably familiar with the concept of buyer's remorse, that doubt we feel as consumers after we make a purchase about the decision we just made. What listeners may not be as familiar with is this idea of new hires remorse. And it's a scientifically proven feeling that a new employee has between the time they accept your job offer and their first day on the job when they first start working for you. And it's that same feeling of fear and doubt and uncertainty. You know what? Did I accept the right job? Should I have negotiated for a better package? Should I have changed my start date? Am I going to like this job? What about the other jobs I was interviewing for at the same time that I hadn't heard back yet from? Should I have waited a little longer because maybe one of those was better than this one that I did accept? If we don't address those emotional and mental feelings that our new hires are having, we're in a deficit. They're in a state of fear, doubt, and uncertainty. We're in a state of joy, excitement, and jubilation about what the future is. And the delta. The difference between those two emotional states doesn't close, and it doesn't close unless we affirmatively focus on it. And it's a horrible way to start the first day on the job where you're thrilled and they're in the hole thinking like, I'm not sure about this. So one of the things I've tried to do is be cognizant of the new hire's remorse that I would actually posit now that I'm experiencing it more myself or have experiencing significantly in the last few months is this idea of they're going through new hires remorse. So what are you doing to affirm them and what are you doing to counter your own inner voice that's saying they made a little mistake must be indicative of all the big mistakes they're going to make in the future. And it's like, no, no, no, wait a second. Is it a little mistake? Is it a big mistake? And this maybe is a conversation for the therapy couch instead of the podcast. But I usually default to if someone on my team makes a mistake, most likely the first place I should look as how did I not explain or train them properly before we got to this moment?

I always say that too, that any mistakes is a systems failure, really. It just means we didn't document our process, we didn't think everything through. I always do try to take the blame for that too. It's no one person's fault. It's just, shoot, I should have done this differently. I'm just thinking, just yesterday, oh, I created such a headache for myself and my team. And we may even need to outsource this. In nearly 500 podcast episodes, we've linked to a podcast transcription service. And now that service has pivoted, they're no longer doing this. So all these backlinks are broken in megaphone and in Squarespace. And as I was saying to my team member, I'm like, this is completely my fault. I should have done a vanity URL. It's freetime.com transcripts. That should have been the link. I should have known better than to rely on a service staying afloat. I should have known better, you know, and now this is a systems error. We can learn that in the future. We would not directly link to an external service knowing it might need to change. I should create a redirect so we learned something. That's just one example, but I'm always trying to look for that learning too.

I love that it's a little thing, but it's a big thing, right?

Yeah.

One of the things I love about talking to you is I always have a pen and a notepad ready so that I can take notes of just all the wisdom that I glean from you. And I just wrote, use vanity URLs that you own. Right. And just that idea of we know that businesses are going to pivot. I mean, somebody even wrote a book about it one time. You know, I mean, there's all kinds of interesting things that are happening and changing in our business operations. And it's like, okay, if that is the case, what are we doing to make sure that someone else's pivot doesn't result in our face plant? How can we avoid that? And something as simple as a vanity URL is a great way to insure against that.

And because of my mistake not thinking that through, there was a niggling thought in the back of my mind when I started linking to this service. But because of this, I'm now creating a lot of annoying work for somebody. Even if it's not my current part time person, then she's gonna need to subcontract to someone else. It's a lot of details and it's just a big Thing. So it does affect somebody in their role. And I think to talk things through, I mean, there's so much I wanna ask you about. One thing that I found very interesting is that you mentioned that the vast majority of new hires, even whether they're full or part time, I think it's something like 88% say that the onboarding process could have been smoother, could have been better.

Yes. Yes.

What is the difference between orientation and onboarding? And where do you think companies go wrong? Even delightfully tiny ones like we have here at Freetime?

Yeah. I think where organizations go wrong is they think of orientation and onboarding as being synonymous. They're not. They're two different words and they're very different words. And I think many times organizations think they're doing onboarding when they're actually doing orientation. Let me briefly explain how I define each word or how I think of each word. I think of orientation as an introduction to the employee's new surroundings and employment activities. This is kind of like, where's the bathroom? How long is the lunch break? How do we set up our signature line and our emails? What do we do if the fire alarm goes off? What form do I fill out to get my paycheck? These are all important things. They're important little details, but they're also very similar to what you would learn on the first hour on a cruise ship on vacation. Right. They're not the significant things that are going to make a difference of the destination where you're going. Whereas onboarding is inviting in new employees through a managed, structured series of contacts that is designed to create a warm, welcoming experience. You mentioned in the intro, I'm a recovering attorney. First steps, admitting you have a problem. There's 11 steps after that. But when I think of onboarding, I like to dissect that definition. Inviting in, not training, not up boarding, not getting someone up to speed. But it's an invitation to the new employee to join something bigger than themselves through a managed, structured series of contacts. We're thoughtful, we're intentional. This is a system. It's not, well, if Juwan's doing your training, you're set. But if Margaret's doing your training, oh, you're in real trouble. You know, it's. No, we have a plan, we have a system. And that it is designed to create a warm, welcoming experience. Not a training experience, not an up to speed experience. A warm, welcoming experience. Because we know that those type of experiences foster connection. They build connection, they build friendships. And it's a lot more difficult for a team member to quit their friends than it is to quit their company. And if you create those connections within the team, not only between you and the team member or the employee, but within the coworkers and evolving hopefully to colleagues, over time you get an increase in the stickiness and the retention. Not to mention it's easier for everybody to work together towards the same goals.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I learned so much from you around Surprise and Delight being intentional systems. Intentional repeatable systems. Like you have to design the system to mitigate buyer's remorse. It doesn't just happen. And you're so good with this, with both of your books. You have these delightful touches and accompanying resources and creative things that you do to even supplement the reader's process along the way. Sometimes I think small companies, companies of oneplus, I call them solopluspreneurs. I don't know, we might think of, we might hear of even something like onboarding. I love how you said inviting in as something that big companies do, the HR process or retention teams. We know that big companies struggle with employee engagement and retention through the course of your research for this new book. What were some of the really tiny things that companies did, whether the company itself was big or small, to invite people in, to make them feel welcome, to make them feel happy that they joined. What are some of the, like low cost but surprising things that you learned in your research or that you yourself have tried?

Oh my goodness, Jenny, there's so many fun examples we could point to. The challenge I often have, especially with this book, is there are more than 50 case studies from all seven continents in the book. Yes. We even got a case study from Antarctica into the book. I think it's the only business book that's ever done that. But what I really tried to do was make sure that the things that I was suggesting had a healthy number of ideas that could be done in under a week for under $100. So let's maybe start there because these are kind of some of the easy ones that even if you are the amazing solo plus or, you know, working with a tiny team, you can put these things in place. I love using videos. Everyone on the planet these days is walking around with a phone in their pocket or their purse that has a video camera on it that is more powerful than the video cameras used by network news 30 years ago. Entire movies have been shot on iPhones. There is no excuse for you not using the beautiful video camera that is built into your phone to shoot a video for your team member. So what might that look like? Well, there's a good buddy of mine at Kaizo Health, which is a chiropractic firm, small firm, that whenever he's hiring a new employee, he shoots them a video right after they accept the job offer. So they might have interviewed with other people on the team and someone else kind of handles the formal, you know, making the offer and getting their acceptance. But then he shoots a video. It's custom for each person walking through the chiropractic office saying, this is where you're going to be working. We're so excited to have you here. Like, you're going to be doing adjustments on this table, you're going to be answering this phone. This business is going to thrive and succeed because of you. And we are so thrilled that you're going to be starting here in two weeks. Just wanted to let you know that we're beyond excited and everything we're going to be doing in the next two weeks is going to be designed to make your first day remarkable. And I don't know about you, Jenny, but if I was a brand new employee that, you know, had taken a job as a receptionist or a chiropractic associate or going to be working in what is basically a services industry job in a small office, I would feel pumped that I had made the right choice. I would feel wanted, I would feel appreciated. And it's a two minute selfie video and it's texted. So total cost is literally just time. There's no additional dollars or giant systems you need to build. It can be that one off touch point now because I know you load systems and I do, too. You just create the System that within 24 hours of anyone accepting a job offer, this is the video that gets shot. Well, now it's a system and now it's in place. Another fun idea that I like is thinking about the power of the handwritten note. There have been times, I think, for anybody listening where someone on your team just came through like gangbusters. They did an amazing job. They worked extra, they delivered in a remarkable way. They pulled something out of the fire, they saved the day, whatever it may be. And we normally memorialize that moment with an email or a text. Hey, thanks so much for your extra efforts today. Thanks for staying late tonight. Thanks for solving that problem. Or we say it in passing in a zoom call or a teams call, and we miss the opportunity to create an artifact. What do I mean by an artifact? An artifact is something that has unbelievable value. It captures a moment in time, and it serves as a historical reference point in the future to the power of the moment in which it was created. A handwritten thank you note is a beautiful artifact. I'd ask anybody who's joining us, all our free timers, just think a couple questions. Number one, do you have in your home any thank you notes that you have received? Now, even though I can't see you, I see a lot of heads nodding. Yes. People are like, oh, yeah, I've got one. Has that thank you note been in your house for more than a week now? The interesting thing about that question is it implies, did you keep the thank you note? And what I would ask you is, why did you keep it? You read it, you know who it was from, and you decided to save it. The reason you saved it, I would pause it, is because in this day and age, human beings are dying for physical proof that they matter. We are dying for evidence that our contributions have been noticed, that our efforts have been appreciated, that we are valued. Taking the time to put pen to paper, to write the person on your team a thoughtful handwritten note and put it in the post and mail it to them, creates an artifact for less than 2, $3 that will be in their home, in their office, in their possession, most likely for many years to come, as evidence that you appreciate them.

That is so true and so simple. Thank you for this reminder. I love that. And I'm thinking as you were asking that question, I save every single one and I often prop them up at my desk. They get front and center placement so I can see it and be reminded or even sometimes If I'm gifted something like, I get a lot of mugs from corporate events, but they become my manifestation. Mugs of podcasts I've been on or. I remember one of my first speaking gigs before I even had the Pivot book deal. I spoke at this event for CIOs and they handed the speakers a Tiffany bag, a big blue bag, this iconic bag that I had never. I don't even know if I'd received anything from Tiffany at that point. But growing up, it was this coveted brand anyway, had two stemless wine glasses in it. And even though it didn't have their logo, John Rulin would be proud. It was not an ad for their business.

Nice.

I kept these glasses and every time I drank out of them, I remembered that event. I remembered that organization. I felt proud that I had gotten there. And they do. You're right. These artifacts stick around. They're so meaningful and it goes so much farther. I love what you said of doing it, not just when you're welcoming somebody, but when they've done something great or something that you really appreciate, large or small.

Absolutely. And I think one of the interesting things, Jenny, that I found in doing the research is it's understandable why organizations think, oh, it's just about getting them up to speed. It's just about getting them started. It's just about getting the ball moving. It's actually about continuing to be a place where people find growth, development, learning and opportunity. It's about being the type of employer or the type of community where we are fostering long term relationships. I certainly want people to take care of their employees in the first hundred days, you know, the first hundred days of the relationship, that's where all the foundation is laid, all the initial impressions are made. It's hugely important. But if you then, Starting on day 101, start taking your people or your team for granted, you forget to do the little extra things. You forget the special touches. It often kind of shows up like many marriages, right in the beginning, when there's the courting and the dating and the early stages, everything's fun and exciting and different. A year, in two years, in three years in, is it still as interesting and exciting? Are you still bringing surprise and delight moments to the conversation? Are you still doing the little extra touches, Writing the little note, bringing flowers, doing the special little gift, leaving the unexpected voicemail? These things that we do in our personal lives and our relationships, to have successful flourishing relationships, are things we should be doing in our professional lives with our team as well.

And you're right that it's so easy to take things and people for granted, especially in the business because things are moving quickly. You're just heads down getting things done. I've never thought to apply those same relationship principles of warmth and appreciation and directly map them to making sure we don't take team members for granted. I actually want to come back to that, but first let's zoom in on the first hundred days. I remember back in the day reading books like first 90 days. You've talked about helping people feel appreciated and that they matter. And you've given us some great ideas of when they're joining the company, how to do that within the first 90 days, or you described the first hundred days. You also write about how to help them feel accomplished, that it's actually quite important, not just that they get up to speed on your business, but that you kind of set them up for success in a very tangible sense. What do you recommend for onboarding somebody, even if they're part time? How can we strategically think about that first hundred days? Not just the small warmth, but touches that let them know we're excited to have them there, but giving them a sense of accomplishment as well.

I believe that many employers think, well, once you come to work for me, you're going to work for me forever. Right? We have this finish line that is some point, way, way off in the future. And our presumption is we're just going to keep moving forward until you either quit, retire or are fired. The problem with having a finish line that is so far away is that the average human being can't envision their progress unless their progress is marked. There is a reason why the number one best selling issue of Architectural Digest magazine every year is their before and after issue, where they show pictures of what the house looked like before and they show pictures of what the house looked like after. Your employees are the same way. They're in the before. They have a vision of what the after is, but it's not very clear and they don't know what the steps and the milestones are to get from where they are to where they want to be. Every employer has the opportunity to not only provide a roadmap and milestones of what the company expects the organization expects you to achieve and the pacing and what we're trying to work on, but also to collaboratively create that with the team member and to say, great, what are you looking to build out your skills for and how can we help you? There's a company that I profile in the book, that is a home heating oil and H vac propane company called SMO. It's in the mid Atlantic in the US and they had a call center with about 80 employees. And they wanted their call center agents to have a certain set of skills. And so they went through and they identified a host of skills, and they figured out what you needed to be doing kind of the curriculum under those skills. And they came up with a little pin, an enamel, colorful pin that you could put on a lanyard, kind of like a piece of flair if you've seen the movie Office Space. And because all their employees in the call center were wearing these lanyards and pieces of flair, now some of the people listening right now are going, okay, Joey, doesn't apply to me. 80 employees. I don't have a call center. Hang in there, friends. It does apply to your business, I promise you. What they did is they created these mini milestones where as team members achieved a level of competence, they were rewarded and acknowledged with this little pin. And the vision was as they got these pins and had more skill sets, they would also get for some of the pins, an associated raise, maybe 10 cents more an hour, a nickel more an hour, whatever it may be, because now they had more skills and would be able to serve more of the customers. The most fascinating thing about this project, Jenny, is we rolled it out, and about a month later, I got a frantic phone call from the head of the call center. And she's like, joey, we have a huge problem. I said, what's the problem? She said, several of the call center people have achieved all the pins. They got all the pins, they've done all the certifications. They've been coming in before their shift, staying afterwards. It's crazy. Their lanyards are covered with pins. What do we do? I said, well, first of all, why is this a bad thing? They're like, well, Joey, we weren't ready for this. I said, I get it. And maybe that's something we could have foreseen, but what's your concern? She's like, well, now they're gonna want more skills that they get to go after. It was like, why is this a bad thing? Yeah, this is magical. This is exactly what we want. And they're like, well, it took us so long to develop that curriculum, Joey. How can we do it and keep them hungry and interested? It's real simple. We just doubled the number of pins during this call. Like, oh, my gosh. Doing what? I said, now we have a train, the trainer pin for Each of the pins for each of the skill sets. When you reach the level that you train three other employees on this skill and they all earn their pins. Now you earn your pin as a trainer. And she was like, oh, my gosh, I think that could work. And it did. So how does this apply to your tiny team? Figure out what skills you need your people to know and then build milestones for them, achievable milestones, things they could learn in a week, in three weeks, in a month, in a quarter, and then track their progress towards it and help celebrate when they accomplish that goal.

I love that and I love the idea of pins. Love some good flair. I use wizardpens.com if anyone wants to know. Yeah. And what I love about this is also the gamification. And maybe if you have a really tiny team, there could be pins. The train, the trainer version is updating the manager manual or improving process. Once you learn these skills, there's also, have you made meaningful improvements to this area? And you can unlock new pin unlocked, new trophy unlocked. So that's really fun. What do you think? Let's say either within the first hundred days or beyond, what are some of the big faux pas that companies make of any size when they're trying to engage or retain team members?

I'll cite two, and I'll give an example of how to fix. Well, I think they're both actually fixed with a little bit of thought and intentionality. Challenge or problem number one that most organizations make is they think that onboarding is measured in days. Hey, it's your first day on the job. We'll get you up to speed. On day two, you're good to go, right? Or, hey, we're going to do onboarding for three days, three whole days of onboarding, and on day four, just jump in the water and swim yourself. Onboarding is a philosophy, not a program. It's a belief that we're constantly inviting in new employees through a managed, structured series of contacts that are repeatedly designed to create warm, welcoming experiences. It keeps going. You're constantly onboarding onto new tools, onto new processes, onto new approaches, onto new offerings, products, and services in the marketplace. So approaching it is a philosophy is, I think, a much better choice. The other thing where I see a lot of employers making a mistake is they think that the onboarding period is all about teaching the new team member our way of doing things. Like, here's how we do things. You need to do it this way. One of the case studies, ironically enough, that didn't make the book Was from the Ritz Carlton. Now stop and think, folks. If the Ritz Carlton case study didn't make the book, okay, there's some good case studies in the book. And that's not a dig on Ritz. They're amazing.

But it is a dig on Ritz. You know my feelings on.

I do know. I know you have some feelings on Ritz. That's really why they didn't make the book, Jenny, because Ritz made a huge mistake with you. And I said, no, they're not getting.

In the book with me and grandma. I'm going to link to that with you and grandma.

I know. Oh, my gosh.

I know you made.

Friends.

I actually knew a little bit about this story before, so I wasn't sure how far I should go into it on the show. I didn't realize. But here is something. The Ritz actually does well, at least at the property of the folks I was talking to. Maybe they don't do it at the property Jenny and her grandma were at. On day 21, after the employee has been there for about three weeks, they have a meeting with their manager. Not only their direct manager, but the manager of the entire location. And the meeting is quite simple. In the meeting, the two leaders ask this new employee, what are we doing right now as a company that just doesn't make sense to you? What are the things we're doing that you're like, oh, that's weird. Or, oh, there's a better way to do this? Or, yeah, it's kind of stupid the way you guys jump through this, this and this. Two beautiful things happen in that moment. Number one, you get insight as to where you maybe didn't do as good of a job explaining the why behind your process as you thought. But number two, new team members are worth their weight in gold because they have fresh eyes, they have a unique perspective. They can look at something and go, why do you do it with five steps when you could do it in two? Why do you have this archaic system and structure when there's this new tool that would allow us to do it in half the time at 1/100th the cost? I think many employers think that they're the smartest person in the room when we should recognize that everyone in the room has a perspective and ideas and possibilities that they could bring to bear to help our organization get better.

We'll be right back just after this.

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In free time. I say new here, help us hire the next you. Which means that's the philosophy that if you're new, help us hire the next you. Like, make it easier for that next person and that they are the ones that are going to see what's missing. The rest of us are too close to it or it's too long ago. So they're the best positioned with those fresh eyes. And I have found that also helps new team members feel some quick wins as well. Cause they're like oh yeah, well this was confusing and this and this and great. You're just helping us make it even easier for the next you.

Absolutely. And Jenny, you're so spot on when you can take a new employee and give them the feeling that they made a change in the organization they're working at. Now they're vested. Now they feel like they're part of the team. Now they feel like they have some stake in the game. One last quick case study from the book. There's a company called hootsuite that I'm sure you're familiar with, Jenny, that specializes in helping people kind of manage their social media connections in a single platform. Amazing Canadian company. And one of the things they do when they hire their new coders, their new software engineers, is they have those people push code on day one. What that means if you're not in the software space is when you're hired as an engineer at most companies, it's weeks, maybe even months before you are allowed to touch the source code that makes the system run with new employees at hootsuite, it happens on day one. And the reason it happens on day one is they want that employee to go home that night and feel like they did something substantive. If you had but one takeaway from our conversation today when you're thinking about bringing new team members on is try to figure out an activity, an exercise, something that that new team member can do on day one that Makes them feel invested into the code, if you will, of your organization, the operating system of your organization, the actual substance of the products and the services you deliver.

I love that One of our previous guests called it a code patch. I guess that's what you do. If there's a problem in the code, there's a code patch. And gosh, it's escaping me who was talking about it, but they were saying, each one of us has our unique code patch that we can offer to the world. And I love this lens that how can you help engineer it so that any new team members can very quickly create a patch of code for your company that's missing? Because there's always something missing.

Always.

Okay, Joey, the last question, which you know because you've been here before, is permission slip time. If you could give fellow small business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Many business leaders and many solo pluses and many folks running tiny teams are so hard on themselves. I know, I'm guilty of this, too. We think we should be doing it differently. Growing faster, more systems, more people, better service, better delivery, better experience. If there's one thing that I wish I could give permission to everyone to do, it's to be gentler with yourself. I imagine you're pretty good, hopefully, at being gentle with your team members and your customers and the vendors you work with. But most of the entrepreneurs, most of the leaders I know, the person they are most critical of is themselves. And so I'd love to encourage everyone to think about the experience of you, interacting with you and what you can do. To give little moments of surprise and delight to yourself, to give little moments of appreciation and gratitude to yourself, to recognize, reward, and acknowledge all you've done to make this possible and to really celebrate that and genuinely celebrate it, as opposed to a lip service celebration. I'll tell one quick story about this. So when I wrote my first book, Never Lose a Customer Again, that evening, my wife and I and my writing partner Sarah went to dinner and we went to a really nice steakhouse and we ordered our dinner, and the waiter had just left the table with our orders. And I said to my wife and my writing partner, okay, let's talk about book number two. I don't need a photo because the images burned into my mind. The look on their faces after we had just run multiple marathons back to back to get this book out into the world. And here I was as the leader saying, okay, now what? We hadn't even had the celebratory dinner, and I was moving on to the next thing. Take time to celebrate. Take time to celebrate yourself, to celebrate your team, to celebrate what you've accomplished. Because if you are navigating, running your own enterprise, whether that's a full business, a side hustle, a solo, plus a thriving organization of 3, 5, 10, 50, 100, however many folks you have on your team, you have accomplished something that most humans never will. That is you are creating impact at scale, and you are making the planet a better place. So take time to celebrate that for yourself.

What a brilliant reminder. Thank you so much for saying that. And it's so important. It's so true. In all this, we think about our customers, we think about our team members, thanks to you. And yet how often do we engineer and create those moments and systems of delight for ourselves? It occurs to me, Joey, I think the third book in your trilogy could be Never Lose yourself again for CEOs. Wouldn't it be so good?

I love it. Something to think about. Something to think about. I love it.

But although now I'm doing what you did at that dinner, it's like the first.

No, no, no, no. It's great. Well, to tell you the truth, I already know what the next book's gonna be. Maybe we can save that for a future. It's already there. The next book has been writing itself in the back of my mind for over a decade. And now that these two books, which I kind of see as a companion set, are done and out in the world, it's time to focus on the next one, which I think my goal is that it has a much broader audience than just employees or customers experiences, and thinks more collectively about our experiences as human beings and what we can do to deliver the best possible experience to every human we interact with in our personal and professional lives. That's the next book that's coming.

I love it.

Little advance share on free time with Jenny Blake that no one else knows about. Exclusive. Exclusive.

I love it. And we have a cliffhanger now. See, I said that part of the way I maintain friendships is by having a podcast. So now we're locked in for even the next book. And I so appreciate you sharing that dinner story. I was thinking in my mind, now you're having crickets for dinner. Because the reaction. And I remember when my first book, Life After College, launched, I was so burnt out because I just didn't know how to do it. And I had so much inner turmoil in the writing and the launching, and I had a lot going on and Every single person who came up to me said, so what's next? And that question drove me bonkers because I'm like, I've just killed myself to deliver you this thing that you're holding in your hands. What's next? Are you joking? And ironically that became the crux of Pivot was to help people answer that question, what's next? Because it sits like such a thorn in your side when you're, you just haven't even taken a second. I'm like, I just gave everything I had over the last three years to create this thing you're holding. And the first thing you can think to ask is, what's next?

What's next?

It's just this natural human response.

Exactly. It's the obvious question for a non author to ask an author.

Yes.

Authors don't usually ask each other that question because they're like, oh, oh, they might have a love hate relationship with their status right now.

Yeah, exactly.

I love it.

Oh, well, thank you so much, Joey. I always love talking to you and you're a listener favorite. Many people wrote in about the last conversation and I know this one will make a big impact too. So thank you. Let people know where can they find you and be sure listeners grab your copy of Never Lose an Employee Again. Where else do you want to send people?

Yeah, so the best place to go if you're interested in getting the book. We worked really hard to create the book in every format you might want to consume it in at the same time. So unlike some other books, we're releasing the hardcover edition, the ebook edition, and the audiobook edition all at the same time. So if you like listening to audiobooks, if you like the sound of my voice during our conversation today, I narrate the audiobook to you. So all of those are available wherever you like to get books. Check out your indie bookstore locally. God, we gotta support our local bookstores so that we have a place to go and browse and have fun with books. But of course it's available at the big book places that you know about as well. And if you want more, come on over to joeycolman.com that's j o e y like a five year old or a baby kangaroo. Coleman C O L E M A N like the camping equipment, but no relation. Joeycolman.com youm've got the opportunity to sign up to experience the book there, to get access to different videos and checklists and that type of thing in the vault that is associated with the book. So check it out. And then let me know how things go as you work to enhance the experiences your team members have when they interact with you in the first hundred days and beyond.

Amazing. Thank you so much Joey. You rock. And big thanks to everybody who's here listening.

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

Thank you.

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