Part 3 - Find Your Tribe To Succeed In Business

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Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wyd.

Yeah, one thing I wanted to ask you where as you were coming up and you know, you've done such a good job in maximizing your experience really from the time you're 13, you started coding, you had, you developed approach somewhere along the way that has served you well in school, in your decision making, in your, you know, getting out in the real world, starting your own business. You, you, you've got some, you know, I don't know how much you've thought about it because I don't know if you're at the point where you're getting ready to write your book or if.

They'Re, but fair enough, if they're pulling.

You back to Harvard to speak yet, that's when you start wondering about things like this.

But maybe they'll learn about me on this podcast.

And they, yeah, but it's like you start thinking like, what are those principles? I, you know, what did, what was I told? You know, there's one reason I do this podcast and I wrote my book. It's, it's like, wait a minute, there's about four or five people. If I had not known them in my 20s and I had not been told certain things from them, concepts, principles, or, you know, an idea I might have gotten out of a book or something like that. Not just all from people, but it's like, you know, there were some, there were some critical pieces that I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't had that piece of information, you know, to operate off of. And so how do, what, how would you describe, you know, some of the operating type principles that have served you well over the years?

I love that question. The first one that comes to mind, I think is being authentic and being yourself and making real, genuine connection with people. What, what that's led to for me is a bunch of really smart people around me who I actually like being with, who make, make life and work way better.

Show me the other side of that story, you know, like you.

Yeah, the other side of your story is some people aren't going to like it. Yeah, yeah. There's going to be people that don't like your flavor, but at least you have a flavor. So the people that do like it, like those are your people. So find your people and, and you're going to enjoy them a Hell of a lot more than if you fake it and you're, you know, overly it's good to be polite but like you don't need to kiss up. Like go be yourself and you'll find your tribe. And I've definitely found people around me who I really enjoy and who I also feel like I can have like a direct true conversation with and cut out the crap. And I think that's also like a not only delightful but efficient you, you sort of get to better answers faster with a bunch of people you trust and enjoy around you. So correct.

That's one thing. But let me ask you dig into it a little bit. Do you think that could be a female thing of just trying to fit in and be accommodating and go along and put up with crap that you don't want to put up with or something? Or is that just, just you?

The good question? I think that is a very female description of how that might manifest, but I think maybe a male description of that might be sort of not being vulnerable or like emotionally available. I see a lot of men out in the world who like don't put themselves out there and don't say the weird thing and, and like don't make, make a risky joke. And I don't mean like a risque joke. I mean like be goofy, be weird, embrace that you're a nerd, like fly your freak flag. So I don't know, just sort of like being down to be weird and letting people see that and letting people find you and really connect with who you are. And yeah, you know, there's, there's not always a time or a place for that. Sometimes I go meet with the client and I read the room and I can tell they don't really want to see that side of me. So I'm not going to like blow up a business relationship. It. But over time I've developed a lot of long term relationships with colleagues and friends and people that were once friends and now colleagues and people that were once colleagues and now friends and all of that comes from being kind of emotionally available and authentic and just being willing to be yourself and take that risk. So I would, I would give a strong plus one to just being yourself and leaning into that and making what you can out of that.

Now and beyond that, now what were some, you know, you're growing up, you start noticing how people act and behave and approach things. What are things that, you know, you said, you know, I want to be that way. I don't want to be that Way.

Yeah, bureaucracy. Hate it, hate it so much. Hate paperwork and process for process sake. And that'll tie into another thing I think is important and is an operating principle which is caring about details, but caring about them thoughtfully and not for the sake of them, and sort of figuring out how to click into that detailed level of abstraction and then step back and see the big picture. And sometimes what I find is bureaucracy seems to be a product of some detail went astray sometime way back when. And so we made a policy and a form and a process, and now there are so many layers of that that it gets in the way of effective action. And I also think it is super demoralizing for everyone who has to be part of that. So kind of questioning rules, questioning process and using your brain at all times and, you know, thinking, thinking that stuff through that wasn't very coherent. But that, that's been important here. And I think my team, if they hadn't realized it, if they heard that, that would make a lot of sense to them because there's rules, there's guidelines, there's also like five other ways to do it and there's exceptions to every rule. And yeah, we have a price for this one product. And if an amazing client comes in and they're offended by that, you know what, we could just change that. It doesn't have to be anything. Yeah.

Now, what is the roughest situation, the most, you know, the, the thing where things just went all wrong? I mean, it just, um.

Well, this is going to be a cliche answer probably, but the year was 2020 and I was eight months pregnant with my third kid. And we had just taken the brilliant team of 11 people to Malibu for our annual off site and we were flying high. We had visions for the year 2020 about what we were going to do and how we were going to accomplish it and how we were going to grow. And then the world shut down and I was locked in my house in Chicago and I watched the email volume die and I watched the revenue die. And we went from our best month ever to fully zero a goose egg in April 2020. No revenue.

Wow. Yeah, it was zero.

It was rough. And. And we're bootstrapped. So it's not like I've got $5 million in the bank that are gonna like back us up so we can ride through the storm. So. And I'm eight months pregnant, which I don't know if you've been. Just kidding.

It's been so long since I've been eight months pregnant.

I tell you it certainly adds a layer of anxiety to the whole situation.

Right.

And then my other two kids, who were 2 and 5 at the time, wow. Are home from school all of a sudden and lucky I have a good husband who also helped and could help because I know some people's jobs didn't allow them to help or have a husband could help. So we're homeschooling the kids, super duper pregnant, trying to save the ship from sinking, and had to start putting. And I had actually just hired my CEO, Lindsey Cohen, who had been my close friend and before that, colleague at Sandbox in Chicago.

So she just hired another high, high level staff.

I had, and she had. She was quitting her job to come join us. We had agreed on Valentine's Day that she'd come and she was going to join on March 30th. And I called her up when the world shut down and I said, hey, did you give your notice yet? And she's like, yeah, why? And I was like, oh, no reason. Don't worry about it. See, on the 30th, so.

So, well, the thing was to point out to people not only was it zero in April, you didn't know what it was going to be in May, June, July, August.

Well, exactly. And I had to start making for me, the way to sort of resolve or at least stave off anxiety is to make a plan. And so whatever is eating away at me, I break it down and I figure out what I can change and I go make those changes or at least put some steps in place that I can sort of see, see through the end of that. And so for me, I had to say, okay, well, at what point are you going to start thinking about laying people off? Because there's a certain point where this thing runs out of money and it'll probably come back at some point. But like, you can dip into your savings, you could take a loan or you can lay people off. And you know, I don't know if you remember, but like the headlines at the time were all these companies laying people off and people their jobs and total chaos and we're washing our groceries. And so I put a, put a stake in the garage And I said June 15th. And I said this in mid April. If by June 15th this thing doesn't feel like it's coming back, I'm going to, I'm going to start firing people. And I also started telling everyone to take, take time off and shifts, we have unlimited vacation. So that wasn't saving me any money, but basically Everyone was feeling it. They were sitting around their computers all day feeling anxious because of the state of the world and also because of the state of the business and their jobs. And they could see it. We're a transparent company. You can go online any day on our business intelligence platform and see the month to date revenue and the year to date and what our goal is. So anyone at the company could have, could have checked and seen that things were looking pretty grim. And so I put a stake in the ground and we went heads down and we came up with all kinds of content and a big sales and marketing push around gifting from home and basically leaning into what our clients must be feeling because we were feeling it too. And we knew what they were feeling. They were feeling all kinds of uncertainty and their employees were feeling uncertainty and everyone was stuck at home and we couldn't reach. You couldn't reach anybody really. Not in the same way as we used to. Salespeople couldn't reach their prospects. So we built out all this content around how to reach the world when the world's gone remote. And here's our technology tools and here's our suggested gifts and we put it out there and we started pitching it and lo and behold, May rolled around and it started to pick back up and it's like, okay, I can move the stake in the ground from June 15 to July 15. So I moved the stake and I had my baby and I was back in the saddle the next day, which was brutal.

Boy or girl?

A boy. He's a. He's a hellion. Oliver. From, from May onward, it was gangbusters and we had an insanely big growth year. We were held back only by our ability to handle it all. And 2021 was even crazier. And so that was a very dark, low moment that we turned into and turned into for a lot of people, something really amazing.

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Notes. Well, I'd like to point out what you did that was so right there and explain it in other terms. Come at it from a different standpoint. And that is that when you don't know what to do, your whole world is caved in. You say, like, I don't know what to do next. What I've always told people that's very similar in sales, where people would say, I run out of all my prospects, there's nobody left. I've, I've contacted everybody I know to contact, you know, and I would always tell them, you're lying to yourself. There's one left.

There's always something.

There's all. I said, there's one left. And, and they would go every time. This, this is decades of doing this. But they would go like, oh, yeah, there's one left. I said, go talk to that one and you'll think of another one. And there's always, you know, there's all. When, whenever you run into a brick wall, there's always one thing you can do. And what you said there was, you know, to, to get yourself moving, to take those steps. You said, okay, I'm going to make a plan. You know, I'm going to get a plan. What can I. Because a plan forces you to think about what you can do, you know, like, well, I can't do that. But, you know, you can't do a plan off nothing. You got to do a plan off something. So it forces you to think on what your, you know, your, your possibilities are. That was just such a smart move, but it kind of shows how you've innately are equipped to do your job in case you doubt yourself going forward. As you go from 100 to 1,000 employees, it's all the same thing. Because you're dealing with situations like that is like, well, we can do something. Let's, you know.

Yep. I think that is. It's like being relentless. I'm a fighter. Like, I, I don't give up. And I think that ties to being optimistic. Like, there's always a way we can spin this to make it better and fix it, um, which is sort of crazy and has led me to do some really weird things. Also more in my personal life, um, I made a very ambitious birthday cake for my 3 year old once that turned out horribly. And my husband walks in and I've been like slaving over this birthday cake for eight hours and he goes, this is the most ambitious thing you've ever done. And it was a complete fail. Like, hilarious. Um, but I Don't know, I guess like within the confines of your own kitchen, being willing to take a weird risk and try that is harmless. And luckily my business endeavors are less of an unmitigated disaster.

Yeah, we're going to have to. It's been fun talking with you and hearing your story. How do you. For people that are wondering, are you, are you virtual still with a hundred employees?

I mean, we've always been all remote. And that was, you know, they talk about in gymnastics, the difficulty factor of a routine. And when I started the company, I chose a higher difficulty factor because I chose to be all remote from the beginning. I didn't want to have an office, I didn't want to commute. And I knew if I didn't want to do that, my choice was either to try to hire the whole company in the suburb of San Francisco that I lived in or figure out how to do it remote. So I did it all remote from the beginning. And that was actually one nice thing about COVID for us was we weren't adjusting to the sort of work from home world and we were kind of in our normal environs. And so, yeah, we're all remote. We are in 26 states and four Canadian provinces now. So we've got a lot of coverage in the US and we also have a 32,000 square foot warehouse outside of Chicago.

Uh huh. Well, congratulations. That's planning that background. That experience of getting remote to this size probably equips you pretty well to continue to scale your future expansion, don't you think?

It does. It was definitely a little harder to start the engine and figure out kind of the block and tackle for. How do you, how do you interview someone for this company that doesn't like, what is the culture of this place? Like, what is this place? There's no place. So getting that started was. Was weird and different and that was the difficulty factor. And now it pays dividends because we can hire anyone anywhere. Any. And not just from the suburbs of San Francisco where people need to make a lot more money, but from anywhere in the country and Canada and maybe all over the world and give people jobs that are above market where they live and give them that flexibility that I really valued too.

So did you. How do you, you know, you hear companies talking about their mission statements and their core values and things like that. How big are you on that to unify your team?

I mean, I think you, I think you live it. We actually just had our company off site in Scottsdale. We bring everyone together once a year Try to take them somewhere nice and show them a good time. And we talked about a few of our company values, but it was sort of the first time we ever really declared them officially. And as you might imagine, they're kind of casual. One of them is one of the. One of my favorites is down to clown, which means you're down to. You're just going to try stuff. Like, you're going to try it, see if it works. You're not going to follow the rules, you're going to break them if you need to, and you're going to figure out the best answer for the client and for us. And so that those are the types of company values we have. And I think just because we're not tattooing those on our corporate wall doesn't mean we don't have values. But I think the culture here is. Is a strong element of. Of this company and why people like working here.

Yeah, I think the. We live them our values is the best answer because rather than having on a paper and we repeat them at every meeting and stuff, you wonder how far that goes.

You know, it's like sometimes I have to repeat myself 10 times before people really understand what I'm. What I'm trying to say. And I've heard that from other CEOs, too. It's just you're talking to so many audiences. You just have to keep beating the drum. So I do understand that, but I think I also. I think I model our values pretty well. I think this company is still largely a reflection of what I believe in and how I work and my style. And I think we've. We've always tried to be really upfront about all that, because like I said earlier when I was talking about authenticity, it's not there you go.

But when you're not trying to be something, you. You are something.

That's right. And come to us. If you are our people, we will all each other and we will have a great time together. And if not, we wish you well and we hope you find your people.

Okay, well, this has really been a lot of fun, and I've kept you too long, but I like to let the guests have the final word. For people who have listened, followed us all the way through, and for people who are inspired by your story and would love to follow in your. Your footsteps, is there any last thing you'd like to leave them with?

I mean, I think. I don't want to say follow your passion. That's. That's cliche. But be contemplative. About yourself and what makes you tick and find a path that fits with that and feels like home. And that's, that's what's worked really well for me. I feel like what I'm working on and the style in which I'm working on, it really just is right for me. And that allows me to keep going in a way that I think I really. At bcg, for example, I struggled. Like, that just wasn't. That wasn't my style. And it was a great experience, but it wasn't a place where I could be for 10 years, nose to the grindstone, really, like enjoying the challenge. So I think you can, if you can figure out a way to work that aligns with. With your own style and your own values and what you're good at and what you like, that's going to make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of your ability to be successful.

Well, thanks so much for your time. This has been flown by and looking forward to getting you back on when you're up over a thousand employees.

That sounds great and slightly terrifying, but thanks. Thanks, Larry.

I appreciate it. It won't necessarily have to be next month.

Okay, great. I hope not.

All right, thanks so much.

Thanks a lot. Take care.

Thank you for listening to the final part of this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Great ideas.

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