Easy Annual Planning for Bootstrappers

All right. What I was saying was that we're going to be covering annual planning at the beginning. That's the meat of this conversation. Then we're going to go into, uh, us showing you how we can help you grow your sales, uh, in 2025. And then finally, we'll answer questions throughout. Keep the questions coming.

We're going to do this conversation style between me and Jesse. Um, and I'll do my best to read your questions. But as I said, the third part of this section, the third part of our agenda will be to get to the meat of your questions and we'll spend the most time there on your questions. Jesse, the, uh, the first thing that you told me was, Andrew, I've tried every different system for keeping track of annual planning and coming up with our plans, and none of them work. Talk about what, what happened when you tried the others.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been doing this for about 15 years now, and, you know, I, I was, I was very focused as an entrepreneur from very young to be like, oh, I gotta build a, I gotta build a great company. And so I'd just go around and I'd look for books like this and say, okay, okay, OKRs, that's the answer. And the truth was, I, and I think this is somewhat normal when you're learning, if you learn tennis, for example, you have to, they teach you the stroke in a very mechanical, methodical way, but it's very different than how you might hit it in a match. And I just kept taking the processes like OKRs, OK, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna roll it out to the company. Here's the plan, check in on them. And they sort of became administrative. That was what I found happened. So that was one big issue. What do you mean by administrative?

It's just like, hey, everyone set your goals. Now when do you wanna be?

Okay, check the goals. Let's make sure it gets done. It was a bunch of check the boxes as opposed to, you know, what later I realized and what I tried to build with the system here is it's, this is all just a process to think about your business and it's meant to be lightweight and it doesn't need to be so heavy that it sort of takes the, you know, it loses the importance of it. If to me, again, like I've said this quote and I think everyone's heard me say it, which is, I think it's Eisenhower or someone is, Plans are useless. Planning is invaluable. I was talking to Adrian yesterday all about her plan and she's like, oh, this and that. And I said, yeah, but what happens if the head of sales gets a job for $1 million 2 weeks into his first year? And she's like, oh, I'm like, well, yeah, then, then the entire plan we have here. But the value of it is we've thought about what needs to get done from that part of the team and we have a sense for where we want to spend time and resources.

And so I just found all these other systems to be too heavy.

And I didn't find them as they sort of lost the essence of planning for me, which was to, you know, ultimately you're sitting at this time and making decisions around where you want to spend money with the hope of creating an outcome that you're trying to create. And that's actually what you're trying to drill down to.

Jesse, I had 2 experiences with setting up annual planning in the past.

The first was it felt like doing homework in school where it was just endless data crunching and endless work. for something that didn't work out. And the second was, I remember living in San Francisco, going down to this great coffee shop, um, before New Year's and just spending hours journaling. What do I want for the year? How do I want to get there? And then fricking A, the next year I would go do the same thing and I would look back at last year and none of it happened. And I felt like such a failure. And I said, why am I bothering to do this annual planning if it's never gonna work? And I would not admit this except last year you helped me, you helped me get into the, uh, Uh, San Antonio Marathon. And the whole time I was listening to the My First Million guys talk about annual planning and how they were never gonna do it again cuz it never worked out. And here we are now going through this and you're saying that the benefit of planning is better and more meaningful than the plan that you create.

Yeah, it's, it's like you, you wanna walk up a mountain and you go, okay, I'm gonna I got to go here. I'm going to go this many paces this right, then I'm going to make a left here. And then all of a sudden there's a mudslide and you can't go down that side. And while I can guarantee everyone listening, you're going to have a mudslide next year of some kind.

But the fact that you actually talked about it and thought through, well, hold on, this is one way we're going to do this.

And now, you know, in case this happens, we're going to flip it in this direction. That's where all the value comes in.

The other thing is, is the, you know, there's—

if you want to organize a group of people to go get anything done, there's a bunch of people who need to go in one direction. If they don't have clarity for where they want to go, they, they don't, they're just going to run in a bunch of different directions.

And so in your case, it's interesting, Andrew, what you just said is sort of like the two ends of the spectrum. You know, one is like super soft or just, hey, here's what I wish would happen. And I hope this is going to happen. The other one is so rigid that it loses all its value to me.

Hopefully what this is for everyone is, is a simple connection point. Again, I'll give an example from our planning, Andrew. We did this last week. You know, we were just like, well, what's, well, what are our goals for the first quarter?

Yeah.

And you hadn't actually thought about them.

And I said, well, let's get 20,000 new email addresses for Bootstrap Giants.

This was like—

I was doing that goal planning.

And immediately that made everyone go, okay, well, how do we get 20,000?

How much do we need to spend on ads? What needs to happen in terms of expectation for ads? What needs to come from the organic content? How much organic content do we need to do?

There was an entire discussion that took place from one simple goal around what would need to happen in order to accomplish that. Now, will we accomplish that? I don't know.

That I can't promise, but I can promise that had we not had that conversation, then you wouldn't have hired someone that you hired this week. You wouldn't have gotten yourself set up in that way. And, and it just would've been chaotic at best, and it would've been ineffective at worst. And so to me, the value is to start with where you want to be and then work backwards to essentially think about what actually needs to be true for you to get to that place. Okay.

All right.

We have got, um, as our guide for this conversation is the doc that you all have. If you are here, you have gotten this, and I'm gonna share my screen so that you can see this. This is it. Where in the middle of the doc, I think, is the most important part, which is the steps for creating your goals. This is the exact process that I did with Jesse last week. Um, and it starts out with something that's so unusual for me, the desired future state and the current reality. Why don't we do the current reality first, Jesse?

And then—

No, no, no, no, no, no. We always do desired future state first.

Okay.

Because here's why. Hold on.

This is really important because you also did this last week and I was gonna give you feedback on this.

The whole point of building a vision for something is you are not constrained by what's here today.

And most entrepreneurs' biggest mistake on this is to constrain themselves on what's here today.

And I want everyone to feel this. When JFK gave his famous speech about putting a man on the moon, he said, we are gonna put a man on the moon in this decade.

He did not go, well, here's the current state of the science experimentation or the space experimentation program.

He said, we're gonna put a man on the moon. And I want you guys all harness that as leaders, your inner JFK, which is, this is what I want next year. It doesn't mean it's gonna come true, but it's, you gotta come out and have a bold vision and something that you really desire.

And we'll talk about how you can bring that into a financial plan in a second.

But it's gotta start, it always starts with a desired future state. I want this for Bootstrap Giants. It's, you know, Andrew, I want 100,000 email subs. I want 200 people joining our, you know, the big kind of private group we're gonna create. It's, 1,000 people taking your accelerators, right?

So here is our DFS, desired future state. And again, we're not done with this. This was us starting last week and it started with what does it look like in 10 years? Where's the revenue? What are our margins? How do we wanna function as a business? We decided in a conversation, actually, I didn't feel a lot of energy towards any kind of co-investing. So we're gonna cross that out. But there was a lot of energy towards the way that we would team up with people who we were working with. Then we went back into 3 years. Um, and that's when we start to get things like podcasts going and newsletter size and, and things that are more directly related to our business. And then we did what's the 1 year? And interesting, through the conversation, we realized actually we don't really want this $25,000 product that we had on the list. And we started making some, some other considerations.

Like one thing I want to point out, I'm so glad you're sharing this, Andrew, is like, it's specific.

There's numbers, there's data. And I know it can be scary and Andrew gets scared because he's afraid if he puts a number here, then one day I'm going to come back and go, hey Andrew, why don't we hit this number? That's not the point of it is the clearer you make your vision, the more likely you are to kind of live in it. If you're, if you're really woo woo, they're like, you got to bring your vibration up to that level to actually accomplish that. And you got to feel what that feels like. And so to me, this is a huge beginning part of it. The other really reason it's super important is even if you have one other team member, like a co-founder, You got to align with that person on what you're doing.

The way I always frame this in meetings with the team is I'll say something like, guys, before we get into the hows of all these things, everyone wants to get to the how. How are we going to do this? How are we? No, no, no.

Hold on.

Before we do this, let's first decide, are we climbing a mountain or are we going scuba diving? Because if you're— you got to choose which one you're doing. Otherwise, you know, the equipment choices you make are completely different.

How do I know if I need a harness and a rope or an oxygen tank? First, I gotta decide which one I'm doing.

And oftentimes when you find teams are not working, even co-founder relationships, or you yourself, if you're doing this by yourself, why you're getting stuck is 'cause you haven't actually gotten clear about what you want in a year.

There's not alignment on where, like the, whether you're doing the mountain or the scuba diving. Once you get clarity on that, oftentimes the how parts of it become very straightforward. Okay, so that's the DFS. Let's, let's keep it moving.

You know what, one, one other thing that stood out for me was I went, uh, to lunch with Adam, who's on the GatewayX team, and he says, look, you don't like the homepage of the site, put that on there.

What's a homepage that excites you?

And so you can see that here in the comment.

And the other thing he said was, you have this energy for working outdoors and like working from an outside, uh, table. Why don't you add that? And so I told him the reason I didn't wanna add that was that's not a businessy goal. That's not a business vision. That's a personal preference.

Like I prefer to sit in a seat here, have a nice background.

How much of that would you include in a DFS versus things like what the revenue is going to be, the number of members, the number of team members?

I mean, again, a big part of the—

my values at Bootstrap Giants is by being bootstrapped, you can create the future you want. And if you take investor money or you do other things, it's harder to do that. So if you don't list the things you personally want, then you're going to create something that you don't actually want.

Well, that's the, that's the worst thing you could do is create something that you don't actually want because you think you should want it. And so Andrew, if you create a plan here that requires you working 6 days a week and you want to work 4 days a week, well, that's a horrible—

like, that's exactly, exactly what we're trying to get aligned on, which is that, hold on, we climbed the wrong mountain here.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

And so, yeah, I would put anything like— and I've like did this the other day with Adrian personally.

It was— it started personally because what's your— tell me about your DFS in 5 years before we talk about the company's DFS, because the company has to fit inside the person's DFS and vice versa.

Okay. All right. Um, so it starts with desired future state, and we actually did start our meeting with current reality. I think we've got everything on desired future state, but let me bring this up. This is in the doc. And by the way, I love that Nak, uh, the COO from GatewayX is in the chat because someone asked for a link to this and he included it in the chat. Um, in your doc that came in this planning guide that you have, you have, uh, Casey's and Casey's desired future state, which she had done.

And one of the things that stood out for me was what she wanted St. Louis, her city, to be, to represent, and how she wanted it to be.

How would you describe this, Jesse?

She's looking, I'm looking for the item on the list. She wanted it to be—

Yeah, the last one. They're adding flights to Lambert because of us, right? I remember when I was in San Francisco, there was like specific routes that United opened up to all these Chinese cities. It was clearly driven by Apple. Because Apple's flying all over China and they literally opened up flights, or there was a St. Louis-San Francisco because of Square. So it's like a fun, it's like a fun vision thing of like, yep, we gotta add some routes because this company's got so many people flying back and forth.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah, you're wrong. Let's go to current reality.

So if you're, you know, for a moment you're drunk and you're thinking about this crazy future state or you're high or whatever you are and you're so excited about it. Now you gotta like go take a walk around the block, slap yourself across the face a few times, take a shower and go, okay, now I need to be like a financial analyst.

Now I'm gonna get really real with myself about where my business is.

What did I actually do in numbers? Where am I? Where are things messed up? Where are things broken? What's not working?

What is working?

You don't need to be all negative, but you need to be very clear. The idea of current reality is to get a very clear perspective on the actual things going right and wrong in your business. Sometimes, you know, Nak and I will do a reflection exercise on just like what went well, what didn't go well, what are things that we, you know, we feel proud of, what are things we don't feel? They're just simple questions to try to, try to bring yourself presence to this moment of where you actually are.

Now, again, the mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make, one mistake in the other direction is they, they build their vision with through today's lens, and then it's not a big vision and it's not a very inspiring vision. The other mistake they make is they look at today with rose-colored glasses. Well, yeah, that initiative's not working, but we didn't actually give it our best.

So let's not actually say it's not working yet.

Or we think we could do this, but we're actually, it will work.

We just haven't gotten to it yet. We haven't made the time for it yet. No, you wanna be as dry and as sort of just telling it like it is when you think of current reality and purposely creating these 2 pretty different places because the name of the game with planning is to start to build the bridge between A very clear sense of current reality and this beautiful vision that you're excited about. That is the point of planning and it's the point of all the things that come after it.

And so again, if you give yourself rose-colored glasses, you're not going to plan to fix a problem that's there because you're telling yourself it's not a problem. You're, oh, it's already solved, so I don't need to fix it.

And then your plan won't work and then you'll go, oh, it's not working. Why isn't it working?

And so it's really important. These are completely different sort of mindsets.

And oftentimes, again, if you have multiple people on the team, you could have different people. Like, it's better for me to do DFS and Nak to do current reality because of our personalities, right? And that's like, it's a helpful way to play off of each other.

Okay. If anyone has any questions on this, put them in the chat. I think we can move on to the next one, but you've got what another GatewayX company had done last year as their assessment, and this is a helpful guide for you.

All right.

Let's come back then to the next part of the process, which is goals.

So goals should be, again, back to this concept.

Now you're sitting at the base of the mountain or you're JFK and you're like, in 10 years, I want to go to the moon. Your goals should be the things that over the next, that period, it's usually a year. Sometimes even just, I like to do 3 months depending on how much visibility there is. What specific things need to happen for me to go from current reality to desired future state? And it's, you know, to put the example I gave earlier, it's really helpful to start with goals and then you're going to work backwards from the how of those goals, right? And by the way, some people call these rocks, some people call these objectives, some people call them, I assume, you know, my old, my coach calls them waypoints, which is kind of a sailing metaphor. It don't really matter what you call them.

There's something you want.

There's some state you want to live in. It could be, I want, we want, you know, for, for Reset Giants, by the end of Q1, we want 40,000 email addresses in our, in our weekly email.

That's a goal.

That's something we're trying to accomplish. Now, there's just a, you know, more color around goals. I like to set goals that are ambitious, and if I come in slightly short of them, I'm like, that's fine, whatever. Let's keep moving. What's the next goal?

Um, Andrew and other people I've worked with, they like to set goals that are a little bit more modest and then beat their goals.

There's no right answer to this. This is really about—

these are all tools, guys, to motivate you and align your teams.

They're not, you know, they're not some life authority to judge yourself by. This is not a report card for your life. This is a system you're using to make your business function better.

But don't get so—

If I'm saying to myself, I wanna hit 40,000 people, shouldn't I do everything possible to hit 40,000?

And then if I don't hit 40,000, Uh, subscribers of our newsletter.

Don't I lose credibility with my team when I say we're gonna hit 40,000?

Here's how we're gonna do it.

I, I mean, it, again, it depends all on the culture you've set up for the team and the organization. If you say, I'm the kind of culture that when I set a goal, like, is a goal an agreement? Is it a, is it a promise? Like, hey, we're starting this at 10:30 today and we started at 10:30. No, it's not.

It's not.

It's not a, it's not a promise.

Right. And that's how I would differentiate it is a promise is a promise. A promise means it's something I'm gonna do. I will be at this time at this place, and you can rely on that for credibility. A goal is something I aspire to, right?

And by the way, there's no— if you're going to do that, and we'll talk later in the 30-60-90, you know, when you get to the next level of planning, but you're going to— you could say, well, I will sign in blood, Jesse, we'll get to $30,000 by the end of the quarter. Okay, fine.

That's a commitment, right?

So it's all just— these are all devices for how you plan.

I, again, I prefer to do something that's out there, 40,000, and then work against it.

Now we'll talk again in the financial plan aspects of this.

That doesn't mean I build my financial plan around that because that's a good way to bankrupt yourself. My financial plan will be built around a conservative projection for where I think the business will be.

And again, and these are the 2 turbans I wear. There's the big visionary guy thinking about what's out there.

And then there's like, hold on, the financial— there's Goldman Jesse. And he's like, wait a second, guys, I don't care what you say, you're not going to hit this number. I can be proven wrong, but we're going to plant, you know, We're going to budget to a number that's more conservative.

Okay.

So goals are, I'm saying by the end of the year, my DFS is to get to a certain number of email subscribers, certain amount of revenue. The goals are, what do I do? What are the waypoints to get to that? How many customers do I need to have in the first quarter? How many paid email subscribers do I need to have? How many do we want organic? That kind of a thing.

Correct.

And Again, to make this specific, let's say for Bootstrap Giants, just to show the interplay between these things, you wanted to do, or Rachel wanted to do in our DFS for the year, some sort of VIP version of the accelerator.

Now, if that had stayed in our DFS, first of all, it didn't stay.

We got rid of it and it was helpful for everyone to go, okay, we don't actually want to do that. Now that opens up everyone's brain paths to go, well, what else can we do now that we're saying no to that thing? We can do other things.

Had that stayed in there, then we'd say, well, we have this goal, this goal, this goal, but we might go, wait a second, guys, we want to get more email subs, we want to run accelerators, we want to have a membership group.

Hey guys, there's just no room for this other DFS.

So there's interplay between making sure the goals you're setting are actually going to lead you to the future you want, right?

And oftentimes this is, again, it's not meant to be so technical, but oftentimes you'll look at the goals and go, well, if I accomplish all those, will I get my desired future state? Or Is that desired future state based on the current goals I have?

There's some other good specifics in here that I think are worth covering.

Andrew, you'll hear me talk about—

By the way, Samantha in the audience asked a question. Samantha, if you wanna unmute yourself, I'll bring you up to ask it. Which parts, Jesse? Oh, she did. We'll bring her in in a moment.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, real quick. So my question is related to, I call it goal setting, but maybe it's the desired future state. And my main question is why revenue or why not revenue? Just because email subscribers could be your North Star Right? You need active subscribers to make sure that you can sell to them. But I'm curious, what's the downside, if any, to using revenue? I'm just curious about the thought process behind—

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, you saw there was revenue in the desired features. Desired features state kind of this broad vision.

I think you're talking about the North Star metric. Let's talk about a couple things here because it's actually a good setup for this section. One is, remember, a North Star metric is a device. It's a device you're using to align your brain and your theme and your team against one thing. 'Cause you want everyone to wake up in the morning and go, email subs, email subs, what can I do to drive email subs? And if you say that versus revenue versus whatever, what I've found, Samantha, is that revenue is a really, it's a, it's very much an output metric and it's very hard for a team to grasp revenue because it's so far away from the world they live in that, and this is, so now let's talk about outputs and inputs. Scroll up just a little bit, Andrew.

Yep.

But no, scroll down. Just, I want you to show the examples and this. Yeah.

So an output is something you don't actually, don't actually control, right?

You don't control the number of sales that close. I know that sounds weird, but you don't. You take 10 sales calls and it might be 2 and it might be 4. Like the truth is you don't control that directly. You cannot promise me that.

What you can promise me is I'm gonna get take 10 meetings.

And I'm gonna do my best I can on the job to do it. And I, that likely will lead to a better number.

So oftentimes, again, for revenues, such an output, it's so far on the, like I think of the input-output scale.

And let's just talk through this for a second. I'm actually glad we're recording this.

So, you know, let's take a, take a B2B sales business.

There's revenue all the way on this side. There's, let's say Growth Assistant. There's, we closed 15 logos in a month at $3,000 each. That's $45,000 in new MRR. That's all the way here in the outputs. That's what ended up happening. One level up on what I call kind of output metrics would be number of meetings taken times conversion rate per meeting times revenue per conversion, right? Those would be 3 outputs.

Those are still not things you can control technically, because even the number of meetings you got was a function of other stuff you did.

Now, if you go to inputs, it would be how many outreaches did I do? That's something I can actually control.

How many, how well did I run those sales meetings?

Those are all inputs, right? How did I, did I present the, the 2-for-1 special on each of the meetings?

So there's these things that you go, I actually control these. Let me measure those things I can control, see how they translate into the outputs, which eventually translate into like a downstream output.

And that's what these examples are showing, right? So again, if you want CAC of 50, the output metric is conversion rate. You still don't control conversion rate technically. Right? You're a marketer, Samantha, you know that.

You can't actually control conversion rate.

What you can control is I can do 2 new landing page tests per week, and I need to get all this activity done in order to get those things accomplished.

So you start to build this, and you'll see again, big thing for me is rigor. And I want to be clear that depending on the size and where you are in your business, like there's, we're doing a lot of this stuff for Growth Assistant because it's 3 years old.

We're not doing a lot of this stuff for Bootstrap Giants. We don't have the data, and it's silly to try to pretend you have data when you don't have data. You're better off just going and doing more stuff.

That's a good question, actually. Nak, the COO of GatewayX, kept bringing up you're different from Growth Assistant. Your setup is going to be different because we're a newer company. What is the difference in DFS and goal setting when you're a new company versus one that's later on?

You know, I think generally you have a better sense for how things perform.

You know, you obviously you can do brand new initiatives for Growth Assistant, for example, We're launching Facebook ads for the first time. Well, that's like anything you do, it's completely green. There's no way we can know what the CAC is. There's no way we'd know anything about it. The flip of that is like we have a very good sense for how many Twitter threads Adrian posts and what we're likely to get in terms of visits and impressions. And we, that, so one thing you're planning with a much more sort of predictable lens and the other one is unpredictable. Whereas in Andrew, for BG, 80% of what we're doing is in the unpredictable category.

Yeah.

And one tip we used to give at Ampush for every company, and we do this, is once you're at maturity, you kind of want, in my opinion, you want 70% of what you're doing to be predictable and like what you expect, and 30% to be kind of like a crazy experiment that you're not sure what to expect. For BG, we don't have that luxury yet because we're too new of a company. So we're probably 20 or 30% and 70%. And we just, that means we just need to go do more shit.

And just keep learning from that.

And you keep learning. That's why like over the weekend there was this email, Andrew, that came in.

Mm-hmm.

Right. I know the guy was saying, I wanna try to sell the accelerator to people without ever getting on a workshop or a date, a one-on-one sales call, which is something you and I hadn't even put in the plan. And my response was like, well, I'm sure I'm like, I'd be curious to see if this works.

Like, I, there's just no way to make a decision against it.

I, there's no way I can make a decision against it. I just gotta try. We gotta try it. Now you can only try so many things 'cause you only have so many resources, but, which is a good segue into the next part of this. But, but that's how I would think about it.

Before we move on, how are you doing with this so far, everyone? 2 sections. We talked about goals just now and we talked about DFS versus current state.

What's up?

And I'll shut this poll down in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. All right, I think we're good. All right, so let's go then to the next section. ICE, impact, confidence, and ease. Let me, let's talk about what this is. And then I want to bring up an actual spreadsheet that can help guide this conversation further.

Yeah, let's talk about, let's talk about this at a high level. Go up, Andrew. Again, I want to be careful that people don't take this stuff and just blindly sort of apply it because that's what oftentimes happens. That's what happens with OKRs.

To me, I always just ask the question like, okay, we're going to do X, we're going to run Facebook ads for Growth Assistant.

Okay, if that works, how big could it be? And how big will it be in a month, 6 months, 2 years if it works? Oftentimes that part's really easy to answer, by the way. And it's really important, by the way, to separate these 3, 'cause oftentimes people will commingle the 3 and it makes it very hard to think about it. It's like, okay, independently, if it's successful, let's not question the success, 'cause that's what happens.

Oh no, wait, what if it doesn't work? No, no, no, just assume it's successful.

Like simply, for growth, this is a dumb example, like Facebook versus Pinterest, which one has a higher impact? Okay, Facebook ads obviously are gonna have a higher, you know, thing than Pinterest.

Confidence is always, is the really important one.

And everyone gets this one. It's confusing.

Also, confidence is how, like, how likely are we to have success here?

Now, this again has to be formulaic, which isn't your opinion of your likelihood to be successful, because that's just a formula for, basically that's like a way of hacking this algorithm to just do the things you think you're going to do good at. It has to be objective.

And the objective question is, do you or anyone else on the team, have you seen, have you done this before and have you had success with it?

If so, then it's high confidence.

If it's, if you have never done anything with this and no one's heard, but you're, you know, you're just totally a brain, crazy brain idea, then it's low confidence.

There's just almost no way it's gonna work.

And then if you've heard of a friend does it, or you had limited exposure and experience with it, then it's sort of a medium confidence thing, right? So as an example, this guy over the weekend, he wanted to sell the accelerator via email.

Well, if you asked Andrew right now, there's 2 ways that we were planning on selling it. One was Andrew and/or a salesperson getting on the phone and talking to potential entrepreneurs and enrolling them.

Well, Andrew would tell you that that probably has medium impact because— but he has 99% confidence it's going to work. Why? Because he did it. He sold 25 or 30 people on this thing and it worked, right, Andrew?

It worked. Ben and I had a conversation and Leo, who's in here, and I had a conversation.

And yeah, that's right.

So that feels high confidence.

And the workshop feels like medium to high, probably because we also had success there, but we don't have our finger on the pulse the way we'd like to. Right. We said we had some.

We did. Yeah, we did a workshop to sell the accelerator last time and yeah, we did okay.

We know it enrolled people. We don't have the numbers. We don't feel yet. And then the third one is this guy's like, I can just sell it right over email.

And we're like, whatever. Okay, low confidence. Right.

He seemed high confidence, but me and Andrew are low confidence on that.

And then ease again is how much resources do you want to put against this thing.

So ideally, right, it's like something that's gonna have a massive impact, you're extremely confident, and it takes no resources. If the sales thing took Andrew no resources, that's all we'd be doing.

We wouldn't even be talking about anything else. But the fact of the matter is that's a very low ease thing. It takes tons of time. So it tends to be the kind of thing that we're all going, well, hold on, maybe we can sell it over email first, then we'll do workshops, then finally we'll push ourselves to sales if we have to in order to hit our goal. So there's kind of a waterfall of effort you can see there around the way this works.

Now, the goal also, by the way, is every quarter to get more confidence in the things you're doing.

So the next quarter—

Excuse me.

That you can— that falls into high confidence stuff.

And as you build a business, you can almost think of it as a bunch of stocks, right?

It's a bunch of initiatives that you're getting into the place where they're like high, medium to high impact, very high confidence, and very high ease. And a company that's functioning really well just has a bunch of things where it's like, I know the impact, it's good, I'm very confident, and it's easy, right? And that's like, the more you have of those, the more successful your business will be.

Ricardo's asking, how do you differentiate between something that's urgent and important here?

So, you know, some people do TICE, so they'll say time, Impact, confidence, ease, which is sort of like a time.

What's the time?

Like time is based on?

Well, it's like, when do I expect this impact to happen?

Because I could have something very high impact, very high confidence, very high ease, but if it takes a year, that's not gonna be as interesting as something that might be different on those. I think typically it's pretty obvious in terms of urgent versus important. The other thing, the reason I didn't wanna show that spreadsheet just yet is that this can get very granular. You can do it at the most granular level. But I would always mentally as a leader and a CEO, I'd do it in my own mind first. What do I think are the big 3 to 5 things here that I wanna make my bets on? And why do I wanna make my bets on those things before I get into all the granularity around this stuff?

Yeah, I'm kind of afraid of showing this spreadsheet even though it helps clarify things because I've done this with like Noah Kagan from AppSumo in the early days of Mixergy. He got on with me and he did this And he just whipped it up in a quick spreadsheet with just 4 or 5 columns. Um, but I do think it's helpful to show what's going on at Growth Assistant because I think that's part of what we're about.

Ooh.

Um, are we about to share something that's too private, Jesse?

I don't know.

You tell me.

I'm about to share the Growth Assistant data here. I'm sorry.

I think if it's old, is it old?

Uh, 2024 initiatives. From last year.

All right, let's take a look at it.

All right. Sorry, I've been getting messages. So I should tell you all that part of our goal here with Bootstrap Giants is to take data from all these GatewayX companies and make them available to other people. And we lean on the side of sharing a lot, but I should say also that we have had requests internally, especially from Growth Assistant, actually from Casey Tudes, please not share too much of that. That's super private, but I'm about to share this with you.

Yeah, I mean, they're running real businesses with real competitors and stuff, so they wanna be mindful of that. But anyway, let's go, carry on.

Yeah, okay, all right. I don't wanna take that lightly. All right, so this is a growth assistant doc right here. Do you wanna walk people through this or do you wanna do that?

Yeah, I think again, this is a pretty high-level initiatives list, right?

And you can see some stuff, pursue tuck-in initiatives. Okay, great. We can go buy businesses. Well, guess what? You know, I've bought a couple businesses in my day. Adrian never has. And it's, you know, and these, this 30-60-90 is formulaic, by the way. So don't, the first time I ever did this, I was like assigning like 37.2% and realized my team was spending all this time trying to assess these things. And we realized, no, that's not the point.

Yes.

The point is kind of a swag at these numbers to start to get some sense of an alignment. Against them, so you can just—I mean—you can get a sense that there's all these different ideas, by the way.

And every every company runs around with a million ideas, right?

How we could do this?

Why don't we try this marketing channel? What if we offer that?

And you can see the granularity goes from pursue talking M&A to offer discounts to current customers in exchange for longer-term contracts. Like it gets pretty specific, and and these things are getting ranked up in terms of what needs to get done around these.

So it starts to when you when you take all these items in a list.

And you list them this way, you know, and sometimes we'll call this a backlog or we'll call it, you know, parking lot or whatever. It just, this is where the other thing that I'll call out and NAC is really good about this is when new ideas present, they should land on this list as opposed to what typically happens is someone goes and chases it down immediately. But a good sort of disciplined way of building your business is, no, I have an idea. Okay, let's put it on the list and let's next quarter or next month, next week, whenever, let's reevaluate it and reassess this situation. And this, by the way, it looks a lot like the way product managers build products, or I mean, we do this in marketing as well. Like we're just constantly thinking about what needs to happen next based on a current prioritization.

So if this is the goals from the previous section, these are initiatives that can get to these goals. These are the KPIs that go along with it. And then you start assessing what's the impact that something like this could have? What's the confidence that we can do this? How— what's the cost? Then you get an average. And then what they did here was they decided which quarter they would do it in based on the total result. Kind of interesting, though. Fewer people reporting to Adrian, even though this has an average of 70, it was still passed on to second quarter instead of moving to first quarter.

Why would— This also gives fodder.

I mean, like, I don't know, this is some probably old data, but like I'm guessing the idea of this is maybe where time came into place or whatever, but is it really that easy? Is it really that easy to reorg the company? Or is that something where it's like, yeah, that's actually going to be medium?

This is also one thing I'll do oftentimes with the CEOs and with teams is just, you actually want everyone in your company doing this with everyone is going, is that really high impact? What evidence do we have that that's high impact?

I don't know. Maybe it might not be high impact to reduce her reports. Like, I would pressure test this and is it really gonna be easy? And I would myself go back, I think it's like medium impact and actually low ease. So let's hold off on it, right? So it starts to create a language, it starts to create the ability to, and oftentimes, by the way, I think most business arguments are essentially a disagreement on one of these 3 things.

How effective is this thing gonna be? Is it really gonna be as easy as you think it's gonna be?

Yeah, like when you and I argue about something, Andrew, it's usually because we have a different belief about the impact of it.

I think it's gonna be huge. You think it's gonna be small or vice versa.

Or you think it's gonna be really time consuming.

I'm not appreciating that. And you're going, wait. And that's oftentimes like, you know, John Oberlander, who'd learned how to manage me really well. I go, wait, Jesse, how long do you think this is gonna take us? I'm like, I don't know, 5 hours? He's like, dude, 50 hours. And I'm like, oh wait.

And then by the way, that leads to another level of problem solving where I'll go, wait, what the hell are you gonna spend 50 hours on? And he heard what I was saying as this huge initiative. And I said, no man, just call 20 people. And, you know, so, so it starts to let you have problem solving and, and get into this really thoughtful way of thinking. And, and, you know, look, again, for everyone listening, this has come outta one person's brain, mine, and with a lot of other people's help.

You gotta take the parts of it that resonate and that you can execute well. You don't wanna be in a situation where you're trying to do all this stuff and you don't fully believe in it or understand, or it's not gonna suit your leadership style 'cause it won't work.

I should say it came from your mind, but it's something that you'd use at Ampush and you talked about for a long time. You've done it at Growth Assistant. I've seen how Casey did it at Hawks. We've shown how it was done at Unblown.

It definitely works, right? And you always want to make sure—

make it your own, let's put it that way.

Let's bring, uh, Carlo on. Carlo, can you unmute yourself? What was the question that you were asking?

Uh, yeah, since you mentioned the similarity with product management, my question is, with doing the decision in which quarter What direct?

You can eat the beef. Is it the beef in the corner?

Yeah, it is a CEO, or if the CEO has a biz ops or chief of staff, that person's probably managing this process. It's ultimately the CEO's decision on how you do what and sequence it. Part of the alignment exercise is getting everyone sees this on the team and goes, do they agree or disagree and why and why not? And that's kind of the alignment parts of this.

By the way, Carlo, are you doing this on your own or are you doing it with someone else?

I'm doing it on my own.

I'm trying to bootstrap Avengers Studio.

All right on. If I were you, Carlo, I'd get multiple different hats and you kind of have to bring in different personas for yourself.

And I actually do that as a tactic for myself to get, because sometimes I want to be in one mindset versus another mindset. And they all sort of require you to play slightly different roles to kind of roll this thing up and make it work. You know, Jesse, I'm crying with the AI. I like that.

I was talking with Ben Fisher from Rodeo before we got started about how I was dreading this whole process. And part of what helped me do it was that I had a goal of showing it to you all at GatewayX last week.

And I had Rachel, who was doing it with me, And I find that it's a lot easier with someone else.

Like doing it on my own feels like it would just drag on and on and on. Do you have any advice for someone who doesn't have GatewayX behind them? Like look at Carlo.

Yeah, I think a couple of thoughts.

I think one is you could find a buddy who's also solo and just be kind of like, you know, cross-training partners essentially. Maybe there's other people in this group who are individuals who would be open to that.

I think the other thing is like, again, You got, even in a big company or small company, you gotta timebox this stuff because you could literally do it forever.

And I have a, you know, an analogy I'll think a lot about in sports, which is like, hey, in the NFL, in between, you know, the next day they'll watch the game tape, then they'll exercise, they'll take a break day, then they'll exercise a bunch, then they'll start game planning for the next game. Then they have the plan, then they go play the game. And I think it's really important in business that we spend short periods of watching game tape, planning, like, you know, maybe chilling a little bit, then going back and thinking about what we do. But then when we're in the quarter, we're playing the game, we're on the field, we're doing the stuff, and we stop reevaluating.

Because a lot of entrepreneurs I'll see every week, they'll go, wait, is my plan working? Oh no, maybe I should change my plan. And, and that's not the worst. Sometimes you need to be opportunistic like that in the early stages, but oftentimes it can lead to this just like running in circles.

And so I think it's important to create periods of sprints or whatever you want to call them where you're actually just doing the stuff to figure out what's going to work and what's not going to work. So The other answer, sorry, Carlo, is timeboxing it and just going, I'm gonna go through all this for a week or 2 with the expectations getting me better clarity on my business, and then I'm gonna stop thinking about it. I'm gonna go do the big things I said I was gonna go do, and I'm gonna come back in 2 months and do this again.

You know what I might do next year, Jesse, if we do this again, is make it available and then schedule some kind of session where we all go through this together and I'll show how far I've come. They can show how far they've come because it's good for me to have some kind of intermediary step before coming in and And talking with GatewayX.

One other thing, right? And I want to like, I want to acknowledge the nuance of this.

If this is new to you, again, it may be like learning piano. First you have to learn the basics of the keys or like I'm learning skiing right now. And first they teach you the wedge and then they tell you to forget about the wedge and then they teach you how to do these turns and they say forget about that method as you get more advanced.

So first you can use some of these methods.

One more advanced technique that you'll hear come out of my mouth a lot is I don't necessarily pay attention to the year or the quarters. I think a lot more about the business. So in other words, like for Growth Assistant right now, we're kind of trying to do a shorter one because like right now we sort of know what we need to do. And the middle of next year will probably be a bigger planning cycle because that's when we're going to have seen whether or not a bunch of these things worked. Then we'll go into a deeper planning cycle, right? So, or I just said use 2 months for Carlo.

Like if I was an individual, I'm not sure I would wait a full 90 days.

I might do a bunch of things for 2 months. Then I'd take a quick— quick gander to see did it work or did it not work? So don't get yourself stuck on arbitrary things like quarters, months, or years. Think about the rhythm of your business and try to, and what's going on and apply this to the rhythm of your business. That's sort of the more advanced version of this. So I think, Nak, we did it at one time for 4 months for Kahani. Like it was like November and we said, let's go December to March. And you just have to think about where the business is and what cycle needs to take place and what you're working against.

Lisa, do you want to ask your question? And then I'm going to move on to the next step because I realize that I'm not moving as fast as I wanted to.

It's Lisa.

Is it?

It's just Lisa.

Is it Lisa? Okay. Hi, Lisa. You know her?

Yeah, we know each other. So I guess my question, I left it on the chat, which is like, one, we have like this— you guys have this like company bets sheet and like when does that come in and I always struggle between the how much to test versus how much to that were like the predictable, which I, I agree with the 30/70 rule, but it's at what point do you decide? Because sometimes I'll work on something and then all of a sudden, you know, something else happens and then that blows up and I'm like, okay, let me completely shift. But I just don't even have the time to think about it because I already had this plan set up and, you know, next thing you're just in action mode. And so like. At what point do you just kind of pause and say, okay, and what point in the state do you say like, okay, this is predictable versus not predictable and saying, 'cause I tend to—

Yeah, that's a great question.

Yeah, I tend to lean towards the ones that are unpredictable sometimes because something pops up.

Yeah, but a lot of entrepreneurs are, we love the cool ideas and the shiny objects.

You know, my simple heuristic is something that I can spend an hour a week on in terms of just accountability and, you know, but it's fully delegated to a team member or an entire group. And the results are consistent with what I expect or what's been put in the plan. That's how I know something is genuinely predictable or quote unquote on autopilot. Everyone likes to talk about things being on autopilot. So this goes back to current reality, Lisa, which is oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we lie to ourselves about where something truly is.

Yeah.

And we tell ourselves it's more baked than it actually is. And then all of a sudden we have like 3 half-baked things, 2 experiments, and maybe 1 thing that was predictable. We lied to ourselves and said we had 4 things that were fully predictable. And so we took on 4 bets and now we're fucking overwhelmed and we've got too much shit going on and we need to cut and we need to cut hard, right?

And so that's typically, and you could think of it as, again, like This is a question I'll often ask.

I'll ask every single team member or every single CEO all the time. If we could only get one thing right this quarter, what would that one thing be? If we could only get one thing right this week, what would that one thing be?

If we could only get one thing right for this call, what would that one thing be? And that's where I start. And then you kind of look around the table or you look in the mirror and you can see if everyone kind of goes, hey, if we can only get one thing right, it's this. And everyone kind of likes, yeah, we're confident we can do that. And you kind of know you've seen the results, you've seen the current reality. You're like, yeah, example for Bootstrap Giants, Andrew, we're getting what, 2,000, 3,000 emails a month right now. So if we said acquire 10,000 emails in the quarter, we'd all kind of be like, yeah, we could do that.

And that's our one thing we want to get that right. Now to grow that, that's going to where bets come in and you have to do other things that you're less sure of.

And then you kind of go, if you could only get 2 things right, what would be the second thing?

You can only get 3 things right.

And so to me, at least, you want to start by going, okay, those are the things I gotta get right. Now I have my experiments. If the things I need to get right stop working, then I gotta pause my experiments and I gotta reallocate resources.

And this is where the dynamics of an entrepreneur is super important, which you go, wait, hold on, these 2 things are bets. I don't know what the hell's gonna happen with them. The things that I thought were gonna work are not working. I gotta stop what I'm doing and I gotta go back to basics. Doesn't mean you have to do it forever, but for a month or for some period, Until things are back on track. And that means, oh my God, now it's 10 hours a week of my time. I'm in, I'm in the depths of all of this stuff. I got to get back to the 1 hour a week and predictable results. Andrew, you're on mute.

Thanks, Lisa. It's cool, by the way, that you knew her, how to pronounce her name because you'd seen her. There's so many people in here who we've seen before, who we know personally, like Andy, uh, Louis Charles, who never turns on his camera, but we know him for a long time. Ben Fisher, who I mentioned, Leo. Grace is in here. Kuldeep is in here, who always shows up with his Fathom note-taker in every meeting. Rick Wenger, who I've been emailing a lot lately. Rick, it's good to see you in here. All right, let's go on to the next thing. Financial plan and projection. Jesse, this is largely where some years I started. Basic— can I show this?

Yes, I think I can. This is basically where I started in the past.

Once you get— once you know what you're doing, you start to create a spreadsheet.

I learned how to do this back at NYU.

What I didn't see was this conservative case, 90%, base case, 60%, and the rest that you've got there.

Yeah.

So, you know, let me talk about the concept here and then we'll talk about how to simplify it a little bit. The concept here is oftentimes people will put together their financial plan and they'll put together one plan And they'll be immediately missing it or they'll be immediately beating it. And they're like, now what do I do? What do I do with this? And to me, I like to think of these kind of 3 cases as, you know, conservative case is sort of like we could do this with our eyes, you know, if all bad stuff happens, not, you know, we'll be totally fine. The flip of is the up case, which is like, this is our DFS. This is like, man, if it all goes great, this is what's going to happen. And then 60% case is like what you actually think is likely to happen based on not every initiative is going to work. Not all the things that you put together are going to be successful. And you can see the mindset of like shift to investor mindset. Yeah, every single thing you're putting on the thing is not going to work. You're not going to end up with time for everything. Something that you think is going to really be successful won't be successful. Something that's working won't work. And you're putting that all together in one place.

This is obviously probably overkill for some people.

A lot of what I've been doing with the companies, like I was telling Andrew, I said, well, what do you think is your worst case for revenue this year, Andrew? He gave me a number. I said, okay, let's build your headcount around that number and maybe give a 10% buffer. So if you're, if this year goes basically what you think is 90% confidence, in other words, very, very likely to happen, Then, sorry, very, very likely to happen is a funny way of saying it. 90% confidence means like, this is, it's going to be easy. It's going to be a cakewalk, but it's like the worst case scenario, to be clear. So it's your worst case, then you're still going to make a little profit or break even. And then a lot of your initiatives focus on to get to your 30% case on productivity of the team to get to that next level, right? So to use an example of that, let's say you have a salesperson.

And you go, well, hey Jesse, I think I should hire a salesperson.

Andrew, okay, cool.

If he converts 15 or she converts 15% of their sales, that's kind of, I think that's possible.

I did 50%, Jesse.

So if they could do 15, that's fine. Now, if they do 50% like me or 30%, that you're gonna see your revenue go up closer to your base case projection or even closer to your upcase projection. So productivity or conversion rates or any, anything that's not, it's not more money, but it's more output.

Is what shifts you between your, your very down case and your up case.

You know, Jesse, I've gotta say that to me, the resourcing around 90% was a big eye-opener because you know how conservative I am.

I think, all right, I know where the revenue's gonna go and I know where I'd like it to go. I'm not gonna spend that money until I actually do it. Even if I'm 90%, forget 90, even if I'm 100% sure I'm gonna hit this number for revenue and profit, I still don't trust it until I get that money in the bank and then I start to go out and invest. And the problem with that is that By then it's kind of close to the end of the year and I'm rushing to spend the money that, that I've made. And I think—

Well, yeah, there, there's a couple of problems with it, Andrew.

I think one of the important ones right now, bootstrap giant mindset, is who, who pays the price for that? You pay the price for that. You don't see your baby son.

You don't like, because what happens is you're plugging all the resourcing gaps we have, right?

As opposed to taking a little bit—

Oh, I see what you mean by pay the price. You're saying, look, if you're doing this and waiting till we hit—

You can do it that way, by the way. That's how I started my first business, right? But But me and my co-founders worked from 9:00 AM to 1:00 AM every day.

And luckily we didn't have kids and we were, you know, whatever, we could, we could handle that. But I don't think that's reasonable for most people.

And so you're, you gotta bet on yourself a little bit and say, hey, down case, I think worst of worst, we're gonna make $1.5 million this year.

Okay, I'm, I can staff myself, I can go hire enough people so I'm spending $1.2 million.

I can hire a writer so that I don't have to do all the writing. I can hire a salesperson.

Yeah, yeah. 'Cause I mean, you end up, you grind a lot, right?

That's what ends up happening When you're—

now you can do it that way.

It is definitely a more conservative, more risk-averse way to do it. But we also have to look at the data we have. We know we got, you know, 55 accelerator attendees. We know, like, we feel confident we can maybe keep that number going for the rest of the year per quarter and we want to build against that.

Okay. All right. I'm going to move things along a little bit. I'll just say you all have this spreadsheet in your package and you can see here how that plays out, the 90% versus 60% versus 30%.

And I think it's important to know the costs are not really different in this, right?

That's kind of the point I'm making.

It's sort of like I'm going to make an investment in a team and then they're either going to, you know, win the Super Bowl or go 2-14. And in either case, I'm not out of business, right? But I've kind of fixed my investment for the year and then it's going to be these different cases. Now, there's a—

there's again an advanced method where you start thinking about the incremental investments you could make at every level, which I just won't go into for now. I don't think it's valuable, but you could think of how much media spend or how much incremental sales headcount In my 60, in my 30, I'll take. But the simple way to think of this is I'm gonna make a one-time investment. I'm gonna hire a team of 5.

We're either gonna crush it, and that means our sales will be this, or we're gonna do okay, or it's not gonna go that great.

Either way, we're still in the game.

Okay, let's go to the final step here of the planning process, which is not that one. It's investment decisions. And this seems like what This seems like a natural next step from what we've done before. Go up real quick. Um, yeah.

Yeah, so this is a little bit like ICE. I think it's just a sort of a double-click on some of these things. Ultimately, like, there's certain things you're doing in the company and you want to double down on the ones that—

this is like a really processy way of one of the most simple concepts I talk about in entrepreneurship. And this is the only way I've learned it is like you do some stuff, If it's working, you do more of it.

And if it's not working, you cut it or you change something. And honestly, like as simple as I could tell you, like most of entrepreneurship is that.

And it's like, how much do you wanna spend? What do you need to go? What resourcing do you need to go get that done? And which hires? And then what are the big bets you're gonna make against those things? But these key questions I would just apply back to the financial model in a conservative scenario and make sure you feel like you're not gonna go outta business.

And then it's like, how, how successful would that group of people Why this is important, by the way, is that oftentimes we as entrepreneurs will put a bunch of bets out there and we won't actually think about the resourcing it takes to get them done. And so that leads to one of two things.

Either we don't get a bunch of things on our list done, right? Or we kill ourselves in the process of trying to get everything done. We usually don't do it all that well. Like, in my opinion is you're better off.

The other thing that happens is then you don't force yourself to prioritize because you go, I'm going to get all these things done.

And that goes back to this mindset of you can only get one thing done. So Really, you want to resource your top 3 bets really well so you feel like they're going to get very successful. And the other stuff is maybe, hey, opportunistic, or if it comes along, we'll get it done.

All right. We're going to do questions on all of this in a little bit. Um, but we just did the annual planning overview and I intentionally used the guide that you all have so that you know how to use it and you're, and you're, you know, uh, and you're, and you're able to use it yourselves. We're now going to go into, uh, something that's a natural next step, which is once you start to think about what's my planning for next year, you think, well, how do I get my sales bigger than they would have been if I hadn't done that? And so I want to show you how we've been helping some of the people here who you see in the session with us live grow their sales and how we can help you grow your sales in 2025.

See, I met Jesse around the time that he had Scaled from $2 million to $19 million in sales. And I thought, this is incredible because most companies that are doing service-based work, Jesse, they hit a plateau because they can't grow more sales because they don't have a system because it's the founder who's doing it. And you somehow managed to grow in a way that was fast, but also, as you can see from the smile on your face, it was, it was a happy process because it was a process. And when I asked you, Jesse, how did you do it? You told me mutual intro.

And I go, what's mutual intro? And those of you who know Jesse, like Grace, I'm sure you've seen this. Lisa, I wonder if you've seen this.

You ask Jesse a question, he'll go and pull out the email or the artifact like within 5 seconds. So he showed me this, I go, what is this? He says, well, this is the email that got me Clash of Clans. The way that I got it was this was a huge hit game maker.

I wanted them as a client. I knew that I could handle their sales.

And so I reached out to someone and I got a warm introduction. And this is the actual email.

We blanked out things that you shouldn't see.

Out of respect to them. But that's how he did it. He just asked for a warm intro and I'd seen him do this now over the years so many times.

Growth Assistant, his, one of his latest companies, has done the same thing.

They knew which customers they wanted. And so Jesse found someone who could provide a warm introduction. He got the warm introduction to the right person and he closed sales. And these are the actual numbers.

And we did get permission, Jesse, to include those numbers on this spreadsheet.

Yes.

And it's a simple process, um, on its face. It's identify who your ICP is. But I understand that for some people that takes some work to know who their ideal customer, what their ideal customer profile is and who their ideal customers are who fit that profile.

But once you do that, then you start to ask for introductions. And when you have a warm introduction to that, then it's easier to close a sale. And I said, Jesse, you gotta, you gotta package this up and, and offer it to more people. And he said, okay, let's partner together. And so we did.

And one of the first things I did when I, uh, partnered with Jesse on Bootstrap Giants was I hired somebody to create the package that you all now have, which is the B2B Sales Blueprint. And we sold it and we made it available to people and it did phenomenally well where people were able to use this because it's a process that works for just about any business-to-business sale. In fact, I've actually seen Jesse, people do this for business-to-consumer sales, but it needs to be big. Like there's a roofer who's using this because he wants to get clients. It's not something that you would use if you ha— if you're selling lemonade or something small time. One of the people who did this is Chirag Kulkarni.

He bought the playbook. He immediately got 2 big sales.

I don't have permission to say it, but it's in the tens of thousands of dollars.

And he was really happy that it works. And the reason that it works is it's because it's the opposite of what most sales is.

And again, you have this playbook, you have this, and you're able to do it yourself. And if you've done sales yourself, then you understand how much of a pain in the neck it is, how tough it is. Because for many people in sales, many of the people who've caught, who are here in our session, I know this about you because we've talked.

You have no process. You're just charismatic or able to do it or a hustler, and so you can close a sale. And most sales is tough because there is no process. You're hustling it all the time. Number 2, you get a lot of ghosting. You talk to someone and it seems like they're interested and then they stop responding. And because they have no connection to you, they must, they like, they have no reason to, to prioritize you. It's feast or famine. Some months you get a referral and you're doing great. Couple of months later you get no referrals and you have no sales, and that's really difficult. It's hard to delegate, number 4, because there's no process to bring other people into, and it's a lonely process. And so that's why the mutual intro works.

It undoes that. You know, if you've got this guide and you're practicing this, that what you're going to see is that when you ask someone.

For a referral.

And we've seen people in the, in the accelerator, Sales Accelerator, do this.

They'll get a referral from someone who happens to be a parent from school as an introduction to someone else. Now, when you have that middle person in there, it's warm. It's a real introduction that matters. And so that's why this process works. That's why it's worked for many people.

Grace, you see in the chat, she says, I just finished the Sales Accelerator. Feel free to ask her directly for, for questions about what this is like. Um, the problem with the mutual intro, and I will say that there is a challenge, is that you've got to do this on your own.

You have to figure it all out. And if you've got this guide and you're using it, you know it works, but you also know that sometimes it'd be great if you can stop Jesse and say, hey Jesse, I'm trying to do this thing. Can you help me? If you can come to me, if you can come to someone on, on the team like Nak who's been responding to messages here in chat and say, I'm going to ask for an intro using this message. Can you give me feedback on it? It'd be great if you could do that. And so, because I think it's valuable, we created the B2B Sales Accelerator, and that is a program where you can work directly with Jesse, with me. We even hired one of Jesse's past salespeople and we said, be available to answer questions directly to people.

And he's done one-on-one sessions with people like you. So Carlo, if you're in the accelerator and you say, this is what I'm sending out, you can go to Andrew Winter, the person we hired, and he'll give you direct feedback on what you're sending out or do a Zoom call with you so that you can do it.

So Chirag, who you saw earlier, he signed up.

I want you to see what happened to him when he signed up.

My name is Chirag Kulkarni. I run a company called Taco. We do AI-assisted search for businesses, so helping them rank on Google, but also AI chat like Perplexity and ChatGPT. I came to the accelerator mostly wanting to learn more about this mutual intro process. I had been doing it on my own for a little bit. But I think some of the mechanics around how to do it more effectively, how to do it in a methodical manner, what to say in sales meetings, all those nuances are things that like I didn't know about, but I didn't think I needed to know about.

Um, then I came in and kind of wanted to explore more on.

So several things that I think came out of the accelerator. Number one is we've doubled our lead count. There used to be this mentality that, hey, we lost a customer and I'll go into this freakout mode, right? Like, oh, like all the MRR is going to drop, but Now to have a system that's very methodical, I know exactly how to switch back on and kind of have more of an abundance mindset with regards to customers. Um, I think it's something so invaluable.

One of the things that he did was that others I asked to do too, and they started getting the same benefit as he did, was he'd reach out to me, he'd reach out to Jesse, he would send us messages, he would be on Slack.

I gave him my phone number. He would call me up as I was picking up my kids from school.

And that's what we want. It's an experience where we're working with you to grow sales. And I built this based on what people had told me they wanted from Gateway X and Bootstrap Giants.

They said they wanted to focus on sales. They wanted not just learning, but to actually do the work. They wanted to spend a 6-week program involved with Jesse. They wanted Jesse to teach each part of the process. They wanted clear sales assignments each week to know what they have to do. They wanted to be held accountable. And between calls, they wanted to be in our company Slack.

So that they could ask for help and they wanted a playbook that they could hire for. I want you to notice a couple of things.

One is they wanted Jesse to teach. Let me show you just a clip because Jesse had, because of his McKinsey background, hired someone to create McKinsey-level educational content and slides. But that doesn't mean that we don't stop and help people directly.

Here's an actual clip that I pulled out.

I mean, let's look at like, do you know Anastasia? Do you know Ross Simmons well?

So we had a member who had trouble actually getting responses back from people.

Jesse had him log into his LinkedIn, find the right people within his LinkedIn, and then send out a message. And even people who were just watching this thing go, oh, that's how he sends out messages. That's how he's firing it off. And the person who had this problem Was able to get direct help.

And so this is not passive watching. This is us working together the way Jesse would work with me and with anyone else on the team and the way I would work with anyone on the team if they were selling with us.

I want you to also notice that we're actually selling.

Ben, this is the clip that I said I was pulling of you, because I want people to know that they're not just disappearing and going off to learning experience.

No, we're still selling throughout.

We have a Shopify app that, uh, helps a brand improve its conversion rate from Email and SMS marketing. We closed 3 deals and we've doubled our price.

So you're doing sales within, and I'm holding you accountable. We all are to make sure that you're doing it. We're asking you to show numbers all the time. We had a couple of members come into Jesse's office just last week, and the first thing he asked them is the thing that we ask you every week if you're in the accelerator, which is how the numbers. And so we do that, and I have a sheet where I can keep track of how everyone's doing with the numbers.

I've obviously blackened people's names out.

But this is the first thing that I see when I log into my browser to see how people are doing. And it's not about a, a name and shame. It's about being able to reach out. This is something that I sent out to Michael. I said, hey, I noticed your numbers, uh, weren't there and what can I do? How's it going? I'm checking up on you and, and so are the other people in the team to make sure you're getting the results. And we're sometimes telling you, be patient. You're gonna get there. Just because you ask for an introduction doesn't mean you're gonna get a sale tomorrow.

Here's from Omar who has a benchmarking system.

Once I started doing that, the biggest thing I learned is that the results are lagging. I went hard at mutual intros at the beginning of this accelerator and was really excited. And then there was a big dip, no replies, no nothing. And I'm like, oh, this doesn't work at all. And then I kid you not, the 2 weeks after Thanksgiving, I've got 16 meetings booked. 2 weeks after Thanksgiving. Everything just lagged, right? Like people were traveling, conference season, whatever it was. That's been the biggest eye-opener for me was it's a number, A, it's a numbers game. B, it takes way longer than you think. And just remembering that day in and day out is, and becoming kind of sanguine about the rollercoaster, right? Like today's a great day, that's fine. Tomorrow's a bad day, this will change. Like that's been a huge unlock. And then one final thing that really stuck with me, and I listen to this every day, what Jesse said was, if you're not a little bit obnoxious with your network, then you're probably in the wrong business. And I think that was probably my biggest barrier. And I was like, you know, you don't want to be obnoxious and, and, um, you don't want to come across as needy and desperate, but, you know, sometimes you're like, I have value to offer. Why wouldn't I be a little bit pushy about helping these people when I have something awesome? So, um, that's been a huge, huge mindset change.

Yeah.

And that's a big one.

When you start to see how other people do this, you, you get a sense that you can too.

Anyone else not able to see the video?

It looks like Grace and maybe Carolina are not. Um, oh, you are able to see it, Ricardo. Great, great, great, great. Okay.

Um, if you're ready to join, all you have to do is go to accelerator.bootstrapgiants.com.

I'm actually gonna put it in the chat because nobody knows how to spell accelerator, including me. We all somehow have typos in it. Would somebody mind just clicking that link and letting me know if it works?

If you do join it, we're gonna get started with a new, uh, a new cohort, meaning we work directly with you live.

In January, at the end of January. Before then, one of the first things I'm going to do is make sure that you're connected with Jesse and other people on the team.

And we're going to work with you to get you started immediately.

This is the best way to get started in 2025, uh, on growing your sales. I'd love to work with you directly, and I'm looking forward to those of you who are in there. The link is in the chat, and it looks like Carolina is saying it is working. And I will contact you immediately as soon as you join so that we can have a relationship directly with you, me, and Jesse. Anything else to add on that, Jesse?

No, I think we're having a lot of fun with it. It was really impactful for me as well as I think everybody else. Just, we had a great time with it and we'd love to have people join. We're trying to run these every quarter and drive results for everybody out there building their business.

Yeah, it's been phenomenal. Like the bonds and connections that we've had with people, people were actually camped out at your office for a while there just because they wanted to be around GatewayX. So I shot video of them so that for the next cohort, I can show video and say to people, look, you're welcome to go into the office and work there. We want to work with you.

And frankly, and if you're in Austin, you can come here and work with me too in person. All right. If you're in the accelerator.

Um, all right. So we did the annual planning. I talked to you about growing your sales, um, using the accelerator, and I'm excited to see that we already have some members joining the accelerator. Let's go on to answering your questions. And the way that I like to do this is to have you chat in questions ahead of time.

And then I'll bring people on camera so that you can answer questions so that Jesse and I can help you out and answer questions. Um, Jesse, let me ask the first question while we wait for people to chat in with others. You've done this now with me. You've done this with Casey, with Adrian, with others.

What, what have you seen that we've done well consistently and what have you seen that's an ongoing mistake that people have done over and over?

Yeah, I think probably the biggest thing I'd like to see be different in the future, see what I did there, is bringing that plan into the day-to-day and the week-to-week.

So I think oftentimes you'll do this and it's still helpful to do it because it gives you clarity.

You'll focus on where to, here's the big goals we have. And you've probably noticed even the last few days, Andrew, you're like, oh, what's this guy Richard doing? And I'm like, well, wait, we set a goal for this. We talked about this already, so let's keep— when this is done well, those things stay front and center every week in the company, every meeting they show up in, everything drives into those top 2 or 3 goals. And, and that there creates that, the tightness of that loop, which is the thing you're trying to build here. So the biggest mistake is like, we do this for a couple weeks, then, I mean, I said this earlier, we play the game, then we kind of say what happened as opposed to keeping those things front and center and always coming back to them and working our way back to those, those goals. So. Living the goals, living the plan, I think is, is probably the biggest one.

How much do we share internally with other people on the team? Like, I kept this as a Notion doc that was private until I invited people. Should I make it available to everybody on the team?

Yeah, I think, I mean, the more people know the direction we're going, like, to me, you hire a new person and the first thing you do is you walk them through all of this stuff.

Here's the goal for the year. Here's the big things we're focused on. Here's the challenges from last year. Like, it just becomes a way Everybody sort of knows what's going on organizationally, and that creates a lot of alignment. And alignment is what helps people do great work together.

How about beyond the company? I'm feeling like there's nothing in here that I shouldn't share with any of our customers, but—

Right?

Yeah, there's no reason you can't. I mean, I think, you know, sometimes a company will share their goals with me.

I think there can be a time and place for it. I think I'd ever want to feel as a customer that someone's like, I'm their goal.

So I think you have to be a little bit mindful of that. I saw an email that was on Twitter the other day from Salesforce of saying, someone saying, hey, in order to close, in order to hit my goal for the year, I'm going to offer you a discount. And I was like, well, that's kind of a weird way to say that. So I think you can share it in the context. Like if it's a B2C company and it's 2025, at least at your company, you're like sending an email to everyone going, here's my big goals, here's my aspiration, here's my vision. Because You're bringing those stakeholders along with you. If it's a B2B business, you're having an annual business review with your clients or a new— and like, hey, here's some of the big things our focus is for the year. So I think there's ways you can bring it in that are effective and classy without also making someone feel like they're a goal of yours.

Yeah, that does feel awkward when you're starting to share your numbers and people see that, yeah, the only reason you're doing this is because you had a goal of doing this.

Yeah, it's not the only reason, but it can feel funny.

Yeah.

All right. That makes sense.

I did notice that Ben from Rodeo, who was in our accelerator, he asked me, Andrew, can I include you on our investor email? And I like that the investor update email is something I've been thinking of once a quarter and then including people like Ben so that they could keep up with how we're doing.

Um, and I think when done well, all of these little things, they sprout out from this process, your investor emails, like you already have your goals done so that that's an easy thing to write your weekly email to your team. They're all coming from the same sets of Activities versus being individual things. Hey, Sarah. Hey, Sarah, you want to ask your question? Seeing you here.

Yeah, you know, hers too. It's Adam's wife.

Oh, oh wow. Okay.

Yeah. And, and in our, in our startup, which is not so startup now, 8 years later, but we're a nonprofit, so kind of fun to compare how some of this still works for us. But definitely now that we're, we're doing the annual plan and we've got the system, Um, tell me a little bit more about what the, the goals look like week to week. How do you bring that in? We're definitely having trouble on the follow-up and like helping the team drive that follow-up instead of just me being like, okay, like, well, wait, what about this? How's this relate back?

Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on the goal, right?

I think oftentimes there's quantitative goals, right? So if you, for us, let's say number of emails we're trying to acquire in the quarter, if that number is 20,000, I would typically break those down into some daily pacing number, and I should have a sense every single day, am I tracking to those numbers or not? Now, that's not a system to beat people up by, right? And I think that's sometimes, again, what people do with it.

Hey, you know, we're behind the goal, 3 lashes.

But it is a sense you have to go, you're flying a plane, you gotta know where, you know, what your navigational thing says. Hey guys, like we've been behind on this for a week now. Let's have a conversation about how we're gonna make this up. How are we gonna go get closer to that goal? What needs to change? What needs to happen? Again, it's not, You gotta find the little, the balance of beating someone up versus just going, hey, I wanna problem solve this with you. So quantitatively, I would just break it down by day and track it. There's other things that, that are just like things you wanna ship. So for you, maybe it's like opening a new center or something. It's like, well, that's a scheduling thing. Okay, well, if we wanna open 5 new centers, we have a calendar for 1, 2, and 3. Which ones do we wanna get open by when? And we're tracking that. Is it on track or not on track? And that's just a progress report 'cause it's a, there's some goals that are just simple checkmarks. I just need to get this thing done.

So those are the, so you definitely want to bring, take that quarter and then break it down into months and weeks and even days if you can.

Um, you know, at minimum I'd say weeks because then you just at a high level, are you tracking towards where you want to be tracking to? Like Andrew sends this weekly email of 10 things and we actually have a week of what we want to get done. But Andrew, now that we've done this planning, we want the, if that thing doesn't tie to the goals and it's, it's, it's sort of silly, right? It just, it is, you want it to tie directly to the things that we're doing. and the specific goals that are there. Is that good, Sarah?

Yeah, thanks.

Thanks, Sarah. Chi, I'm going to bring you on. I know you've got a couple of questions too. Let's add you as a spotlight. Hi.

Hi, everyone. My name's Chi. Thank you for hosting this masterclass. Yeah, I just have a couple of general questions about the accelerator. So what phase of the founder business is Typically recommended for this program? Best suited?

It doesn't matter, or—

Sorry, was that for the accelerator or for this annual planning?

The accelerator. Oh, the accelerator.

Yeah.

You can take that one, Andrew.

Yeah.

Um, we'd like you to have tens of thousands in revenue a month. Um, I think that if you're starting out with nothing, we're just, you're too early to work with us. If you're, if you're in the tens of millions, you're too far along. So thousands, uh, tens of thousands a month is a really good place for us. We've seen a lot of people who are in the million to $5 million. The only issue I have with people who are in the million to $5 million. They're really, they're getting a lot of benefit and we're helping them get beyond the plateau. But boy, are they quiet people. They, they do not participate as much cuz I think they don't have the same hunger, but at least tens of thousands in revenue. And then you also had a second question about the people in the group.

Yeah. So how many people tend to be in your cohort?

Like what's a good number that you have?

So I was initially trying to keep this at a really low number because I wanted to have everybody get access to Jesse. What I discovered, Chi, was that the bottleneck was not Jesse as I expected. The bottleneck was how many other people do they reach out to? And so when I think about, uh, Chirag, whose video you saw, he didn't necessarily need Jesse when he was writing his email out to get warm introductions. It would've been better for him to work with someone else on the team who had been writing multiple emails and get feedback from them.

And Jesse's available.

But he needed to get on with him, with them.

Another problem that Chirag had was he was not following up with people who were not making an introduction, and he wanted to know, how do I keep track of people who are not responding?

Jesse's not the right person to talk to about that. Nak on our team is the right person for that.

Or Andrew Winter, who had done sales with Jesse and created a spreadsheet for our group, was the right person.

And so we made them available. And Nak, I think towards the end, realized how much he loved helping people more directly in one-on-one Zooms. And I'm going to start to recruit more people on our team to do that and hire more people. So with that in mind, I think we could do 50 to 100 people and have every one of you have direct access to the right people and a session with Jesse every Wednesday, sessions on Friday where you ask questions. And so that's, that's where it'll be. And I still believe that every single person will be able to get on one-on-one calls when they need it and have someone do what I've done, which is follow up without being obnoxious to say, hey, Chi. You're not closing a sale this week, or you haven't sent out your offers. What's going on?

Yeah, the idea from my perspective is to get people doing the work and, and actually making it happen. That's why we haven't called this a course. Like we've called it a, an accelerator. We want it to feel like, and I think that's what most people experience, is that it felt like a lot was getting done.

Hmm. Okay. And then is there a, um, so it's for B2B, right? And is it, you know, products, services, or it doesn't really matter, just anyone in that B2B space? offering services to other businesses?

We've done both in services and SaaS.

I think on the margin, it's probably more helpful for some sort of tech-enabled services because that's, that's what my experience is.

What I would say is even more important is that you have high price point. If we're teaching you a process where you're asking someone for an introduction and then you get the introduction and you get on a meeting and Jesse's going to show you his meeting outline and you'll have recordings of Jesse's meetings. If you're doing all that, For a $5 a month sale, it's just not worth it. But if you're doing it for $4,000 or $5,000, you know that you get a little bit of improvement and working with us, you'll close one sale. It'll, it'll more than pay for the whole program.

Okay, cool. Thank you. Thanks a lot for answering.

All right. And I do think that everyone who's in the program should have access to me when they need me in addition to the other team members. So I'm going to put my cell phone number so that if you have any questions as you're going through the program, you know that you have access to me. And I just chatted it to you privately. Um, thanks. Any— let's see if we have any other questions. Um, Lisa?

Hey.

You wanna jump in here too? Let me add you on the spotlight.

Uh, yeah. Hello. Um, okay. I do have a question about the B2B thing too, after this question. Um, so the— okay, so, but this is related to kind of planning again. It is, how do you hold your team accountable? Like what routine do you set? So like we do like a start of the week, end of the week, just to check. But like, how does that work for, for you guys? Especially like Jesse, like I know you juggle so many different things. I don't know how you do it. Like, it'll be fascinating just to hear what you do to like keep everyone on track.

Yeah, there's a, I mean, interesting, this could be a whole nother masterclass. I think, you know, I, I think the traditional mindset around accountability is like, hey, what, you know, why haven't you hit your numbers? Where are we on this? Like, let's get to it. And you imagine the CEO kind of yelling at their team, and I'm not saying anybody does that, but like, That's sort of the mental image of holding people accountable. What I find is that if you create transparency with the numbers and reporting and where things need to be, and then you're there and you're kind of going, hey, what's going on? What's happened here? What's our plan? Or it's a little bit more of like a problem-solving session and done with a certain, with a regular, with amount of regularity. People hold themselves accountable if you have the right people.

Now, if you have the people who are walking in, they don't give a shit about their goals, they probably don't belong in your company, right?

That's like a separate thing. But to me, it's around creating a system.

And, you know, I don't know, Andrew, like I have reporting on every single business and in every Slack channel.

Like I can look on Slack and in 10 minutes I can know where everything stands relative to where it needs to be. So some of it is just the information has to be in there and transparent. And then after that, I'd say I don't attend the weekly meetings at most of the companies, but I do have one-on-ones with every CEO and I'll just kind of check in and say, hey, I saw this was off. Like, how are you feeling about it? Is, you know, what's going on with it? But to me, it's kind of maybe the way I would frame it is create the space for others to hold themselves accountable and then like, and then be there with them. And, you know, one story I'll tell that is like funny one. I had a buddy of mine who worked at Salesforce, and I guess there's 6 major business lines at Salesforce, and each of them have 5 or 6 sub-business lines. So there's like 30 GMs in the company. And I'm like, how does it work? Like, how the hell does Marc Benioff run this business? Right? Same kind of your question. How's Jesse doing this? It's like, and it goes like simple. You make a plan every single year that's gonna grow you at over 20% a year. That's like his mandate. And if you're hitting it or exceeding it, he meets with you once a quarter. And if you're missing it, he meets with you once a week. And I go, does he like yell at you? Like, is he, is he mad? Is he like— Nope. He's just very present. He's like, what's going on? Okay, how could we— does the pipeline need more? Like, he's just problem solving it with you.

And that's kind of the mental model I've used and I would recommend people use, which is like, hey, if you've put your plan together, back to this idea of something that's truly predictable and bankable, it's like, I spend an hour a week, you give me the update and it's going well.

I'm going to put my energy and attention elsewhere.

But if it's not hitting the plan, then I'm with you every day.

I want 15 minutes. I want to know where it's going. So I think you can create that accountability by creating the space for it, but it's a space for other people to step up and go, well, here's what I'm doing tomorrow. Here's how I'm going to change this versus If you're sitting around, you know, barking out orders or pushing people to be accountable, you probably don't have the right people. And oftentimes you do have the right people, you just haven't created that space for them. And once you create it, they'll, they'll jump in and take it and be accountable.

And it also sounds like you have like real-time data at any point, whereas like sometimes we do like monthly reviews, so then we have lagging information. So then by the time you look at the last month's information, it's like, oh, okay, we—

Yeah, I hate like my—

the finance review is my least favorite meeting because it's like fucking the 15th of the month and you're looking at last month's data and this month's half baked, it's so useless, right? It's helpful to see everything in a P&L finally, but like, to me that's like way— yeah, I like daily, weekly, pretty real time, even if it means I need a growth assistant pulling all the data from 6 places and putting it up in a spreadsheet. Like, I'll take that.

Yeah, that's helpful. And then in relation to the B2B accelerator stuff, like going back to like, should I You know, the, the whole, like, that's a whole debate between like, okay, doing the things that work, but then also Jesse knows my business. I actually have a product business. So we have a B2B channel, which is like corporate gifting. And with that, we use like a B2B distribution channel. And it is like, it's either we sell, like we could sell like thousands of bags or 10 or 20 bags. And it's a weird, and it's super hard to. predict sometimes. So I don't know if product businesses like mine, and this is a whole nother thing, like, you know, when and if I should do this because we are, we have a retail channel too. But, um, you know, so we just kind of let things inbound for now. But like, basically it's like we could have a great month just because B2B hit like an inquiry for like 1,500 bags, $70,000 or something like that. Or like we could just have very little.

That's exactly why people have joined, that a lot of times they have this come into their lives and things are good. And they want to finally take action and be more proactive. And that's where we can accelerate it by creating a process around it and one that you can then hire other people to help support grow.

Yeah. The one thing, Lisa, though, I, I would make sure it's one of your top 3 priorities.

Otherwise it's probably not yet the time for you to take it. 'Cause you don't wanna take it and spend the time and energy if it's not a top priority of yours. Meaning you have a bunch of other things that'll work and then you're like, this is one of my big 3 bets for the year is I wanna, I wanna get the crack the B2B and turn it into a Machine flywheel.

Yeah, yeah.

If you're not there yet, or it's just not going to make the cut, then this will be a waste of your time. Like you have other priorities. Yeah, no, that's a good point. But if you want to make it independently outside of this, you said, "Hey, this is one of the big things I want to crack for the year." Then this would be the perfect thing to do in Q1.

But even for a product business, because you were talking about SaaS, and I just want to clarify on that part.

Yes, yes, yes. Like Grace's product business, for sure. Because at the end of the day, this is about building relationships and selling, and then you can do that. with a lot of different things. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Okay. Awesome.

I'm going to bring you back and then, Joe, I hadn't heard from you, but I see you on there.

And Dalil, I hadn't heard from you. I'd love for you to join on and ask anything. And let's just talk about how your annual planning is going. Chi, you are the next person who asked the question. I'll bring you back on. And Joe, if you're good with it, I'll bring you on next.

Yeah, I just had a quick question in the post about the chat about when do you revisit your goals in these financial spreadsheets? Like, Do you, can you share a little bit more about that?

I mean, again, ideally you're tracking the goals on a daily, weekly basis and how you're trending against them. It doesn't mean every, every minute you're reacting to them, but you have a sense for where things stand. You know, the, the short answer is probably at least once a quarter you sort of dust them off and go, hey, did we hit this? Is, are we trending towards it? What did we learn? What could we do differently? And there's a whole, you know, we could have a whole deeper discussion around that, but it's like, wait, did we miss this because we didn't execute well? 'Cause the goal was a stupid goal. Like, you can kind of think of any angle there and kind of go, well, what could be the reason that this didn't work? So then do we want to change the goal or do we want to just get better at executing against it?

So quarterly is probably the rule of thumb. You know, sometimes we'll get through something in the middle of the quarter and it's obvious it's not going to work and I'll just cut it.

I'll just go, why are we doing this? It's not— or someone quits or who was leading that initiative and you're like, I just can't do that. Like, we're done with that. So I think keeping them on the top of your mind, but then quarterly is probably the normal rule of thumb.

All right. Thanks.

Thanks, Chi. What's up, Joe?

Joe, one of the things that I like to do in the accelerator that I didn't get to do enough here because we didn't have that much time is just pick people up and invite them into the conversation. How was this for you? Annual planning?

Um, this, this year, um, we've— sorry, what's the question specifically?

Tell me about how annual planning has been for you this year and what you got out of today.

Was it useful?

Yeah, this is super useful. I think, uh, I, I similarly to, to you guys and Jesse specifically have, I've gone through lots of different processes and procedures around OKRs and KPIs and trying to plan. And what I find, generally speaking, is you put a lot of energy and effort into the process. And then when you— A, it's who do you invite into the conversation? How do you keep it tight? And then ultimately, how do you cascade that information down to the rest of your team in a way that makes it feel like they can own it and it's actionable? It's always been challenging. So I've put it off this year just because I feel like You know, looking back at what we put together last year, things just didn't go super well. So my hope, uh, just from this session was to kind of get a different take and see if there, if there's a, an approach or way, um, that, that I can think about this to make it a little bit more effective for me. And then ultimately how, how to kind of empower others on the team to make it feel like they can be involved in the process as well. Um, so any thoughts around how to do this at scale as you kind of get to like the 20, 40, 50, you know, 100 plus? I, I, I don't want to go too out of scope here, but that's where for me things are getting a bit challenging.

Okay, let's close it off with that question.

I don't think that was a question.

Oh, I thought you were asking, how does he—

He was just giving you feedback.

Got it. Okay. I thought he was asking a question.

There's no question really. It's, I think it's for me implementing a process that I feel like I can enact that actually again cascades down to the rest of the Well, as everyone's signing off, thanks guys for making the time.

We'd love more feedback on how this all went.

This is the first time we've done anything like this, so we're learning as we go how to share all this stuff out and get people's thoughts on it. All right. And Joe, I'm sure we'll catch up around the STL.

Love it, man.

All right. All right. See ya. Right on.

Thanks guys. Everyone. All right. Bye.