Becoming a Creator, Building a HoldCo, Going from Idea to Business Launch with Michael Girdley

And it turns out that inspiration and joy starts to decrease over time as the business gets built. And eventually business building is doing 101% things rather than one 100% thing. And I want to work on the 100% thing. I don't want to work on the 101% things except for the couple percent of those that are actually really interesting problems. I'm driven by interesting problems. I love interesting problems. But your boring-ass, how do we upgrade our HR system? Kill me, literally. Like, I've been in those meetings and I'm like, thank God I'm not the CEO here, this is the worst thing I've ever sat through. But there are other people who do that and like it and love it and love it, and I want to partner with those people and I want to put them in the seat and I want to create an opportunity for them and get the hell out of their way. You want to talk about sudden deafness?

Yeah, let's talk about— so we're getting off, here we go.

Um, so sudden deafness is something I had My wife reminded me it happened 6 years ago. Basically what happens with sudden deafness is it happens to 1 out of every 10,000 adult men over 40. Basically you just wake up one day and your ear stops working. So that happened to me. I learned a lot about the science of ears, which is it's basically medieval. They know very little about how ears work. If you go to an ENT, which is ear, nose, and throat specialist, and you say, "Hey, why am I deaf in this ear?" Uh, they will tell you, "We have no idea unless we cut open your head and do an autopsy on you." So it's a real mess. Um, but yeah, so I just woke up one day and my left ear was basically not working anymore. I had strong sense of vertigo. I went to the local little emergency room and the ER doc said, "Well, just give it a few more days and see what happens," which is precisely the worst advice. So I did learn if your eyes or your ears stop working for more than 60 seconds, you need to stop everything and go to the hospital. Because anything they can do for you happens within the first 24 hours, and then after that you're pretty much screwed.

How has your life changed not having one ear that works?

Uh, my family is very annoyed with me because like this entire half of stuff is, um, not very exciting.

Yeah.

Um, it's created situations where, you know, before I had a lot of anxiety going to cocktail parties and stuff. I hate cocktail parties. I like— I love social stuff. I hate unstructured social stuff, uh, and it's made a lot of times now where we'll be at stuff and if it's too loud, like just above a normal roar, like I can't hear anybody and like I'll just be like, I can't stay. Like it's because people will be talking to me and all I see is like this.

So have you changed anything about your life besides not going to cocktail parties and being in loud situations?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a pretty first world thing to be like, yeah, I can't go to cocktail parties. The good news is I didn't even really like them. Um, you know, I think annoying to my family for sure, but I really looked at it as one of those things where I could say, how do I want to react to this? You know, and I think that really defines people, like, how do you react to adversity? And you get to decide what that level of reaction is going to be. And for me, I just decided, like, screw it, I'm gonna go make some stuff happen. You know, I'm gonna live every day like it's I'm going to be deaf tomorrow.

Which I think, honestly, and I think we could consider ourselves good friends at this point. We've been online buddies, but we've seen each other in person several times. And as I think about you and if I just had to brand you or tell people about you, always the glass is way half full with you. And you said a quote when you said, "I could choose how to look at this." We were talking on the pre-call about "how do you deal with getting on Twitter or online and seeing things that you don't like or that would typically trigger you?" And you had a quote and you said, "My strategy is simple. I'm okay with somebody else being wrong," or something to that degree. And if you look at life that way, then it's your permission to like, "I don't have to react to every little thing that comes and I can just be positive." Yeah.

It's super liberating. 15, 20 years being an adult trying to change people's minds, you're like, "Ugh, this is so annoying. I'm not going to do this anymore. Just let them think how they want to think." Was the ear the thing that kind of—

Have you always been that way or was it just maturity?

I think there's just— It's natural maturity. I mean, as a younger person, I definitely had insecurities that turned into smartest guy in the room type stuff. And man, I would tell you what I thought you should do. Here's the right answer to this and I've got it figured out. I don't have it figured out. I've done too many mistakes.

You have some humility and some scar tissue.

I think one of the transformative things, I really gravitate towards teaching. I just love it. I think it's so much fun and the intellectual challenge of how do you translate an idea and give a person that kind of perfect thing that they need to hear. To help them unlock and achieve, that's so interesting to me. And I think that if you're in a position where you can just be okay with letting them be wrong, but then when they're open to it, be there for them, that's super fun. And I don't know if I just wandered off into another space because sometimes I'll think about 3 ideas at once, but that's fine.

We're gonna go wherever this goes.

Okay.

And when we talked at lunch earlier, I said we might start somewhere, but I think we're gonna incorporate that later. Let's just kind of keep going on teaching. So, um, you are a prolific teacher and you've been super generous. And so I want to kind of move into how I would describe, as someone who's just been outside looking in, this creator, um, momentum that you've built. I, I really think you've leaned into this in a big way. And when we talked earlier, a lot of it was based on teaching people. But maybe let's just start with like, why have you chosen to put so much time into building an audience and becoming more maybe notable on the internet?

Yeah, lots of reasons. I think most good ideas tend to have multiple factors, so there's not one reason for it. Number one, I think I enjoy the process, like the teaching process. I don't know if you've ever looked, have you kind of studied what makes an okay tutor different than a really good tutor? No. So they went and studied what makes an okay tutor different than a really good tutor. And the difference was an okay tutor will tell you the correct answer. The great tutor gets into your head and tells you the perfect answer. And to me, that's such a cool challenge intellectually to be like, "Okay, well, this is where you're at. Let me really understand what you're thinking." And I'm reading Twitter all the time thinking about what are people thinking about this? Where are they at? What is their perspective? Trying to understand that. And then that intellectual challenge is super fun. And then I dig into it and lean into it. And then the other, like, thing that happens is you have a situation where you're teaching and giving on Twitter, and like, every time I do it, I get paid back 10x, right? Like, so let's just take it a micro level. Like, you and I have become friends just because, like, I beat my ass writing threads on Twitter.

Yeah, right?

Like, that's how we've connected. You've gotten to know me, I've gotten to know you. Like, that's like a great gift. And so it's that reinforcement that happens because it's just an enormous return on investment for me, top to bottom.

But to be fair, I would say when we first met, maybe we were all kind of messing around on Twitter trying to figure it out. But I would say in the last, I don't know, 12 to 18 months, you've taken it to another level. Was that a decision or was that just, "Hey, I've really enjoyed fumbling around on Twitter for 3 years. If I'm going to spend this much time on it, maybe I should channel it more," or something of that nature?

I want to win. Yeah. If I could help more people, that's a win. Yep. Yeah. So this year I had that goal of getting 150,000 followers, made it a month late, unfortunately. 2 months in, I discovered that the follower count idea is a total stupid metric, doesn't really matter. But I still kept doing it because I'm me. But yeah, there's a level of like, it's a competitive thing. It's like a video game to me. And I don't mean it in an I-win-you-lose way, but I definitely want to win. Yeah.

Why did the follower counts not matter like you thought they would?

Would, uh, so people think back in the old days on Twitter, follower counts were people that actually saw your stuff. And then when they went to the algorithmic, like, approach to things, that changed what your audience actually is. So your reach isn't— is, is somewhat correlated to your follower count because it's typically indicative that you're putting out good stuff. But now you can look and there's people with 2 million followers or 150,000 followers and they get like 3 likes a post. It's because their stuff's not any good and the algo algo has learned not to prioritize their stuff for viewers.

So what makes good stuff? What makes for good stuff?

Yeah, look, I think there's different versions of that. Okay, you see that there's, there's different people putting out different stuff. There are all kinds of corners of Twitter that you and I don't go into. Yeah, you know, there's, uh, uh, there's, uh, adult entertainment Twitter. Uh, there is my least favorite corner of Twitter, which is, uh, bro Twitter, I would describe it. Like a non-masculine Twitter. Have you, have you ventured into this?

No.

It's the worst corner of Twitter. Like, it's the worst.

It's this, like, what's a non-masculine—

they're anonymous, they're anonymous people. I'm trying not to use the incel word, but they're basically that. And there are people that are promoting this, like, um, like Andrew Tate type stuff. So they're doing— they're in the Andrew Tate genre, some version of that, and they're promoting, like, this is how you can be more of a man.

Yeah.

And it's like, no, being more of a man isn't cigars and whiskey and being a jackass and treating women poorly. It's actually the opposite of that. Like, real men take responsibility. So that's like my least favorite corner. Okay, so you can produce stuff there. Yeah, but like ultimately I think that kind of Twitter corner grows because it's based on negative emotions. Yeah, to me I think the best tweets are ones that come out of a place of good and giving, and it's like, how do you help somebody become a better version of themselves? How do you help them achieve their goal? And so like I think about it when I add stuff there, like how do I take and make this useful to somebody else? And that's good content. And anyway, there's that dichotomy there, but there's lots of ways to get an audience. That's just the way I choose to do it because I don't want a bunch of jerks in my feed.

For sure. To give the listener here some idea, and people ask me about this all the time and how much time you put into it, But can you maybe give a little bit of an insight into how you think about writing, how much time you spend writing these threads? I mean, these are not things you put together in 5 minutes. These are very meticulously put together. And maybe just a background of all the effort that goes into what people actually get to read by the time they read it.

Yeah, 100%. Well, there's a dichotomy. So there's the people that create intently for Twitter. There's kind of the joke, there's the toilet seat tweets that invariably you're like, you think about it, you write it on the toilet and you're like, "Whatever." And that's just a one-liner. My most popular version of that one is I wrote a tweet about every bankrupt person I know has owned a boat. And there's some nuance to that comment, but it hits into a lot of things and got whatever, 12,000 likes or something, which for me a one-liner is enormous. But then there's the other end of it where it's very intentional content. And I've discovered I'm pretty unique in this in terms of what I go through. Because you and I have been in a creator group of other people that are sharing tips on how to do this stuff. So my process basically is I will develop a concept based on what I think somebody would be interested in hearing, right? So it's like, "Okay, well, here's—" One I'm working on now is how to be a small business CEO. Yeah. And so I will go through and I will do a lot of thinking and prep work on that, and I'll start to build out notes, uh, around that. And that might be a couple hours of being on walks or thinking about it or being in the airplane, whatever, thinking about the, the thing. And then I will quickly write out a first draft, and typically I will go through 5 to 6 hours of revisions, 5 or 6 revisions, and then I'll let it sit, uh, over a week or so, and then I'll come back and revisit it again for readability. Oftentimes the last step is going through and removing half of the words twice, putting everything into 6th grade English, short declarative sentences, be able to read it on a typical trip to the toilet like a People magazine article. And so, yeah, a typical thread is probably 4 to 6 hours of work for me. And the pace sucks.

It's a long game. You keep telling yourself that. It's a long game. Okay, here's where I struggle. And I told somebody this the other day on the phone. I felt like I have not participated and tweeted near as much as I used to. And maybe you've kind of answered it, but a lot of times I'm like, "People already know this." Or I don't want to come off as— I never want to cross the line of coming off as kind of what you said, like, "I know more than you do," or, "Look at me, look at me, look at me." But you have found like a great balance of it really comes off as genuine teaching. But the real question is, how do you not overthink some of the concepts from a standpoint of everybody probably knows this anyway, why am I going to put it out? Like, how do you get through that mental block?

Yeah, yeah, no, I hear you. Well, I, um, an eye-opener for me, I think it was '34, '35, so over a decade here, I'm 48 now, and, uh, I was— I volunteered to help at a technology accelerator and there was a bunch of young entrepreneurs there, they're in their 20s and early 30s And I'm spending time with the guy running the program and I was like, "Man, what do I have to teach these guys? Why? I'm still pretty early. I'm in my mid-30s." And he goes, "Girdley, you don't know all the stuff you know. Just go out there and talk to them. You'll figure it out really fast." And I went out there and talked to these people and these are cream of the crop, handpicked technology entrepreneurs in an elite program. And, uh, like we're talking about some basic stuff like copyrights, like just really basic stuff. Like, like I'm like, you don't know what a copyright is? Like, I don't know. I'm like, oh, cause they've been working in some job at a big company forever. Like they never dealt with that stuff. So, you know, that's the feedback I would give to you. Like, yeah, you know, you're spending time with a lot of peers who know stuff really, really well and are experts in these things. So you're like, wow, what could a beginner possibly have to learn from all this? Turns out there's a lot. So, so, um, and then I think the second thing is, you know, as you start to think about what you're going to write or what you're going to share there, like, read what other people's questions are, read what they're asking. Yeah. Um, literally, you know, you and I were talking about YPO, EO, and Vistage and stuff like that. Um, literally today in the plane on the way up, I was talking to a guy on Twitter and he's like, what's a peer group? Yeah. But I was like, oh, you don't know what this is, do you? Yeah. Like, I was like, like, okay, like, I know I can help you.

Okay, you have 150,000 followers now. Now let's just frame this from what do you think— now that that tool is in your tool chest or that arrow's in your quiver, as you move forward in business, how does that audience that you've built factor into how you look at time going forward? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I wish social media paid better because I would devote more time to it. It doesn't pay very well, but it's an amazing accelerant for the things you're doing. It makes you smarter by writing. It makes it easier to hire. I put a job post up today, so we're hiring. I'm building a media team. Okay. Yeah, so I've got one person, Mirko, who's amazing, who produces our podcast. Not as well as this one, Johnny, just so you know. It's a shadow of yours, but we're doing good. We're doing good. But it's gotten to a point now where I've learned I'm really good at creating and I find a lot of joy in that, and I'm happy to do that unpaid. Distribution is so annoying. And by distribution, I mean figuring out which clips you're going to show and figuring out writing episode summaries. I hate all of that stuff. Or repackaging stuff I have. I have so much stuff that I've created and it's buried in a blog somewhere. So we're going to hire folks to do that. Anyway, over time, that's how I see it, but I see it as an accelerant for the core business that I'm in.

Okay. Now you've got me interested. What— so this media team, do they just work on your stuff, or are they an agency that work for other people? How are they going to get paid?

Oh, well, yeah, so I'm gonna— I'm gonna pay them, unfortunately. Uh, if you know anybody who is really good and wants to work for free, or pay me to work for me, that would be good. But no, I'll pay them, um, because I want to have good people that are highly motivated. I've tried the agency stuff and partner with people like that, uh, like I just do better with missionaries over mercenaries.

And what does that mean?

Uh, like, um, I want to have somebody that's fully dedicated and they think about my business in the shower and, and how they're going to make it better. And they're a missionary and they're aligned with me. Hey, we're going to change people's lives by creating content and putting it out there. And a mercenary is thinking about how they're going to grow their agency and I'm one of their customers. Yeah. And so, you know, the difference I think in social media between pretty good and great is pretty shallow. That's a pretty narrow gap, but it's hard to reach that gap, right? That 6 hours that I talked about in doing threads, I want people that are on my team that have that same level of excellence. Somebody that's running an agency isn't going to have that because I'm just one of their customers.

How do you think you find these people? Because I think we're entering this world of creatives. What do you look for to go, that per— like, how do you hire that person? Because I guess some of it could be a resume, you could look at their past work, but is there something else you're looking for to go, this is somebody that will— they basically become your left brain, they get what's inside your head and can become extensions of you. How do you do that?

Yeah, well, I think, um, to every— every hiring job for me is the same process I run with everybody else. So it's a combination of, um, top grading which is this track record-based hiring process, which I talk about all the time. The personality assessment tool you and I both use, same one, Culture Index, and then aptitude, a general mental aptitude assessment. And, you know, I can take those things as kind of a first filter, but then use the personality that I learned through the top grading process to really understand them. So like Mirko, who works with us, like, the dude's a bulldog, right? He's in Argentina, he produces stuff for our podcast and has helped us do really well, right? And, um, but what I saw in him was a pattern of things that I knew I wanted to have the kind of culture he had built into him in terms of how he was wired on my team. Yep. And he has proven to be that guy. Like, he's just— he's ride or die, right? And it's just like, I want to have those type of people around. And so, yeah, it's track record and then the same hiring process I use with everybody else.

Okay, I'm just going to keep picking. This is selfish. What does a well-built-out media company or media staff that you've envisioned in your head look like?

Yeah, hopefully it's built around where I think my strengths and weaknesses are. Right now, I don't want anybody else to help with creative. There's other people that are good with the creative, outsource creative to their team, and you could see it, there's people building little media empires. What I want to do is just accelerate all the crap that's already coming out. And help me filter it and make it really good. Yeah. Um, so for example, like right now I've got 13,000 people or whatever on my newsletter, and like, uh, like I don't write very often because like I'm too lazy to take the Twitter threads and put them in the newsletter. Like, that seems terrible to me. I'm like, oh, I have to do that for free? Give me a break. But so people that in my case can be that wagon wheel, the spokes— and I know we're not supposed to do this in an EOS, like, modern business thing, I'm supposed to be automating things— but like I really just want— I just need people to do those things that I really hate in terms of my stuff. So, you know, we're, we're going to be taking the, the content that I already have, which I think is genuine for me. Like, I don't want to be publishing somebody else's content under my name. I mean, you see big creators that are doing that, and that's just like, I'm not interested in that at all. I don't want to be like, hey, like, this is ghostwritten for, you know, for me. But then, like, being omnichannel as opposed to unichannel where I am now, but doing that with a team. Yeah, if you want to keep probing, I will continue to—

full on, I'm gonna keep— I'm gonna keep probing because what I— all I did for this episode were like 3 topics, and creator is one of them. And I think you have— you're part of this emerging class of— and I would maybe put myself in this category, not near as great as you've done it— of people that are coming from the business world and becoming creators, whereas you also see a lot of creators that have never run a business. And so it's interesting to watch these professionals. Maybe we're digressing or aggressing. I don't know which way we're going in our career. We'll see where it ends up down the road. But we are starting to, okay, we have this knowledge of stuff. Now, how do we reinvent ourselves? And I don't think it was a conscious decision I made. I just kept doing it. And I think maybe you did too. And now I finally sit here going, Okay, I've created 4 years worth of content on the podcast. I've not really thought too much about it because I've had this other thing, but I'm just now waking up. And we talked about it a lot at lunch today to go, oh wow, this might be the next thing and here's why. And we can talk about what this could lead to down the road. But one thing I was going to go back to, you just said I've got 13,000 newsletter followers. Would you rather have 13,000 newsletter followers or 130,000 followers on Twitter? Oh, right now?

The 130,000 on Twitter? Okay, why? Because I actually enjoy creating content for them. Yeah. But look, I think it highlights something going on with Twitter right now, which is it's changing under the new ownership. It kind of sucks right now. Elon has said that he wants to create something for the masses, and that may mean niche creators like us get punished. Yeah. And, uh, there's, you know, if you look at who's really doing well and the tweets that are working well now, they're all mass-markety mid-twit stuff, right? The niche kind of, here's esoterica about property management or acquisitions in real estate, or like, here's how you hire a CEO, like, that stuff is getting punished. And like, I see creators that used to publish stuff that was super interesting and would get 400 or 500 likes and would get visible with people. I saw one of our mutual buddies, he clearly spent several hours on a thread today on investing that was very good.

4 likes and 1,500 views. Do you think that is because they've already changed the algorithm to that? Or because as they're unraveling the algorithm and trying to get it where they're going, things are starting to crumble under their feet?

I don't think you should ever attribute to malice what you could attribute to just cluelessness. Yeah. Um, but I do think that if you look at the charts that Elon has been putting out, um, and I use his first name like I know the guy, like, you know, my buddy Elon, you know, he comes over to my house for barbecue. Like, I mean, that's the other thing with some of these— you ask for questions from Twitter for me and they're like, he surely has met some famous people. Like, no, I'm a big nobody. Seriously, I like being a nobody. Like, I don't hang out with famous people. I like— it's just like, I'm just a rando. Yeah. Um, but anyway, if you look at the charts like that he has published— and by the way, here's a great thing about the algorithm recently— I don't see more Elon tweets.

I don't see him at all.

I don't know what's going on, but it's because I don't interact with him. Correct. I'm just like, I'm not interested. But the charts he's put out are like, how many daily active users am I having? How many tweets are going per minute through the thing? And it's like, oh, if you draw back to what he's measuring, that's what's getting managed here. What's getting managed is nudging from where we were, which was this global community of little town halls, getting nudged to one big town hall, talking about something close to 4chan-style content.

That's kind of what's going on now. It is very much going on.

And I think it all happened right around my birthday, January 4th, because I did a tweet thread which I was pretty proud of. It was my favorite 15 dishes at Twitter, or at Chili's on Twitter. And then I thought I had tripped some kind of pornography ban or something like that because I pumped out too many images, but I think they changed it right around then. And I felt it that week. 'Cause I'm spending a lot of time, like I'll tweet 4 or 5 things and delete 4 or 5 of them if none of them go. 'Cause I'm trying to feel like, okay, here's what people want to see, here's how it works. And I felt it like immediately. And a couple weeks later, like all of our friends are like, hey, like Twitter's broken. I'm like, yeah. I thought it was just me.

I sent something in December that was like, I'm not seeing, if I don't see you, Moses Kagan, sweaty startup on a regular basis, I knew something was off. And for a while, I mean, If Moses is listening to this, he'll laugh. I texted him on the side. I was like, are you mad at me? Are you okay? Did something happen? Did you block me? Am I muted? But it was no. And I will tell you, it's made me realize how much what I loved about the old Twitter was feeling like I was walking into a room with all my best buddies and we were just going to start chatting. And now I feel like I walk into a room and I just don't know who's going to be in there. Or it's like some of the folks, I can't really describe the way I feel about it right now other than I've put 4 to 5 years into it. I'm not going to give up on it. It's got to get better and I'm not abandoning ship. But I do miss that niche community vibe, but I also can acknowledge the importance of maybe a big community vibe too.

Yeah. Yeah. And when I think— I think two things are happening. One is I have noticed, and this was commented to me, people that watch my tweets, they said, "You've changed your tweets in the past two weeks." I said, yeah. Okay, what'd you change them to? Much more pithy kind of one-liners, much more image-centric. For example, I don't know if you remember, 2, 3 months, 4 months ago before the change, if you posted a short-form video, never worked. Nobody ever cared. I posted one the other day, I got 100 likes, which is enormous. And of course it was me talking about how I recommend a book to people that I haven't ever read. But anyway, it was— Well, the joke, the joke was, it is, the joke was, he's like, I didn't need to read the book because I understood the concept from the title. Like, it's like this book should have been a tweet, but you know, if other people want to not read, you know, anyway. But, um, so, so that I've noticed, I've personally changed what I'm creating. Like, there's long-form threads and all that stuff, we're getting punished. Um, and I'm doing much more kind of pithy, I would say middle-of-the-road content where like niche content just doesn't do very well anymore. Yeah. Then I think the second thing happening, and I'm starting to do this, which is, "Oh, okay, seeing this as a platform I can't necessarily trust anymore." I knew there was a trust level that I had that Twitter was basically owned by the employees, they ran the shop, and they weren't going to change en masse. And now they're all gone, and we have a new overlord who may change things and is changing things. I think you're going to see a lot more folks doing what I'm doing, which is long-form content like threads and stuff. That's going to go to email, It's going to go to LinkedIn because it's not getting rewarded anymore. You're getting punished for putting it on Twitter. So that's part of why I'm hiring this person and building out a team is like, okay, newsletter. Newsletter, at least I know unless Google changes their spam rules, I'm not going to get canceled there. But on Twitter, I don't know what the new overlords are going to decide.

And the way it's going is not optimistic. Has LinkedIn translated to you? Has it translated well? Like what worked on Twitter, does it work on LinkedIn? It's kind of a different culture. I've done zero LinkedIn, but I have been observing that a lot of my Twitter buddies have shown up on LinkedIn?

So I think everybody has gone from Twitter and just started copy-pasta— copy-pasting all their stuff on LinkedIn. I like pasta too. Yeah, copy-pasta, that's a, that's a computer science joke. Um, uh, yeah, it's like, well, you know, copy-pasta that, just copy. But anyway, yeah, so, um, so I started doing that too, and I was like, this is lame. That was my reaction. I was like, this is so lame. Like, why are we all just making our Twitter threads into slides and putting them on LinkedIn? So about a month ago, I was just like, you know what I do? I'm just going to go be a real person on LinkedIn and see what happens because nobody else is being a real person. Yeah, everybody else is like, check out my new whatever. I'm like, I'm just going to go. I'm just going to go be a real person. And it's been so much more fun. I highly recommend that. Just go. If you, if you're a real person on Twitter, go be a real person on LinkedIn. Don't do the— let me tell you, here's the 14 things I learned from, you know, Seth Godin's book. Like, gag me with a spoon. So boring.

But, but, but LinkedIn is a strategy right now?

Uh, total experiment. Okay. Yeah, total experiment.

Uh, email, uh, good. Do you do anything else on any of the other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, any of that? Uh, no. No. And why?

Um, so I think for each of those platforms you have to figure out how to be a native in those platforms, and I, I see where people are going in just kind of half-ass where it's like, okay, well, I'm just going to like take clips and I'm going to use my YouTube clips. I'm going to put those on Instagram. It's going to work great. And like, I think that being good at any single one of those platforms at a level where I'm going to be proud of the content coming out and I want to associate my name with it, like it needs to be me or me plus a combination of people really leaning into those. And like, I don't want to put a bunch of crap on those platforms that I'm not proud of. Yeah, that makes sense. As I get more people to help with the distribution stuff and build out all this kind of team type thing that I'm doing to amplify my messages, I think I'll do those kind of things. But for now, I would prefer not to be on those platforms rather than put something out I'm not proud of.

Yep. You said Mirko's in Argentina. Will this team be distributed across the world, or do you think those will be US-based people? Everything I'm starting to build these days, unless I have to, is 100% remote. Really? And do you ever find a— not even— is there ever a cultural thing where especially as you're distributing content, you think this is how Americans like to receive content, is it the same of how Argentinians like to receive content, or is there a bridge that you have to gap there, a gap you have to—

whatever? So I think what I'm learning is for some overseas roles where there's a cultural difference, hiring anybody but a North American when your major consumer is North American is very difficult. So like Mirko's amazing. And like the thing I love about like him and I love about hiring Argentinians, for example, is like those people love to work. Like they, they're aligned with Girdley values that way. It's like, let's go, we're going to push, we're going to do better. We're going to have high, high set of standards, which is crazy when you look at Argentina, which is like one of the world's most screwed up economies forever. And it's funny because they all like hate the government, but they love their country. Yeah. It's the craziest thing. But I just love working with them. But it's a big gap, right? Where you have, if you don't have somebody that's native in a language like that, it makes it just so difficult to have nuance. So I think there'll be a combination of people that are North American, either Canadian or US. My chief of staff right now is Canadian, she's great. And people overseas, but that'll be specialized depending upon roles.

Okay. So when I think about just something that you are very, very good at, and you just got done talking about managing, um, you know, teams overseas, and there's a gap, is you do have an ability to manage a lot of different relationships, companies. Uh, Girdley Enterprises is a holding company with 11 different businesses, and you don't work in any of them, which means they're all accountable to you. Correct. So let's start at the top. Like, how have you What is it about you or your strengths that are able to keep so many things accountable to you and that you're able to stay on top of?

Yeah. Well, I mean, at the core of all this is, um, you know, I'm very systems-oriented, so I like to have systems for stuff and it just works and it just goes. So, you know, like from a Culture Index standpoint, like, that's a personality assessment that I use, like the, the consultant there read my profile and he's like, "Okay, you're the set it and forget it guy. You're the Ron Popeil of business. You need to set things up so they're automated because you're never going to remember." And the reality is unless I have recurring systems reminding me to remember stuff, I will forget details like crazy. So that's why to be able to do that, I have to set up recurring things to where it's like, "Okay, well, there's this one-on-one on my calendar and that's how I make sure I have this interaction model." I have a board meeting and I get these reports at this date and I set it up and I am able to forget it because I have a memory of a goldfish. So it's super important to do that. And then that works its way down. And I have an interaction model that I've standardized across all the companies. It looks very much like a kind of standard holdco approach that most people do. And then there's a standard API in terms of, to use a computer term, in terms of how what I see from them and I say, "Okay, I want to see this," and they send it back to me, or it just shows up. "Okay, here's your monthly financials. Congratulations, you get to see them." So those systems and routines are how the whole thing really holds together.

And how do you know— because you have the— okay, you got the system, but you said you have the memory of a goldfish. How do you stay up to speed with what you should be up to speed with? Is it purely like, "Hey, these are the reports I got last quarter," and I go review those quickly before my next? How do you stay to where you're in a flow with somebody to where every time you're interacting with them, they don't feel like they're just totally catching you up to speed, but you feel like you're on top of things? Yeah. Well, okay.

So I think the leadership style I try to have is being transparent with them about where I'm good and where I'm bad. And they all— the fact I just said I have the memory of a goldfish, they all understand that. Like nobody is like gonna be insulted because I forget something, because like they just know. Like sometimes I'll be like, wait, what are we talking about again? Like just a little confusion there. So like they— I hopefully do that, but at the same time do the things to communicate to them other ways that I care about them as people first and the business second, right? And try to do things in that way. But like for me, like everybody uses the same common language in terms of how they run the businesses. Like there's At its core, there's the EOS process, which is the business operating system I ask everybody to use. Is that forced? The agreement I have with people is use this. If you have a better idea, bring it up and we'll all change to that one. And nobody's come up with a better idea at this point. And it gets enforced when people are like, okay, we're having our board meeting. I'm like, where's the EOS stuff? Right? Where's the, where's the 10-year plan? Like, where's all the stuff? Like, can't I can't get up to speed on your business unless you show it in a format I can understand. And so having that standardization allows me to say, okay, well, I've created this interaction model with this company, right? And I customize it by company because I have a heterogeneous set of things, right? If you have a homogeneous set of things, you can standardize your interaction model. In my case, every company's in a different stage, different market, different CEOs. And then the different CEOs is important because different CEOs need different things from me. And I customize that for them. And so I get those things and I have that defined interaction model and it all gets run by my Google Calendar where it's like, okay, this is showing up on this date and I'm having this one-on-one on this date and I'm having this quarterly meeting on this date and the routine just happens. Do you ever screw up?

All the time.

What would you screw up on? For example— All the time, baby. No, I mean all kinds of stuff. I mean, very basic stuff. Because I have so much going on, it's impossible to keep everything in my head. I may forget things. So I could do that. For example, one of the things I've tried to get much better at is not jumping to conclusions on things. And actually, working with my business coach, I actually switched to be too much not jumping to conclusions, and that caused some problems where the last set of— it went from, "Hey, he jumps to conclusions too much," to, "Hey, he's not providing enough input." So the pendulum swung the other way. So I'll do that as well. And then there are times where if I'm not careful, little cracks can come in where that process that's supposed to happen, like the every 2-week one-on-one or the weekly one-on-one or the monthly meeting, I can let things fall through the crack. And I just have to be super diligent to make sure that I don't have that happen. Because the last thing you want to have happen— with business problems, it's super easy if you know about them 4 months before they're critical. If you know about them 4 minutes before they're critical, that's really bad. Yeah, so that way I can try to stay ahead of things.

So, so many things I want to unpack, little questions here. But, um, okay, just going back to EOS real quick, and anybody that's listening, if you don't know what EOS is, read the book Traction. It'll tell you everything you need to know about EOS. It's an operating system for businesses. My question to you is, do you hire a— do you teach the business, every business, EOS, or do you hire an implementer with every business, or do you just make the CEO read the book and hope they understand what it means?

I let them choose how they're going to deal with it. So really, yeah, so there's a super high-level— like, for me, like, I want to empower the CEO to take ownership of it, so I am very limited in what I tell him or her they're going to have to do. Yeah. So if they want to hire an implementer, they can do that. If they want to self-implement, they can do that. If they want to delegate it to an employee in the company, they can do that. Like, I'll coach them and I'll say, you know, I think you should do it this way or do it that way, But other than that, I'm not going to force it on them one way or another.

And just— I think I know the answer because this is a lot of things. There's a big— there's that, there's that imaginary line of when are you doing too much? When are you now becoming the CEO yourself? What happens if in this example they choose to self-implement and it's just been a poor job, which you see often for first-time implementers of EOS?

Yeah, well, that's where I would give them feedback on the work product and just say, hey, like, this isn't very good. Are you breaking this rule here? Though sometimes they get pretty good and they tell me I'm misunderstanding the rule, which happens. It's pretty fun. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Well, thank you." We'll pull out the book and be like, "Page 82." But yeah, that would be feedback for them, but it would be in the context of all the other work product they're preparing. And then I'm spinning up and I do an annual review process for all of them. So where some of that would get sussed out in terms of, "Okay, well, is that going well or not?" What was the core problem maybe there that caused them to make a decision and predict it went the wrong way? And so yeah, just be part of all their work product.

You're the business coach to them, and often the chairman could be considered maybe a business coach, but you just said you have a business coach.

Yeah. Well, and most of the CEOs that I work with are also in peer groups. So a lot of them are in the other peer group run by my same business coach. Oh, really? Yeah. They're in another Vistage group. There's like 4 of them in there.

So what do you feel like you still have to learn?

What do I feel like I still have to learn? Yeah. It's really interesting. I mean, I feel like at this point I'm in the— there's 2 categories of things that are learnable. One is there's all this kind of temporal stuff, like tactical stuff that's changing all the time. I'm curious about that stuff. Like, okay, what's working? And that's pretty obvious stuff. But I think at this point I've read enough business books and been around the block enough that really, to use the Donald Rumsfeld idea, there's the unknown unknowns. That's the stuff I keep learning, and that's why I like Twitter so much. I'm just stumbling around. Johnny and I were talking in the pre-show. He told me about something I hadn't known before and I took a note. I was like, "Okay, I'm definitely doing that." So those unknown unknown things are just by kind of stumbling around and trying stuff. Accelerates my learning.

What does your chief of staff do for you?

Well, it's pretty good. We talked about my memory of a goldfish the other day. I was in a one-on-one with her and I was like, "I'm getting managed here. This is great. This is really good." But I'm really good at being at 60,000 feet and developing insights. I'm terrible at taking 60,000 feet stuff and bringing it down to 5,000 feet to where it can be implementable. And so a really good chief of staff for me is going to be somebody who, to use Culture Index, is going to be low C, likes to have a lot of stuff going on, but is totally comfortable with taking that kind of— when I walk in and I'm like, "I don't know what I need, just make it good," and they kind of ask me some questions, try some stuff, I give them some feedback, and they are comfortable translating that down into where the rubber hits the road, that's super valuable. And then frankly, just there's processes that I know how to do that I have to get done, but I should delegate those things, like running a small hiring process. Those are things where it's like, "Okay, you go do this." So the social media person we're hiring, she's running that process. And we've agreed on here's how it's going to get done, and she'll present 1 or 2 candidates, we'll agree on them, and then we'll go from there. And then she'll probably build the training plan for them as well.

Can you give an example of, just a real-life example of something that you might conceptualize and how it actually ends up getting done?

Yeah, so all that hand-waving stuff I did about the social media stuff, she's re-architecting all of that. So I'm like, "Okay, this is where I think we need to go. We need to be becoming more email-centric. We can't depend on Twitter anymore. We need to become omnichannel. We need to think about putting a calendar together." And so she took that kind of level— that's the level of direction I gave her, by the way. That's why I'm such a great manager. That's fantastic.

You sound identical. I don't even know if I would've given that much detail. So a lot of this is for me right now.

Well, it's funny, one of the CEOs that I work with, he's like, "Okay, Girdley, stop philosopherizing on me," because that's the type of culture index profile I am. He's like, "I need some detail here. You got to tell me exactly what you want." I was like, "Yeah, just give me a financial statement that looks good. I don't know why this is hard. Just give me this format right here. Just do this. Something looks like this." But yeah, that would be exactly a project she's doing at this point. Where it's like, okay, translate this down into some actual activities of how my website changes, how my production flow changes, all that kind of stuff.

And then does she come back to you with like a plan, or it just— she's just off to the races to do it? And how do you play a role? We were talking about this at lunch. I'm really good at giving you the high level, me thinking you heard what I thought you heard, and then once the product's done, being like, no, no, no, no, no, we got to change this, this, this, and this, and And that person can often get really frustrated going, well, it would have been nice to know that up front. And on my head, I'm thinking, I thought I told you everything and you agreed to it. So I guess my question is, once you've given that to her and it's her project, does she come back to you with like a write-up of how the project's going to go? Or how do you kind of make sure she's doing what you actually thought you told her to do?

Yeah, so we, you know, habits, habits as well. So one-on-one chats. There's a good habit there. There's weekly one-on-ones. And so she'll bring those up and then we revisit them. But today, this morning, we had a call before you and I met for lunch. And I was like, "Okay, well—" She had taken the 60,000-foot thing and was kind of confused, so asked me, "Hey, I'm kind of confused about what the next steps are, so let's have a call." So we got on the call and we pulled up what she had kind of produced so far. And I was like, "Okay, well, why don't you take this and translate it into a plan? And then when you get to kind of a a stopping point or where you're confused, let's talk again. And then at each point I said, when you kind of have one-way or big decisions to make, let's stop and have a check-in. Because yeah, I've learned the same way. I can't just be like, yeah, just go make that awesome and then you disappear. I have to stay part of that process. And that's part of us getting to know each other and her being like, yeah, okay, this is where Michael's weak. Because frankly, that's a weakness. Every strength has a weakness. And she'll come back to me and be like, okay, that's where I felt like I was getting managed. Because she's intuiting what she needs to to make me successful and her successful.

What, what was there a, was there a certain moment, uh, or was it just kind of continuing to mature where you realize this was your role in business and it wasn't in the business any longer, it was going— or did somebody, did you take tests and that's what the test told you? Like, when did you kind of get the clarity that this is where I sit in the world?

Yeah, well, I was, um, fortunately I feel like I can talk about small business CEOing because I was small business CEO twice for over a decade. And there was this kind of pivotal moment where I went away on vacation and came back 4 weeks later and everything was running better than when I had left. And I was like, "You know what? I may suck at some stuff." And over time that idea and that level of humility gets reinforced because you try things and they don't work, or in my case, you buy into kind of the personality assessment Culture Index or Predictive Index type stuff, and they're like, "Yeah, you're a flawed and perfect human being all at once. Accept that and lean into your perfections and hate on your flaws and let somebody else take care of them." And understanding that I think has been eye-opening for me. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that think they can do everything. I suck at a lot of stuff.

I'm really bad. Oh, me too. Really bad. What is your process for— So we're going to talk about— We're going to get to big ideas in a little bit, but maybe we can kick it off with one thing that I've— One of the things on our call that was most interesting was you said, "One of my goals going forward is I only want to work on big things." Let's just actually start there. What does that mean to you? Yeah.

I think the transformation I've made is at this point, and I think everybody kind of reaches this in business, you kind of look up and you're like, "Okay, well, if I really didn't want to work anymore, I don't have to." Yeah. Right? Where am I going to find meaning and what kind of games do I want to play that are going to be interesting to me? And I think that's where having a business coach has been really helpful. Once a year we'll sit down and kind of do stock of, take stock of like, "Okay, what are you excited about? What are you I'm dispassionate about. And for me, things that didn't have a ton of impact or potential to make a shit ton of money—that's a technical term—those are not that interesting. I'm just at the point in life where I think I probably could not work ever again if I don't want to. I kind of say that and I feel really weird because people are like, "Well, why don't you just quit?" And I'm Why would you ask that? That's how weird of a question it is to me. Yeah. Because I love playing the game so much. Yep. And so to me, there's a 2x2 dimension of impact and potential financial outcome, whether that's 9 digits or 10 digits. Those are the types of ideas that I would want to work on that 20 years from now could look like that. And along the way, I think the theme of everything that I do is I've looked at it and with my business coach, it's like, "What's the theme of everything you do?" It's like, "I create opportunity for other people." I run a school. Like our fireworks business, you know, creates jobs for people that come in and run those locations. Like all of that are things that I've created opportunity top to bottom, these things. And I want to have that level of big impact. I just don't want to do it on a small scale anymore.

Okay, now that we've set that, you've, um, you've been a master at being able to take things from an idea to kind of launching them, and then you know when you're— it's your time to get out. So I want I don't know, maybe we could describe how in the past you've gone from idea to getting it off on its own and taking the role that you eventually take, which is a chairman or an advisor type role. And then I want to go from there and go, does that process change as you go through big idea thoughts? Are there different filters you put in place? So let's just start with number one. What has been your process from going from, hey, I have an idea to start this, to it's launched and I'm back where I need to be at the chairman level.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think historically that I've realized I'm a business creator and not a business builder, right? And there's people that I think find a lot of joy in business building. Like, I probably could do it if I wanted to kill myself, but like, it's not fun for me, right? But the idea of creating, synthesizing all the opportunities, synthesizing all the people and the resources there, and kind of doing, you know, I do this effectuation-style creation of new ventures, like All of that is where I find inspiration and joy. So I want to stay there. And it turns out that inspiration and joy starts to decrease over time as the business gets built. And eventually business building is doing 101% things rather than one 100% thing. And I want to work on the 100% thing. I don't want to work on the 101% things, except for the couple percent of those that are actually really interesting problems. I'm driven by interesting problems. I love interesting problems. But your boring ass, how do we upgrade our HR system, kill me, literally. I've been in those meetings and I'm like, thank God I'm not the CEO here. This is the worst thing I've ever sat through. But there are other people who do that and like it. And love it. And love it. And I want to partner with those people and I want to put them in the seat and I want to create an opportunity for them and get the hell out of their way and be their best friend and supporter because together we can win because I don't want to do it. It looks terrible. This is the worst.

Okay. So you come up with an idea, then do you find the CEO next? What happens from the day you go— We can take one of your businesses if you want to do a real-life model. We could take the coffee one or pick a business of how it happened. Yeah.

CodeUp's a fun one. I think that's a great one. So that's our coding school. So they have 50-odd employees located in San Antonio and here in Dallas as well. Not in Fort Worth yet. We'll work on it.

But yeah, it's on the list. Country Coders over here. We'll call it Country Coders.

Um, yeah, we're fancy. We're in Uptown. We're cool. Um, but yeah, so that was a business that, uh, you know, I— it's— I— the creativity of it was I saw— it was at the nascent part of when it happened. It was whatever, we started 10 years ago. And I read about a business where these guys in Seattle were teaching people how to be computer programmers to help them get jobs, and they were doing it all in like 12 weeks or something like that. That's not enough time, by the way. We learned that after a while. But basically I read about this and I had been investing in companies, angel investing, and all these startups were like, "How do I hire programmers?" And I was like, "Well, there's a huge shortage of programmers here and these guys are doing it in Seattle, so why don't we just do it in San Antonio? We're just as smart as them. Why the hell not?" And so we took the same idea, and there were only 7 or 8 of these boot camps at the time back then. And I remember being in our house and I turned to my wife, I was like, "You should do this." That's usually the first Girdley thing. She's like, "I don't want to do that." And so then I was like, "Okay, well, if she doesn't want to do it, I guess I'll just make it happen." So at the time I knew a couple of guys because I didn't want to teach the classes. I knew I was the right person to start the business, but I knew I didn't want to actually do real work. Just kidding. I like real work. And in that case I said, "Okay, well, I texted a couple people and I texted this guy Jason," who's now the CEO. I said, "Hey, Jason, check out this idea. We should do this." That's the whole pitch. He said, "Look, I totally—" We met and he said, "I totally want to do it, but I'm also starting a business right now and I started it a week ago, so I have to do that too." That was a consulting business, so an agency for software development. He said, "We need to get another teacher as well." I said, "Okay, well, let's go find—" So we found our third co-founder. So it was a guy, Chris, who was also located in there. And so I said, okay, well, like, let's start this business. Let's go see if anybody wants to buy, you know, what we're selling. And really, that was the theme of kind of everything that I do under this effectuation model of entrepreneurial creation, which is like, you go figure out what the biggest risk is, and you see everything you're doing as an experiment. And to me, the biggest experiment was not could we teach the course, not could we find a classroom, not could like we create a logo, but it was does anybody want to pay us for these courses? Because if I couldn't get anybody to pay us for the courses, it doesn't really work. So this is 2012 or so. And so I told the guys, I was like, "Okay, let's try this." And they said, "Okay, well, we'll build some curriculum." I was like, "No, don't build any curriculum. Don't do that because it doesn't matter. We know we can do that. The big risk here if you build all this curriculum is nobody wants to buy the damn thing." So we put up a website. I started having little seminars at the coworking space. I'd buy everybody pizza and I did this song and dance. And I was like, "Okay, once we sign up 15 people," willing to put down deposits, then you can start building curriculum. And at that point, we got 15 people and I was like, "Okay, build the curriculum. We're good." And along the way, we had structured how we're going to structure the business, who's going to own what, who's going to get paid what. And I agreed to take more ownership but not get paid, which was a good decision. And basically, we went off to the races and I was the first CEO. So that was my kind of last small business CEO job. And, uh, I, I did all the marketing, business, admin, all this kind of stuff. Dealt with the authorities when they called us because we weren't licensed, uh, and then they did all the teaching. And we did the first course, then we did the second course, and eventually, you know, 18 months later, we hired a CEO and I got out the door. And that's—

and now you're just a chairman to that CEO?

Uh, we, uh, the first CEO, um, she ended up leaving us. Okay. Um, and then Jason, who is one of the co-founders, made a transition from being teacher, shut down his other business, and is now CEO of CodeUp and has been doing it for 4 and a half years now.

That's awesome. Okay, so as you think about, um, as you think about, uh, big ideas, which— and when I hear that, I'm thinking things that are just going to take a lot more effort to get done, or maybe they're just ideas that are so good that they can start small but they have a huge impact. Does your model change at all?

I don't think so. I mean, our business, Duro Software, I think is an enormous idea that checks those boxes. It started small. It started with me and my partner and co-founder Paul buying one software company. And then we bought two software companies and we bought a third one. And so Yeah, I think the idea that you have to start big in order to eventually turn something into something big is kind of— is definitely flawed, right? I mean, there's the Silicon Valley venture capital thing where you can do that and you go raise big-time VC and good luck to you. Yeah, but I think there's plenty of bootstrap businesses that can get there. Mailchimp is a great example, right? Just start small. Every— if, if it's going to work at a billion-dollar scale, it's going to work at a $10 scale.

That's my opinion. I've never heard that before. Yeah, that's true. You have done VC investing. Do you still VC invest?

I'm still working on our funds that we raised in 2014 and 2016. And yeah, I still spend part-time on that stuff because I made a commitment to the investors and people that gave us money. And my money. I'm not raising any of the new funds. Yeah. I did the same exact thing.

I raised a 2014, 2017 little angel fund.

Yeah, never again. It's tough. You know, the people I would tell you, if you're raising a venture capital fund, if you're somebody that wants to be true to your word and wants to do right by investors, like, you're signing up for 10 to 12 years. Yeah. And, um, you know, that's one of my kind of core values. Like, I just, I couldn't take somebody's money, and I put my own money in, like, a good chunk of the money. My partners and I were 10% of the money. And, um, but like, I look at my partners and they have the love for Yeah, they love it. That's awesome. And I want to be the man in the arena though.

Yeah. Um, at a— as a holdco, do you do capital allocation? How do you know when to take earnings or distribute them?

This is a total Twitter question.

Oh, we're going to get through it.

I studied the Twitter question just so I'd know. Um, look, I think, uh, in, in my course, by the way, I'm here— I got to promote my course.

That, that is— if you look on the screen And you go, "Hold, CoCourse, we're about to get there." It's super funny because every time I talk about the course and stuff—

by the way, I made the course because I was so sick of answering people's questions for free. And I was just like, "Okay, fine. If you would like the answers to these questions, you could pay me." Anyway, and it's also great because it selects out— if you can find somebody willing to pay $2,500 for a course, they're going to be some people with some wherewithal and they're going to be truly motivated rather than the people who are just DMing me random questions. But anyway, the way I think about it in terms of capital allocation, capital calls, and how that works with the companies is there's a hurdle rate that is risk-adjusted on a per-company basis. So I will take a look and say, "Okay, I want to have an IRR, for example, of X or a yield of Y on my overall portfolio," and then I will adjust that up or down depending upon what the company's kind of risk profile is. Got it. And then if they are investing below that, they need to send money up to Papa Gerd. And if they don't, if they have a great place to deploy it, which most of them do, then they can keep reinvesting capital and we'll go from there.

And as far as if they do have somewhere, is there a hurdle or a certain return that you want? Does it have to be in year 1, or do they just have to convince you it's good? Or how do you know it's a good place to deploy capital?

Yeah. So early on with the smaller stuff, we will be doing a lot of, you know, wet finger in the air kind of, does this make sense by feel? As the companies get more mature, we will do more sophisticated kind of sensitivity analysis around those. So, you know, our fireworks business is very sophisticated in terms of how we do underwriting of deals at this point. Like they'll build LBO models or not, not LBO models, but leverage models in terms of site development and estimations, all that kind of stuff. And so we have a hurdle rate for them. Then the individual businesses will analyze those on a per-initiative standpoint.

All right. We're going to get to the course in just a second. It's fine.

We've promoted it already.

That's the fun part. No, actually, I think we're going to tie what we just talked about with holdco with being a creator. The plan was to bring it down to this thing. When you have 11 companies, you have 11 CEOs. 11 CEOs are— What's the typical profile of a CEO? Hard charging. Um, uh, you know, maybe a little ego in there, maybe a little 'I think I'm right.' Uh, all great people, but I guess the question becomes, what happens if you're at odds? Or— I— you don't seem to me to be somebody that you get at odds and maybe we're going to be mad and fight over it, but like when things— when you just do not align with what the CEO wants to do, are you ever— is your system set it up to where that filters it out really far in advance to where you're not being surprised by something? Because once you have 11 personalities, it seems to me like there could always be something where it's like, "All right, we're in severe disagreement here." How have you thought through that? Yeah.

So I think having an aggressive interaction model with one-on-ones, being on the same page, and them understanding kind of where we're each at in terms of of what we want to achieve out of the business is the right model there to not be surprised by anything. Is there a time in which we get to a point in which I will occasionally say, "Okay, there's a tie here and guess who wins?" That happens, but it's rare. It's maybe a couple times a year. And the reason is, A, you try to avoid that by having those kind of interactions ahead of time, but The, the second reason is, is like, I really want the CEOs to be taking ownership of the business, right? I want them to feel like they're in control of it. So it's very rare that things get to a point where I'm like, no, like, we're doing it my way. Yeah. And, um, that's by design. It's because I'm going to put ultimate trust in them. And I think that creates a pretty healthy dynamic because they all take it super seriously. Yep. They take— they're like, man, I'm really being trusted with this. Like, I need really bust my ass because we're putting faith in them.

And you had done a thread on it at one point. I think it was how to hire a CEO, but are there best practices for how to incentivize a CEO? Yeah.

I mean, I think there's different models in which you can do it and they can get tailored by the situation. So if you say somebody's coming on really early and they're a co-founder CEO, a great way to have them is give them equity from day one. They can share in the risk. If somebody's coming into an established business that's oftentimes more difficult to give them equity. So the model that I actually use is a bonus-style structure that is incentives based around them being aligned with the interest of the owner. So say, for example, if the investment thesis to own a business is maximizing multiple for time of exit 5 years from now and we don't care about profit, you can incentivize them around that. Or if it's healthy growth, right, you can you can create an incentive around there. So I did a thread on that. It basically ends up being a 2x2 matrix where it's like EBITDA versus revenue, and I use that with pretty much everybody at the C-level in my companies now.

Okay. All right. We're going to now take it back to kind of the top on just on holdcos. So when I think of a holdco, just so we're all speaking the same language, but I think you've said there's multiple different types. Some people like to think a holdco is like, "Oh, you just don't do a whole lot. It's just this entity and it owns all these businesses." And maybe Warren Buffett's made it seem easier than others, maybe not. But in your opinion, what is a holding company? Because as I watch people on Twitter, I sometimes see these people that say they have holding companies, but then I watch what they're tweeting. I'm like, "You're an operator, dude." Right? This is a fake hold company. This is an operating business. So to you, what is a hold company or what are the different types of hold companies? Yeah.

So, you know, at its core level, a holding company is a business that owns multiple independent businesses with leaders that are empowered to run those businesses, you know, subsidiaries. And there are different flavors of those. There's everything from like a Warren Buffett style, what I call a pure holding company, which is like this, and that's what I do. It's like a disparate set of unique assets, and you may even run different strategies. And then there's all the way at the other end of the spectrum where you may only buy, say, things targeting the same industry, or you may only buy this— like, you know, our software business Dura is a holdco, but it's a different type of holdco because they only buy B2B software companies. So like, they can run a different model than what I do where and totally distribute it in terms of my holdco. And then there's roll-ups, which I also consider holdcos, where you buy 3 different chains of oil change places. That's a roll-up that technically could be considered a holdco, and I'd consider it that. And ultimately, I think the differences between an operating business and a holdco is what the CEO does every day, which to your point, People think, oh, you just kind of hang out and you go to Dairy Queen and you drink your Diet Cokes and you hang out. Like most, most every holdco operator I know operates more like I do where we're working our ass off. Yeah, because we don't own Union Pacific and all this stuff that Warren Buffett— yeah, I wouldn't do anything either if I owned, you know, GEICO. And but guess what? Like the baby boomers bought all those companies. They're not around anymore. So, so the rest of us Gen X, we got to figure it out. And, uh, but in, in my case, like, what the CEO does all day is capital allocation, coaching, supporting, monitoring. Like, so I'm— the operation I'm doing is supporting those CEOs, and it's a full-time job.

Is there a capacity where you just can't take on anymore?

Uh, so what people mostly tend to do is, uh, you end up, uh, creating like people underneath you to take— portfolio managers. Yeah.

Will you do that? Uh, possibly.

I mean, I've got a lot of room to scale right now just because my model is like really low, low touch, right? Um, I mean, low, uh, low time requirement. Like I just go to board meetings and do one-on-ones and, you know, like say per company I would spend 2 to 3 hours a week max.

Okay, but that— okay, but to be fair, even if it's 2, that's 22 hours a week. If it's 3 hours a week, that's 33 hours. Absolutely.

Yeah, but I'm only at 11, so then you've got Threads, right?

We're gonna get to what does a week in the life of Girdley look like. But, um, but in fairness, let's just say you added 4 more companies, then you're kind of at a spot where maybe you have to hire that next person. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, all right, so let's just talk about the course for a second. This isn't a, a promo for a course. It's more like, why did you choose— because I think this is You know, there's, there's been this whole thing on the internet. It's like, oh, you're selling— like, people kind of, you know, what, what would we say? They, they tease you if you have a course. But as I actually think about this world evolving, and I think about all the information we give away for free, and then you're at a point now with 150,000 followers where, to be fair, if, if you wanted, your whole full-time job could just be responding to people. That would take up your whole week. So you decided to create this course and that was to filter down what you wanted to teach, but also do it with folks that you felt like would take it seriously?

I mean, those are definitely byproducts. I think the internet beat me. I was in the, "Who needs to do a course? That's so slimy." You're trading your social capital, which I still see social media as social capital. You're trading social capital for money, which I was always like, "Ugh, it's kind of yucky." But like day after day of people like, "Will you help me? Give me this for free. Do this for free." My DMs are just a dumpster fire full of those things. And I said, "Okay, well, I want to help people, and I'm trying to help people more by building up a cost structure." I'm hiring people. We have Mirko who does the podcast stuff. I'm going to hire a social media manager. I'm investing all this time. I want to make this sustainable, and it's not sustainable for me to be coming out of pocket to help everybody for free. So that's ultimately the core stuff. A, I love helping, but B, it's like, "Okay, I need to monetize this so I can pay for all these people." Because otherwise, if I go home to Mrs. Girdley and I'm like, "Hey, you know what I'm doing? I've hired 4 people, we're seeing no revenue. Pretty great." It doesn't go over as well as you think. But that also makes it sustainable where it's like, "Okay, I can justify giving away my time basically for free, but hiring people and paying salaries and doing more of that without some sort of revenue source, kind of a bummer.

How did you build it? Did somebody help you build it? Did you just kind of stream of consciousness? Was there a format you followed?

I got to do all the fun part. So Mirko and then Robyn, Chief of Staff, helped a lot. So basically the way we did it was we collaborated on creating an outline. We partnered with a company that does production of these, so would recommend them, they're good people. And so they've helped us with kind of all of the editing, video production. They hired the video production people to come to my office. But basically what we did is after the outline, Mirko and I would basically spend an hour every other day of me just going through on a particular topic like, "How do you hire CEOs?" And I just spend 30 to 45 minutes just giving a monologue total all over this about everything I know about the topic. And then they would take that and then they would translate that into a script. That would be all my stuff. And then they recorded me for 4 days straight reading that script, which was close to 400 pages. Damn. Yeah. So it's like this thing, like I talk about how I want to approach the threads, that's how I approach the course. I'm like, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to put my name on it. I want it to be really, really good. And so, yeah.

Was there ever a time where you were putting stuff out that you weren't proud of, or have you always been that way?

Um, I delete stuff I'm not proud of. Yeah, like I put out a couple threads, I'm like, "God, this thread sucks." Yeah. "Damn it, I hope nobody noticed I deleted it." Oh, I mean, people will be like, "Hey, you deleted that thread. Why'd you delete it?" Or, "Why'd you delete that post?" And I'm like, "Ah, it sucked." So you spent—

can you even give a— like, you spent how many hours building this course of your time? Hundreds. Hundreds. And obviously some cash along the way. So you have a lot invested in this course.

Time-wise, yeah. I mean, course production's really actually not that expensive. All the infrastructure and everything is like $17,000. Okay.

Have you started selling it?

Yeah, we've done presales. So I've got like 55, 60 presales.

How do you sell it?

Just through your newsletter? I write a Twitter thread and then I say, "Hey, please buy my course." It's like, "Who'll buy the course?" Okay, so now we're getting back to where we started though.

And this is where I think, when I think of the podcast, you've built an audience and now they know what you're about and you can kind of point them to things that, you know, are, uh, it's not, it's not a for-profit thing, but it's saying, look, if I'm going to put all this time into creating content that everybody's going to benefit from, I also at least want to have the lever to go, hey, I want to get into that business. Everybody check this out. And you kind of have a way to basically pre-sell everything that you want to get into. Whether it's an actual course or just getting people invested in it or interested in a business that you're in, or maybe you need investors for a business you're about to get in. Is that how you think about growing this distribution long-term? Yeah.

I mean, I think the business of distributing the social media, I just want to break even on that. It's kind of like Acquisitions Anonymous or first podcast, we always kind of joke, "Hey, we're almost breaking even." We did break even last year. I made $30 an hour working on the podcast. That is below my normal rate. But it's a total joy to do it. But yeah, on the distribution stuff and scaling the messages— maybe there's a better word to say than messages because I feel like I'm an evangelical preacher or something. But to scale that, I just want to break even on that stuff. And then I'll make money doing other things. But yeah, if I'm going to be scaling and producing and distributing more stuff and hiring help, I just don't want to be losing money on that.

All right. We're getting to the tail end, but I think we've covered a lot today and we brought it kind of full circle there with creator, holdco, how things could be sold and bought and sold because of the audience that's being created. And now we're just kind of saying, with all of this confluence of business, this emerging audience that you're starting to create, and you've now been through what I'd call the first half of your career and you're entering the second half of your career. If I just said, where is Girdley going to be like 20 or 30 years from now? We talked about big ideas, but you're a philosopher, so you've obviously thought about this. What does the second half of your career look like that might be different than the first?

Yeah, and it's interesting. We've talked about that at lunch. I actually think I've gone through 4 segments. I'm in the 4th segment. So yes, to answer your question— 4th quarter. To answer your question like a true philosopher, I'm going to change your question for you to make it better. This is like, I don't know, Culture Index people will think this is funny. But anyway, Culture Index jokes are the best. But no, I mean, that's how I think about it. So phase 1 was working for other people, learning how big corporations work. Being miserable there because I just didn't feel like I was working on interesting stuff. Yeah. And then making a transition from working in tech in California to like running the least tech-oriented business at the time. We had one computer when I came back to San Antonio, and it was connected to the internet, and we had dial-up. That's how we emailed around. We had an AOL address. Um, and I did that for 13, 14 years as a CEO and learned a lot there, but learned enough to know, hey, like There's better people at this than me. And the third phase was kind of doing what we're talking about, like being okay working on smaller things. And really now I see myself as having a foundation where like I just want to work on hugely impactful stuff, big outcomes, big ideas, um, you know. And I'm gonna do one every year, one every two years, and get them going and see what happens.

I wouldn't be doing the podcasting world a, uh, service if I didn't say I have a podcast, you actually have 3. Yes. Or 2 and a half, maybe. 2.

2 and 1 that's on hiatus. On hiatus.

Again, we've talked about being a creator. Why have you chosen podcasting as a medium?

It turns out, I mean, this is a culture index thing again, philosophers have a way with words. I don't know if you've ever— Have you ever seen that in the philosopher discussion? No. So, okay, all right. Here we go. Here we go. So Culture Index has these archetypes of people and I'm one of them. And it turns out philosophers can be remarkably charming in discussion and they have an amazing way with words. We all have very large vocabularies and we can twist words in ways that's very interesting. It turns out that's a very good format for being on a podcast. You can turn on your charisma, turn on your charm, you can speak ideas and then you just move on to the next thing. It's like, "Oh, this is perfect." And we talked about before, my first show is this interview format, and interviewing gives you joy. It does not give me joy. You know what gives me joy? Showing up, talking about interesting ideas, getting really excited about them, turning off the podcast and leaving. That's what I want to do. Yeah. Right? So if you look at the two podcasts I'm doing right now, that's precisely it. No prep time. Just show up, have a fun time, talk about interesting stuff, and leave. And Bill, who I think you recorded with recently, Bill Alessandro? Yeah. Guess what his CI is, our Culture Index thing? Same thing. He loves the podcast because there's no prep work. Show up, drop some bombs, leave.

You know, the funny thing is, so when I first took Culture Index, I was a daredevil, but something changed along the way, and that pattern is now labeled the philosopher. And I'm going to show you this after because you're, you, you're the king of Culture Index. But we gotta, we gotta make this, and it might be a great reason why I love doing this. I love being on this mic I love chatting with people. I love talking about ideas, but I genuinely love the conversations like the one we just had. And as I think about from a creator perspective, I think about it as scaling trust. I think the world is craving authenticity, which obviously you could have a podcast that isn't authentic, but not in a way— The only thing that happened today was two guys showed up to a mic. Johnny's sitting in here. There was no post- there are pre-production scripts and executives that had to set this up. And I think it's one of the things I'm most bullish on is it's authentic. And I think in the world we live in today, like, people are just craving it. And so it's why I'm most interested in it.

Yeah, well, you're killing it. I mean, you're so good at it. And it's like we talked about before at lunch, like, the emotion that you're feeling when you create a podcast is what comes through the microphone. Yeah, right. And it's— that's what I tell people that are starting a podcast, like, make sure doing the podcast brings you joy because that'll bring your audience joy. If it's work for you, it'll come across as work. And it's clear just watching you guys, like you have a ton of fun doing this, which is why you're 300-odd episodes in. Like kudos to you, man. Super cool.

Well, Michael, thank you again for coming up here today. This was awesome. Yeah, right on. Jason, as we sat back years ago and were envisioning envisioning where Fort was going to go, we realized we needed to bring in a global workforce, a remote workforce, uh, that could work with us. And a few of the reasons why were, uh, obviously cost, which I think is the first thing that comes to everybody's mind. But then when we talk about, uh, shifts, a 24-hour shift, and maybe you can go a little further there, and some of the other benefits that we've realized as we've gone on And now we sit here today in 2022. At the time we first had this was maybe 10 employees. Now we're at 46. Mm-hmm. And as you think about the next chapter and how we're scaling, it's almost inconceivable that we would do it without Relay Human Cloud. So can you just talk a little bit more to, um, how the shifts work at Fort and the productivity and some of the other benefits that we've learned about working with a, a global workforce?

It, it's actually been pretty transformational, um, from how we think about how we're going to not get— not only get stuff done today, but how we're going to get stuff done in the future as we grow. And so, um, when you start going down that path of thinking about you're going to start working with people on the other side of the world, right, there's a lot of questions that come up. How, how are we going to do it?

How are we going to train them?

How are we going to, going to manage them? Who's managing them? All those things come What we found with Relay Human Cloud was that all those thoughts had already been taken care of and that we could focus on what type of talent is there that can join our team. Does it fit our need? And once we saw that, that all that thought and energy had already been put into the, the operational part of managing and running a team and the thing that we focus on here locally, then it was just a matter of finding the talent. And what I think that Relo Human Cloud has done really well is find a lot of great talent. And, you know, these are people that are highly educated, that can provide a ton of value to a company like ours that otherwise we can't find here. And obviously it's at a high, uh, or an extreme cost savings compared to what we could find here. So what we started looking for was how could we supplement what we currently do with the team overseas. And it started off for us from an accounting perspective. We have a lot of these things that are repetitive, task-driven, that just never end. And we know that— knew that our team was taking on a lot of work during the day, which was limiting our ability to take on new properties. And so we could either— we have a choice. We can hire another accountant or another staff accountant or, uh, promote somebody and bring that person on, but we're really just trying to solve at first a repetitive task. Um, so when we reached out to Rela Human Cloud, we discovered that not only could we solve that problem, we could get a very qualified person that could not only do that, help support on a lot of other things. And so it very quickly, it turned into, we're trying to solve some repetitive tasks to, uh, bringing on more and more team members that were actually helping us grow our accounting department without having to bring on a lot of people here. And so that, that just continued to grow. So since then, we've brought on additional assistants, but it started with accounting. The benefit of having a team working globally is that you get the benefit of around the clock and it never ends. And so because we have a team here working on things, obviously the time runs out during the day. But there's things that are going to— they're going to come into work tomorrow and they're going to have to start doing that again. One of those things, and a good example, is cash reconciliations of every bank account. At Fort Capital, we have 50 bank accounts and there's cash reconciliations that have to happen every day. Well, that was something that locally a team had to come into work and start working on every day. Well, that just means there's other things they can't start working on. What happened immediately with our team at Relay Human Cloud was that overnight they were processing all those. They were, uh, doing all that accounting work on the back end so that when our team showed up in the morning, they could start on more important tasks that were happening, happening locally, directly related to the property. And that, that allowed us to create efficiencies. Um, and so that's just one benefit. You— we can I can go through a, a, an entire list of things that we have discovered that overnight can be done to help increase the efficiency of the accounting team. That, that extends beyond the accounting team. It also extends to the property management team processing invoices. So, uh, Fort Capital, we have millions of square feet of industrial space, uh, across the country. And with that, you have a lot of invoicing that's happening at all times. You, you could name a million things, whether it's paying bills, contractors, tenants, whatever it is, there's a million invoices being— and that can all be processed in India overnight so that when our team comes in, they're not spending their day processing invoices, which allows us to get to more, uh, proactive accounting measures so that we're using our accounting team to actually push the company forward, not, uh, keep up with what's coming at us, right? And So we found a ton of efficiencies by using or by having the 24-hour workday.

So following that up, it was also important to us because that could have been done anywhere, but we wanted it happening under one roof with people that we knew, that we worked with daily, that were part of our team. And so as you think about these people that are halfway across the globe, it still doesn't seem like they're— it seems like they're in the next room over.

Right. And that's a good point. and I think the— what's important to understand there is that this group of individuals that are working in India are working directly for our team. They are a part of our team. They're in our systems. They communicate with our team every day. They are not just an extension of our team. They are a part of our team. And so it is much, much different than if you go hire a third-party service out there in the world that you're asking to process invoices, who you're having to send critical or important data to that is, or might be sensitive, right? Information. We actually have all that internal, and this team is a part of that internal team. And so it's a, it's a much different way to look at outsourcing than if you're just outsourcing it even here locally in America. There's a risk there that you're sending your data to somewhere else. This is all happening internally.