8 Takeaways Hosting Our First Team Off-Site In Miami!

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour. Because here we are, we're hyped up on caffeine, it's Friday, we're feeling good. One week until Full Stack Rider goes live. But by the time you're watching this, Full Stack Writer will be live.

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Yeah. I like that copy.

One enrollment into Full Stack Writer. So be sure to listen for that secret word at the end. But other than that, we got plenty to dive into today that has kind of nothing to do with Full Stack Writer. We just want to give that quick intro. Mm.

Awesome. Yeah, we had the team here last week. I'm. You said happy Friday and I'm so disoriented on my wife here.

It's like 4am you know.

Yeah, we've been, we've been heads down hard at work. This is always the busiest time of the year, but this is the push into Thanksgiving. But yeah, we had the whole team here last week. It was a really, really cool experience. I mean not only it was a lot of firsts, it was our first team meetup and was the first time we had met a lot of people on the team in person.

And that first time almost everyone on the team met each other.

That was what was cool.

We'd met a lot of them as a one off. That was them all getting together.

Yep. And then we also held our first PGM off site meetup. So this is our premium ghost riding Mastermind. So these are some of the all stars that came up through pga. Now they're in the Mastermind. They've built, built and scaled agencies of their own. Each one of them is crushing it. Yeah, it was really, really fun to jam with them for a whole day in session. Yeah, what a. Just what a cool experience. And I know we both had a handful of takeaways but you had some great ones to jam on.

We can jam on some of these. But high level, I agree that that Was I rattled off this list to you on Friday. Was it Friday night before dinner? I just texted to you because our brains were fried. That was kind of the first takeaway is that there's a lot of planning, a lot of operations, a lot of extroversion. And we're both relatively introverted. So it's like, okay, we gotta put on a show, we gotta talk to everyone. We gotta do the logistics. We have to be at our best the entire time because everyone's kind of coming out for that. Both the mastermind and our team.

Yeah.

But I find that actually some of my best writing happens during that where my brain has like 3.3brain cells and I just rip out Apple notes and it's like, what's everything that I learned so I can get this off my head and then not think about it again.

Totally agree. That was the whole outline of this thread there. I might be making this up, but I feel like many years ago I read this interesting study about how you write better. Like not necessarily late at night, but when you're a little bit sleep deprived because it removes the sensor in your brain that's constantly trying to edit everything. And I remember I went through a period of time where I would try and like stay up late and wait till I was like falling asleep and be like, now I'm going to start writing. But I believe that.

Yeah, yeah, that. So that was the genesis of this list. So you want to just jam on some of these takeaways and go down the list?

Yeah, this first. This first one, especially because I have a handful of things to say about it.

So takeaway number one. We said most solopreneurs want to work by themselves out of spite. And I've seen this. It's very popular.

It's a growing trend for sure.

Growing trend of any solopreneur talking about the beauty of running a one person business. And we've both kind of done that. We've had periods where we worked on our own and I've never once heard someone who is a solopreneur introduce their story without. Eight months ago or five years ago, I worked for a team and the team was horrible and the team was X, Y and Z. And I hate working with people. So now I run my own business. And so to me, anyone really pitching the hard solopreneur lifestyle might be doing so because they worked with a horrible team in the past where if they had a better experience, which is what we are experiencing right now, it's a lot more fun to work with a team of lethal A players than it is by yourself.

Yeah, yeah. Just to define that. So solopreneur being you work solely for yourself. And a lot of. Sometimes I see people take it to the extreme where they're like. And no contractors like you, you don't outsource anything. There's almost this pride in the fact that you do it all on your own. And like, that's fine. The thing I wanted to share with this though is because I experienced this firsthand after I scaled down my agency. Like I went through 18 months really before we connected where I was just. I had, I never wanted to start another company again. Like that first experience for me. And at our height, you know, we had 23 full time employees. And it, you know, it was, it was a lot, especially as a 27 year old to employ that many people. It was, it was a lot. And I walked away from that experience really feeling like I never want to do this again. This was exhausting. I liked our team, but I really like, you know, like half of the team, you know, and then the other half, we had grown so quickly. I didn't even really get a chance to build relationships with them and all of these things and to show how real this was, like, funny little tangent is when we first started working together and I remember when Daniel, when we started working with Daniel in official capacity, he was more of a contractor and we were paying him. And I remember telling Alyssa being like, she's like, so it sounds like you hired your first employee. And I was like, no, I wouldn't say we hired anyone. I would just like, I was in denial about it. And I would say I literally have been in denial about it until this meetup.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden everyone's in the room and I was like, oh, I think we did it again.

Right. We did learn that. Because I remember each hire we made, you erred on the side of extreme caution.

Extreme caution, caution.

And it was like, okay, if we're going to do this, here are the seven things we need to avoid. Yeah, got to avoid overly giving them too big a title. We got to avoid all these other things where it was like you had like a, a shell up. I've been burned by this in the past. And so you could have easily gone down the. No, we're going to do this all on our own. But I think one of the lessons we've learned this year is the fragility of a 90% margin business where it might sound like, why would I hire anyone and Give up my 90% margin digital product business. But you realize that the reason your business is at 90% and not 60 is because you are doing that 30% of labor that you could easily empower other people to do. And it's more fun.

It is a lot more fun if.

You have people who show up excited. You get to lead the. The difficult skill to learn is this one where I put, you have to have the management skills to correctly align the incentives of the entire team.

Yep.

Where now we're working with more people, how do we make sure that everyone is incentivized to grow the top line of the business? So that's something we're thinking about a lot as well.

In hindsight, I do think that because I had that experience, erring on the side of extreme caution, I think was very helpful for us. Like, we had that pattern recognition and it helped us avoid a lot of mistakes that we've seen other people in our space make and which is totally. It's just part of the journey. Like, the first time you do it, it's very hard to not make those mistakes. But I think something that we've done really well too is sort of challenge those things in ourselves. You know, like early on when you were like, should we spend a hundred bucks on conversion? You know, I'm like, yeah, we should spend the money. And same thing. When I. Whenever I was erring on the side of caution, you were like, no, this would be a really good decision. So that's a big part of it too.

Yeah. And I think we're learning more and more and it's fun to document these. I was saying to someone else, like, we spent a lot of this year unlearning a lot of the beliefs we had last year about the types of product, products we could sell, the type of team we wanted, the type of businesses we could start, all of that. So we'll probably do another, like 2023 recap business lessons.

That would be cool. Yeah.

All right. Number two, I said your team culture hides on Slack and Zoom, but reveals itself when the entire group is.

This one blew my mind. Yeah.

So starting with the old type of off site that I did. So I was thinking back to the blackrock off sites.

We were Wall street offsets, where basically.

You'D stuff everyone into a conference room to give presentations that no one really was that interested in. We'd all sit around all day, bored, not wanting to be there. It'd be a stuffy, whatever environment we'd have, like, bounce back and forth between the offside and still doing our day to day work because the market never slept. And I just remember it was never that fun.

Yeah.

And then we'd throw this big party at the end of the day and it was like, oh, thank God I get to go blow off some steam. And we'd all get drunk and go. It was fun. We'd invite all the people on the floor and it was kind of like a big event. And then we try to have day two of the off site. The next day we'd roll in hungover, pissed off, drink a bunch of coffee, like donuts, feel horrible not getting anything done. And like that would be the extent of the off site. Compare and contrast that to our entire team where everyone showed up like it was training camp. That's what it felt like. Everyone was like, I'm here to ball.

Yep.

I'm here to learn. I'm here to soak the most out of this. Everyone was in the hotel gym because so for context, I stay in a apartment slash hotel. So one side is apartments, the other side's hotel. My apartment is on one side. And then all 10 of the others, except for you because you have house, stayed in the hotel side. So it was very convenient.

Yeah.

And then on the morning of Saturday, everyone was up getting after it in the gym at the same time.

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

Pretty much everyone.

Oh, that's cool.

Which was really cool. And then 0 out of 14 people drank the entire group dinner. That was one of the more interesting things by far.

Yeah, that was shocking. The second dinner when we showed up at Fiorito, because when I booked it, I had also booked an open bar.

Oh yeah.

Cause like, you never know, you know, and usually for stuff like this, most of the time everyone wants to drink. And so I was like, okay, yeah, it's our first time doing this, so sure, why not?

And.

And we sat down and. Because this was the second dinner, the first one no one drank. And so we sat down. The waiter was like, okay, open bar. What does everyone want? I'm like, no one wants anything. And he's like, so I guess I'll just take it off your tab then. Or what do you, you know, I.

Mean, I go back and forth because had we sat down and said both days, like, we're going to drink, they probably would have joined people here. But it was like I wanted nothing.

To do with it because no, it was.

So had to show up the next day and the last thing I could do is have any kind of brain fog on the next morning.

We talked about this briefly, but one of my biggest takeaways from doing this is how often in the past the vicious cycle would be, you're doing something that's taxing. And so then at the end of the day, you feel exhausted and you sort of rationalize to yourself, wow, I just worked really hard. I deserve. And then insert whatever the vice is, like, I deserve a glass of tequila. Right. So then you have the glass of tequila and to reward yourself, but really to like, sort of cope from the intensity of the day. You go to sleep, you don't get great sleep. And then the next day, which demands just as much from you, is now even harder. And we didn't drink all weekend, and I woke up Sunday. We did, you know, we did this ship 30 celebration call. We did the last thing and then literally just slept for the entire rest of the day. And it. It really made me realize how intense those three days were. They were super taxing.

And then at least, though, because you were able to fully recover on that Sunday, you hit the ground running this week.

Yeah, back at it. Monday, Tuesday, like, yeah.

And so we talk a lot about our three values of extreme ownership, relentless tempo, championship, championship energy. We have a video, I think like six months ago, and we solidified those values. I think it was earlier in the year. We made an espresso hour on it. But it was so cool to see that team come together and be like, okay, we've actually built a culture where we weren't really sure how people were going to show up. And then for everyone to show up like they did, it was like, okay, we're clearly on the right track with the way we're communicating, the expectations we're setting, everything. Yeah, people were hiring.

A very subtle thing I've noticed too. And this started all the way back when it was just you and me. And then you, me and Daniel. Is whenever you and I talk about something there, there literally isn't even a single word of oh ever, ever. Like, anything we talk about, it's always, okay, great, so what do we have to do? And. And I've now seen how that has bled into the culture of everyone else where having everyone here anytime, we said, okay, now we're going to work on this. Like, there was not even a single, like, like every person's like, what's next? What's next? What's next? And that has been really cool to see how that's become the culture as well.

Further contrast with the average corporate off site.

Yeah, people complain about all they do is complain.

Think about the water cooler. All it is is complaints. There were zero complaints at the entire weekend.

So it's nuts.

And.

And other people said that and were like, this is a surreal experience. I've never experienced this before.

Because we have. We have a diverse age. We have people from every experience. We got 23 year olds and we got older everyone. So it's like everyone is at a different stage of their career.

Yeah.

But they all recognize that what we're doing is different.

Yep.

Which is pretty cool. Okay, number three, don't underestimate the amount your team members look up to you. So I preface this with 18 months ago, I worked for a company of 10,000 people. Bottom of the totem pole. Now we run a team of 10 who look to us to set direction. And you said this when you sit down at a large conference room table and just 10, 11 sets of eyes turn to you, like, all right, what are we going to do? You're kind of like, oh, yeah, I have to be the one to decide.

What we're about to do.

So I felt that in a big way.

That was my. Yeah. Saturday. So everyone got in Friday, we spent some time with the team. Then we did a big dinner. Team plus mastermind group. And then we woke up Saturday morning. We rented out this conference room here in Wynwood and basically spent all day just jamming on ghostwriting agencies scaling. Very mastermind focused. But the whole team was there. And. And yeah, 8am I had the moment where this all really clicked for me was I got to the co working space early, obviously. Cause I wanted to like, set up, make sure everything. And we got orange PGM hats for everyone. And I was there by myself. And I was walking around the big conference table, like putting a hat at each person's seat. And that was my like, movie moment where I was like, oh, yeah, this is real.

People are here for us.

And yeah, we sat down at this conference table. It was this big long table. And Dick and I were sitting at the head. And all of a sudden, everyone just sort of settles in and then just turns and looks. And I had this moment where I was like, oh, okay, it's 8:50 in the morning. Time to ball for the next nine hours. You know, it was great though. It was a lot of fun. And afterwards when we came back here, that's why I asked you, because this is the first time you've experienced this, you know, And I asked you, like, what was this like for you being in this position?

Yeah, my take was Dang. This is such a flip from where I was 18 months ago, where it hit me in a different way, where. Because everyone was staying in the hotel, we were going to dinner that one night, and I walked down from my apartment, and everyone was in the waiting room, like, in the lobby, ready to go. And I was like, okay. And I got down there and everyone was talking, and then everyone stopped and just looked at me for a second. I'm like, wait, okay, this is different. Because you don't feel that on Slack. You don't feel that in Zoom. And so I was like, okay, we got to get three Ubers. And I'm like, dictating the game plan to get to the place. I'm like, oh, I remember doing the exact same thing, but being on the other side.

Yeah.

Like, my boss would come down and I'd look and be like, okay, tell me what to do kind of thing. Obviously, we have a way different team than the one I was operating on, but it was just a funny full circle moment to think about that. But then there were a couple other little anecdotes where we're part of our team. We have two killers, Tristan, Connor, if you're listening, watching this. That are 24 years old. And I think we both underestimate how much influence we have on them right now. And I go back to when I was working at blackrock, the most influential people in my life were the people older than me on my team. I spent the most time with them. I looked up to them, everything. And so I think we underestimate how much the little things were the. Tristan eating a bag of chips at sweetgreen, where I, like, jokingly was like, why are you eating chips at Sweetgreen? This is a salad place.

He just looks at his head like, why am I eating chips?

And later he's like, I might never eat chips again. Little funny moments like that make me realize that we do have the opportunity to shape the way our team conducts themselves far beyond just work. And so I went home and said, well, what are all the things where we could put together some kind of internal trainings on various topics that would be extremely valuable to the various members of the team that are probably now obvious to us, you know, and that's sleep, nutrition, organization, personal finance beliefs, all those kind of things that are now slowly becoming the highest leverage trainings we could put together beyond just personal con, beyond public content. It's like, how do you align the people doing the most work for you? Yeah, on the right direction.

You know, the Thing that's really clicked for me on this is. And I think this is something I really didn't understand with, with my first company, which is so many times people think about it as like, oh, how do I become this really great boss? Or, how do I become this really great manager? And they. They see themselves as this above figure. And something that's really clicked for me as we've built all of this in the past three years is. And again, I think it's just happened naturally because you and I push each other in this way. I think about it much more as a player coach scenario where it's like, yes, in many ways, you and I play the role of quote, unquote, coach, but there isn't anything that we ask anyone else to do that we aren't actively doing ourselves the whole point. And so I think of it more in that player coach of it's not our job to, like, tell other people what to do. It's our job to set the tempo and then give everyone else the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And if you rise, great, you're. You're a good fit on the team. And if you don't, it's. It's very objective. It's like, well, this is how we operate, and you either rise to the occasion or you don't.

You know, it's like, you hear this story with the Patriots all the time where when a free agent signs with Bill Belichick's team, they come in and on the first day they're like, oh, this is different than every other organization that I've been a part of, where the meetings are sharper, the practices are sharper, the people are sharper, the. The staff is whatever. And they go, oh, this is different. And a lot of people don't like it. Yeah, a lot of people are like, damn, I'm in the NFL. I kind of don't want to be doing all this.

I don't want to try this hard.

I don't want to have to try this hard. Exactly. So we actually haven't had anyone join the team recently. Recently that wasn't a great fit. But I guess as we scale, though, it will be increasingly clear when someone comes in. And the turnaround time, I think, will be way faster than if we bring someone on where it's. They jump into slack and they're not ready to get after it, like everyone on our team is on a daily basis, then probably not going to last.

Yep, agreed.

Okay, takeaway number four. This was really just a general one of Nothing beats the energy and speed of having an in person event. And it made us realize we want to do more of these. So on a quarterly basis, have the whole team out there, even on a more often basis, have some of our like core team that are part of every decision. So Daniel and some of the others, then that was all I felt was where we had a couple times where we would have had to organize a Zoom and Async, but it was like we were just having breakfast and we'd make the three decisions of the day that we needed to.

Right.

And then we'd be off and running. And the speed of that I think was new to us.

Yeah, agreed. And it was really cool to see that we could combine a team off site with a Mastermind and, and actually that there's benefit in that, you know, like people in the Mastermind got to hear different perspectives from people on the team. And also as we were jam on things in the Mastermind, we could immediately then turn to the team and be like, that's an upgrade. That's an upgrade. We should change that. Like the. The time to improvement was zero. It happened. Everything could happen very, very quickly. I liked that a lot.

Yeah. So we really want to do it. And now we know how. Hotels, flights, restaurant, co working space, boom. Done.

Yep.

You know, okay, number five, when putting an event together, keep the environment dynamics.

I liked this one a lot.

So this was very small. The only thing we could have done better would have multiple places for the meeting or for the group to be on the actual Mastermind day rather than all be in the same place. I think we did okay with like going to lunch and we had some different ones, but this was why it was so much better than the Wall street ones was we moved around a lot.

Yeah.

You know, we worked out at the hotel, different restaurants, we walked home, we walked, took walking meetings. We did some time outside. We had conference room in a completely different part of town. So they got to experience a different area. And yeah, we had some time with the whole group and then we also spun some out to do those small group huddles, which I think all worked pretty well.

Yeah, that was really great. I. My takeaway.

We.

We did it sort of at the last minute, but it was good to have the team and the Mastermind together for one part and then break them apart after. There's just so many things that now that was. The whole thing is when we put this on the calendar, same thing. It sort of hit me that we put this on the calendar like Three months ago. And it reminded me of the studio where three months ago I was like, there's no way. And then when the time came, it was the perfect time.

Perfect time, Exactly.

And so our biggest goal with doing this was, I always feel like the measure for success the first time you do something is literally just doing. Really doesn't matter how it goes. In a lot of ways, the whole goal is to just get a rep in. Because now that we got a rep, we have a laundry list of things. We're like, oh, now we know what to improve. But you can't know what to improve until you get that first full loop.

And you will never feel ready to do that first. Yeah, I mean, we pretty much done that with 10 or 15 things. Product launches, getting the studio in person, events, newsletters. You just have to pick something and get started on it.

Yeah.

Or beating a dead horse. Repeating that one at this point. Okay. Number six, hire a photographer and videographer. It's worth every penny. This is the biggest one. I honestly think this is the biggest one is if you were going to get your team together, make it a memorable experience and event by having someone there to film the whole thing and capture photos and do headshots. I think that headshots one was amazing.

Yeah, that. So my. My big realization with this. And I think 10 years ago, I get where saying something like this, it wouldn't make sense. But the more that the world moves digital and the more that we all care about our. Our digital lives as much or more than our analog physical lives, you have to recognize that when you create quote, unquote content or you have someone come take videos or pictures or whatever, if you're holding an event, whether it's team or some sort of group event, mastermind, whatever it is, people value the digital assets that you create. Like, every. Everyone was really appreciative being like, now I have a new picture that I can use as a profile picture, you know, or everyone's like, oh, look at that cool B roll that I'm in that I can put on my Instagram.

So.

So you have to recognize that it's not just for you or your own business or company. Like, it actually is a value to everyone who's involved.

Yeah. Seeing the whole team comment on one another's Instagrams with like, oh, that's sweet.

So cool.

Cause you realize you don't get that when you work a remote job.

Yeah. When else are you going to do that?

Exactly. So we had Juan shout out Juan. We had Paola take Headshots for everyone. And we're going to have like a mini documentary. We're going to be able to look back on that as the first team event. So a lot of fun. Number seven, invite your most successful customers to come to the off site for a hot seat day. Anyone can do this. So I said, this does two things. It increases conviction in the mission from your team members. So when they see that you've the tangibility of the real world benefits that.

Your product, they're like, oh, this is a real thing.

It's like, oh, this is a real thing. And then second, it does even more to give more value to your best customers. So having the PGM Mastermind guys out, we got to one coach them and then everyone else on the team go, oh, wow, these. Because of the work we've done, these lives are changed. Right. And it's hard to tell that with a kind of online business. So the more that you could bring that into the real world, I think both of those dividends are going to pay for a long time.

Yeah. And also too, I guess, just to share behind the curtain a little bit. You know, Dick and I were really hesitant to do a first like ghostwriting Mastermind because PGA is still really new. PGA has only been around for six months, and we only have a handful of people who have gone through PGA and ascended to the Mastermind. Obviously another year goes by and that will grow. But in the beginning, everything's small. Right. And so we were sort of hesitant going, well, you know, if only a couple people come out for this Mastermind, is it even going to be valuable? And you were the one who kept saying it to me, but reframing it as this is probably the most valuable one for the couple people that come because they're going to get so much attention.

They did.

And they did.

Yeah.

Like, each person, we got to do hour, hour and a half hot seats for each person. We got to jam with them for, you know, five, six hours that day. And realizing that as the Mastermind grows, hopefully, you know, we'll find ways to do the same thing for everyone. But, you know, if you have 50 or 100 people in a Mastermind, all of a sudden the dynamic changes.

Definitely.

So I think for anyone here who's again, hesitant being like, oh, I only have a couple people in this thing, is the, is it even worth it? Is it even valuable? Reframe it as this might be the most valuable because they get the most attention.

Yeah. And it doesn't take very much effort. Additional effort.

Yeah.

Already renting the space to have the off site. You already have the hotels and logistics mapped out. You just tell those customers, hey, stay here. Be there at this time. They're not gonna be there for every event. Like we said, we did half and half. The first day was just the team. Team. Second day, we brought in the Mastermind members. That was so cool to see. And people walked away with like, oh, wow, I can see how this is going to grow from here. And we felt the conviction triple just this week with the way people are conducting themselves. And it was already at a high level, but now it's clearly ramped up. And I think we felt that from the management side of like, oh, everyone got back on Monday and was like, I'm ready to go.

Yeah, Monday after it, I opened Slack and I. I felt like our team already moved at a hundred miles an hour and it felt even more cranked up.

So that was a lot of fun and definitely something I think we should do for the next one. If we do it in March, which I think is kind of what we're targeting. Same thing. And hopefully we'll have more on the PGM side.

Yeah.

And then lastly, have your team members write up their takeaways from the event and share them with you.

This was so cool.

Yeah. So we had, rather than have everyone dive straight back into work, we had everyone share what they learned in their golden nuggets. And one, I said, this does two things. It gives them space to share the ideas that we've probably overlooked. Like Tristan saying, I'm never going to eat chips again. I would have never thought that. Connor saying, I'm reevaluating my entire approach to effort and intensity, like in my entire life because of one set of one workout that I did with you on Saturday.

And Katie's thread was the one inspired.

Us on all of it. Yeah.

Yeah. So that. And what was cool about that too. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to have this type of business, but again, I think these things will become more and more prevalent. The fact that we have a culture within a business that's all based around writing on the Internet, it was so cool to see everyone then go write about their takeaways on the Internet. And seeing that the next couple days, it just made me realize that as the team grows, we could foster that where. Where we can. Where right now it happened organically, sort of on accident, but we can encourage that of team members. And then other people get all these different vantage points of what it's like to work on our team. And yeah, it's really cool.

We had and we took that idea and now our sales team are creating one to three pieces of content every single day that they were already doing internally with our end of day reports, but now they're just tweeting out one lesson. Real a utilization. You could take that and apply it to your team.

Yeah.

Whatever you learn on a daily basis with your job, tweet it out. That's so low hanging fruit to help one your team members distill everything they're learning and build their audience on autopilot as they're going about their day to day. And that being encouraged I think is so important to general culture. Everything.

Yeah, that, I mean it's a, it's a meta lesson we talk about all the time. But that right there is a great example of like when we've had these conversations with other people on the team. Most people think about it as I have the, the role that I play and then, oh, I also need to create content. And you're. Most people think of them as separate and in reality they're, they should be the same thing. Because every single day, whatever you're doing, you don't realize that you are creating valuable insights or lessons or takeaways or frameworks or anything. And this is a great example. We just held an off site. We're not sitting and quote unquote creating content. All we're doing is just reflecting on the thing that we just did.

Exactly. Just talking about the things we're already doing. Which is why this episode is so easy.

Yeah.

We're just, here's what happened. And every. We've learned more and more. This is how we want Espresso hour to go. It's rather than saying, hey, here's how to run your team off site. It's hey, here's how we ran our team off site. Off site.

Yeah.

No one can compete with us on that. We don't claim to be experts. We literally just ran our first off site and we're talking about everything we learned. We're not saying this is the de facto way. It's hey, here's what happened and now we're talking about it.

Yep.

And that allows you to create content about what you're doing forever. Just, hey, recently I did X here's what happened.

And selfishly it has huge benefits for us because it crystallizes all these takeaways now. Now the next time that we go do this, we can reference this list and go, oh yeah, these were some of our Biggest lessons learned. What should we improve on? This is It's a mini tweet. You know, it's a listicle. It's a carousel.

It's a VSL for future employees that might want to work with us. I mean, this got a couple hundred likes, a couple hundred bookmarks, people going, oh, wow, I'd love to work for a team that did that. Are you guys hiring? I got a bunch of DMs. Same thing. So revolutions, revolutions.

Just over and over and over again. If there's one thing we hope people take away from all of the things that we talk about, especially in regards to digital writing and things like that, is you have to not think about it as I have to go do this thing and instead realize that you're already doing the thing. All you have to do is just sit there for five minutes and reflect on it.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, that was fun. And I think we want to do the next one in March, so. So countdown to that one.

Hop to it. Let's go.

We should go ahead and get that booked, you know. Okay.

Giveaway, Giveaway.

So last time we did the word Caribbean. Caribbean, but half the people just put secret word Caribbean in the comment.

So if you've made it to this.

Point, you have to hide it. Otherwise people who don't watch the whole video are going to get there. So we need a better word. What's something that they could use that you can kind of hide of? I think we should just use off site. So that's the word. And that way you can say, oh, I love the takeaways from your off site. Or oh, I ran my off site XYZ again.

Oh, I like that.

So you have to bake in the comments. So there it is. There's the secret word. If you're on YouTube, it's off site. Leave a comment with your biggest.

Is off site one word or is it hyphenated one word off site?

Yeah.

Is it? Yeah, it's not off dash site.

No, I think it's one word off site. Off site. Yeah.

One word.

One word.

All right, One word off site. One word. No dash.

No dash. So but we're hiding it, folks. Don't say secret word off site. No. Okay, so if you're on YouTube, you can leave a comment. If you're on Spotify, you can take a screenshot and put it on Instagram.

Oh, I like that.

Use the word off site and you get entered. And what else?

Bonus points if you don't just use the word offsite. But if you share some sort of takeaway when I was running my off site. How you could improve your off site.

We need that as well.

Things I liked from my company's off site.

Right. There you go. All right, so this, I love this because we're only talking to a handful of people that make it to the end of every episode. We're at the Marvel movies and we have a little post trailer. All right. That's the secret word. We'll give away one free. Free enrollment into Full Stack Writer, which is live if you're watching this right now, and goes unavailable for sale at Sunday, 11:59pm so you got a couple hours, a couple days left to go pick that up. I think it's the best product we've ever created, by far the most comprehensive writing product on the Internet.

That's why we're only making it available for five days, because it's so insanely valuable that we're like, no, let's just. Anyone who takes action on this, you get rewarded. Everyone else, nope, sorry, you got left behind.

There we go. All right. That's all we got for this one.

That's it.

Like, subscribe, leave a comment, leave a screenshot, tweet about it. You. You know how to enter the contest, all that good stuff. We'll see you back here for the next episode of Espresso Hour next week.

See you, everyone.

Have a good one, y'.

All.