Prison or Castle: How To Build A Business Around Your Ideal Life

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 we are once again hyped up on caffeine despite being in Amsterdam. It's 6:52pm here. I snuck in a. I snuck in a little double espresso around 4, 4:30, just because we had a ship 30 call. I knew we're gonna do this. And it wouldn't be an espresso Hour if I wasn't hyped up on a little bit of caffeine. So how you doing, bro?

I'm doing great. It is once again thunderstorming in Miami. My dog hates it. We got Meredith, which is my dog's name, a little, like, earmuffs to, like, block out the thunder, and she hates it. She looks like a little muskrat. But I'm very jealous that you are in Europe right now, because I think we are. We have both come to the conclusion that Miami is an amazing city minus the months of May to August.

Yep. I think it is the best city in the world to live from December to May. And really November, I think late November to May, but the summer is hot and humid. And then you get the hurricane knock on in September and early October, and then the community dies down and it becomes really nice. And it works perfectly with kind of how some of the northern cities are. But I think that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today. It's just general lifestyle lessons and realizations we've started to kind of piece together as the business has accelerated. The team has grown. We have, I think, dabbled in different management styles and meeting styles. And we're starting to kind of crystallize what the infinite game looks like for us to run this business forever. And I think jamming on that people would be interested to hear. We can talk through some of the frameworks we're thinking about. And then maybe someone leaves this episode saying, why don't I just implement that working system in my business right now?

Yeah, I think this topic is super important because so I remember when I was working in Chicago, my mentor at the time used to have this saying where he would say, when you're an entrepreneur, the business that you build can either become a castle or a prison. And when it's a castle, well, it's really great. Like, you get to design the castle that you want it to be, and you can choose the art on the walls and you can have people over to your castle and you can Design your bedroom in your castle and like, it becomes a very creative and fulfilling endeavor. If you do not design your business intentionally, it becomes a self inflicted prison. And what he meant by that is you become a slave to your own business. You're a glorified worker. You know, you're the owner, but you're, you've given yourself a job, arguably and usually a more stressful job than if you were to just work for a company. And I really experienced that building my agency. My agency became a prison for me. I haven't written about it too much, but there was a point in the middle of our agency where our payroll was so high and we had so many clients channel at once because a third of our clients were crypto clients. At the height of 2018, you know, we got a huge surge because they all raised a ton of money and then they all bitcoin fell and they all left at the same time. And to avoid laying people off because we thought we were still going to like hire and we could keep scaling, my co founder and I cut our salaries so that we could continue paying people on staff. And there was a couple months there where we were the lowest paid employees of the entire company, despite the fact that we were working 80 hour weeks taking on all of the risk and, you know, all of these things. And so I think something that Dickie, you and I have done really well since the very beginning of ship 30 is we've had a lot of conversations around what do each of us individually want? You know, why do we want to build a business? What are the things that I care about? What are the things that you care about? And we've also made some really strategic decisions around hiring and like really trying to push, like think about how much we've built just with Zapier opposed to defaulting to, oh, we need a person for that. We need a person for that. We need a person for that. And I think you would agree with me, every person that we talk to when we share how big our team is, they're floored because we have a very small, very lean team. And like, that is a very intentional decision to build a very specific type of business. And the more intentional you are, the more you build a castle, not a prison.

We've definitely taken a lot of the lessons you learned running that agency and applied it to hiring. The framework or metric that I think we've implicitly used is revenue per employee, where you should have some idea of what your revenue per employee is. And then that gives you a kind of metric to measure against. If you're going to add someone new to the team, is that going to lead to a decrease in revenue per employee or an increase like how are they going to help change the business? And I think as you look a lot of people in this space they'll say we're just going to hire a big team. But the revenue generation activity from each of those individuals is not apparent. What it might be would be it takes a non revenue generating activity away from the founder so that the founder can then go do more revenue generating activities. But that comes with the upfront trade off of training the person. And if you're only training people all the time and then you have churn and you're not going and working on those high revenue activities like that's I think the endless hamster wheels where you spend all your time hiring but then you can never break out of that trap. So you have more experience with that. But I think that's a good overall metric of revenue per employee. Is that increasing with this higher or decreasing?

Yeah. And like a super lightweight way of thinking about this is looking at the people in your team and asking which ones are revenue critical and which ones aren't. And revenue critical being is this person actually doing something that impacts revenue or are they like, like an assistant for example? Assistants are helpful. They are usually not revenue critical. And so it's okay if you have one or two team members that are not revenue critical because they help take things off your plate. But if you look at your team and you're like eight of the 10 people I have are not revenue critical, you are probably over indexing on. I just am trying to hire people. The big thing I want to share. And then Dickie, I think you've laid out like a really nice, you know, here are the things to think about and optimize for. What took me a really long time to fully internalize as an entrepreneur is that you can build whatever type of business you want to build, whatever life you want to design for yourself, you can. The problem and where I see so many first time founders fall into, myself included and I feel like Dickie, this is where like we have been able to power level a little bit because I experienced that and then by the time we teamed up I was like, we don't want to go that road, we should go this road. Is like first time founders have this very ego driven desire to feel like they need to build a formal company. So when you think of designing a business, you actually don't think about your own needs. You think, well, to build a business that means you have to have employees and they should be full time and we should offer them benefits and we should do team building exercises and we should do retreats and we should, like you think of all these very formal ways that most people define companies. And as a result, you start measuring success in all the wrong ways. You're like, I'm measuring success by how many employees I have. That's horrible. That's like bragging about how high your overhead is. Right. Like, so I think that it's really, really hard to understand that as a first time founder. But as you go along and like now where we are, you know, we're almost three years into building this together, it's like finding what are the ways that we or you listener, is measuring success and how do you specifically make decisions to create the business and the life that you want for yourself, not what everyone tells you a business should look like.

Yeah, I think it's taken us some time. I mean, less than eight, less than 18 months ago, I was still working a full time job at a hedge fund. So I didn't really know what I wanted as I've left and that is it's revealed. I think another thing is we are at different life stages. You're engaged, about to be married. I'm luckily 27 and single. So we have different perspectives around that. But I think intertwining them is what is going to allow us to build something that lasts forever. Right. Being able to play off one another. So I'll share a couple things as we kind of lay out what prime is thinking. So I was on Ali Abdaal's podcast while I was in London and we got into this conversation about scaling the businesses. It was like two hours in and we just started talking about what he's thinking about on the scaling side, hiring more people, what he eventually really wants to do long term with it. And he kept coming back to this idea of as he goes about this, goes about his day, he's asking himself right now, if I won the lottery, would I still be doing this thing? So each activity, if I won the lottery, would I be doing this? Would I launch this product if I won the lottery? And then the follow up question that really broke my brain was, after you do that and you have this long list of activities, you follow up with, how much of the lottery have I already won? And I thought that was a very interesting way of like, okay, what actually would change about my life in general if I had won the lottery and what I prefer to do and like how close to that am I already? And what parts can I start to implement where for these X number of things I might as well have won the lottery because nothing would change. And I haven't really sat back and reflected on it. But that was one thing where he said it during the podcast and I just wanted to pause for like 10 minutes and think about it. But then now I've traveled to Amsterdam from here and I'm starting to look more at the way we're spending all of our time and going through that lens of like, would I continue to do this if I won lottery or if I reversing it if I'd won the lottery? What are the things that I know for certain I would do every single day? Why aren't I doing those things if I'm not for the most part I am, which I'm very lucky for. But also how can we optimize to make that the infinite gain that you just get to continue to do the things that you really love to do and then other one off activities you can unlock. I think as you grow an overall larger business. So that's the trade off, right? Your day to day likely doesn't change for a lot of the business growth if you take control of the schedule and run it in an efficient way. But the one I thought one off activities you can go experience change. So I don't really want to focus on those. I'd rather just focus on the general lifestyle questions. And as I started to reflect on those, I have a couple answers there. But that was what primed a lot of this thinking.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with that a ton. So what are, what are some of the things that you wrote down?

Before I even answer this, I'm spending time with George Mac in Amsterdam and he's run a similar thought process and basically tried to construct his entire daily routine around this. And so I answered the same questions of like, what is A lot of people talk about building your ideal day, but that doesn't make that much sense because yeah, you might go to dinner with your friends on your ideal day, but if you did that every day for a week, you don't want to do that. So it's actually you want to kind of design your ideal week. Like what are all the different activities, people you talk to, experiences you have, you design your ideal week and you can even kind of design your ideal month where you have certain times. I think that the nice middle of the road is to design Your ideal quarter. What are all the things that I would do in a given 13 week period if that was kind of the container I started to play with? And then you can look at different days. So I started with, I know until I'm 90 years old that if I can wake up and have one to three hours with nothing but waking up moving my body a little bit, this will change. As you have kids, I'm sure life priorities change, whatever. But one to three hours of time in the morning focused on processing thoughts and to me that's writing. Whether that's writing to publish, writing to journal writing to just explore and learn. I know that for a long time it's, I want to be able to have complete ability to wake up right. Without having to handle any fires the second I wake up. Like for example, if I was six hours behind and on Hawaii time, I would very, very rarely get to have that because I would feel all of the messages that would be coming into me the second I woke up and I wouldn't like that. Versus right now in Amsterdam. I wake up and I go, it's 1:00am Back in the U.S. no one could, even if I wanted to go put out a fire, I couldn't. So there's no point in going to check it. There's no one who could be reaching me at this time. So that's been number one. And I think you would answer a similar long term priority.

Yeah, something that's been a bit of a realization for me lately. I notice that whenever I'm really not dialed in, one of the worst habits that I have is I wake up and I immediately just check notifications of things, check social media, check stripe, check email, check anything that has a real time notification to it. And what sort of clicked for me recently because I've been since working on not doing that, is instead I've been waking up, moving my body a little bit, doing some light stretching, really starting to feel it now in my 30s, how much my body needs that. And then sitting down and doing some very intentional either reading, not reading for entertainment, like studying, reading something that I'm trying to like, really turn. It's like a brain workout and some writing. And what clicked for me is that's not just like a better habit. What's really happening is you're trading cheap dopamine for earned like foundational clarity for the day. So you're not just removing one bad habit. You're like going from waking up and drinking iced tea and eating Skittles for breakfast to like having A really nutritious breakfast that tees you up for a completely different day. And I think, you know, if I look back on when I was running my agency, like my day literally started at I would be jumping out calls by 6, 6:30 in the morning. Cause I was in dealing with clients in different time zones. And I would immediately check my phone. I was on west coast, so I was immediately inundated by slack messages. And I'd be chugging coffee within 11 minutes of being awake. And it's like, I know so many founders that get stuck in, in that cycle and then they tell themselves all the reasons why it can't change. And it's like this extreme ownership of like, you have designed your life that way. In that really toxic moment. I had designed my life that way. And so every decision that you make is like, not just what do you want? But also accepting responsibility for. And if you don't have what you want, why are you making choices? That's constructing your life that way.

I'm so glad we're talking about this, because I can share some small hacks that I've come across over the last two or three days. That idea of waking up and checking notifications hits me so much harder when I'm traveling and I'm a little bit underslept and I know I'm going to wake up and my brain's going to be a little bit foggy. Maybe I had a late dinner or drink the night before, something like that. And that act of notification checking is actually like a quick take the numb, like numb my brain a little bit. It's like my head kind of hurts, but it's going to hurt less if I just like, like stare at the screen for a little bit. And my brain is defaults to the absolute easiest thing. And so if my phone is anywhere near me in bed, I'm grabbing it and I'm checking. Like I know how bad of a habit that is, but it's like it's. I'm traveling, it's Saturday, and like before I know it, I'm on instagram for like 30 minutes. That's sitting bed. So as I move to this new place in Amsterdam, I'm very intentionally have a charger way away from my bed because like most hotels, most I don't do that at home. But I go to a hotel and I'm like, oh, this is convenient. Like there's a little charger right next to my hotel bed. I might as well just put my phone here. And then I wake up, grab it and like the day is kind of over when I start like that. So I set up another charger over here. I'm powering down both of my phones at night, so they charge, but they're empty. So not even like I can see a notification pop up when I grab it. It's pure black screen. Okay. And this may sound like extreme measures, but I've recognized how important this environment design is for my personal productivity. That I am a liquid that takes the shape of its container and left to my own, I'm just like sprawled out all over the floor. But if you just give me a nice container, I'm going to execute it. So I did that. I'm opening my computer in a separate profile. So I have two profiles on my computer now. I have like, no nothing Dicky and then regular Dickey. And in this one, I have no chrome. I'm not logged into anything. It's Apple Notes blank page. That's it. No messages, no WhatsApp, nothing. And all that does it prevents me from going on the Internet. But the Internet is also blocked on that, where I have a cold turkey app locker that blocks all Internet. Because here, like, yeah, but it's like, but what if I need to look at this? That is the, hey, I'm thinking too hard. Let's go down a rabbit hole. Because this is like a little bit uncomfortable. I'm on like rep 8 at the gym and I'm trying to get to 12 and I'm like, I could rack it right now. Let me just check the Internet and like Google this thing. But it is so much more uncomfortable. And the long term benefit of getting to that 12th rep of like 40 minutes into your writing session, where the good start thoughts really start to flow. So those are like the extreme measures I'm taking. And I've done that the last two days since I've been here. And it's the most fulfilling writing sessions I've had in a long time. Just sit down, three hours, blank page, capture ideas throughout the day as I'm going about traveling and having conversations and listening to things write about them. Like, this idea for the podcast came from this morning's writing session where I wrote up all of those takeaways that otherwise I might have ended up on Instagram.

I really like that second one a lot. I never thought about that. But you know something that I am notoriously bad at is recognizing the incremental power of like, very small actions. Like, I think humans in general, we just have a hard time understanding how compounding Works. But whenever I'm in bad cycles of like just consuming too much social media or just failing to stay focused on things for long periods of time or whatever, it is, something I'll convince myself of is I'm like, oh, I don't have time to work on this thing today. And so I just don't. But the reality is I do have time. I just might not have like three dedicated hours. I might have 15 minutes, I might have 15 minutes this morning and 15 minutes before bed. And. And something that I've been trying to work on in myself is realizing that those little blocks of time add up pretty quickly with consistency. If you do something for 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes before bed, and you do that seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, you make it massive amount of progress on things. And so also like not discounting these little opportunities that you have in your day. But yeah, I think obviously I'm a big believer. You are too dicky. Like, it all kind of starts with your morning. Like how you start your day is usually an indication of how the rest of the day tends to go. But there are some other, like, bigger picture things we've been talking about too. Just in terms of like, this is the type of business and type of life that we want to design.

Yeah. Why don't you dive into what's top of mind there?

I really liked when we were chatting, I might be skipping around here, but I really liked when we were chatting yesterday or two days ago, this idea of the informal four day work week and this idea of Fridays are actually sort of these empty containers. If you're around and you want to grind, you know, and you just want to put in the work and make use of a Friday, amazing. But otherwise you don't have to. And it was funny when you first brought that up because it's a, it's a funny question to ask when, when it's like, could we have the same, could we do all of the same things but do it in four days instead of five? And the answer is like, yes. And I think the answer for most people and most creators and most companies is like, okay, all the things you do in five days, could you get them done in? You'd be like, yeah. So then what's the long term benefit of working four days a week, Monday through Thursday, leaving Friday more open, leaving it open for more spontaneous conversations, leaving it open for more creative work, leaving it open for bigger picture thinking, leaving it open for a grind session if you want to. Leaving it Open for travel for a long weekend if you need it. It's like, what is the long term benefit for your life when you do that? Recognizing that it's the, it's not the Pareto principle. What's the principal Parkinson's law, right? Where like it fit. And most people go, well, you have to work a five day week because otherwise we won't get everything done. It's like, well, ask the question. Could you get all that done in four? Yeah, you probably could.

Where this originated, I think the most stressful three to four hours of my week every week are after a bunch of our Friday calls. So to paint the full picture right now as a company, we do all of our calls on Friday. Ship 30 calls, PGA calls, team meetings, we do them all on Friday. And the whole idea is like our brains are typically pretty cooked around Friday. We want to just. We're not going to get as much deep work done. Let's just do Friday. But what that actually kind of turns into is like Thursday is usually kind of a like weird up in the air day where like you see Friday and you got some deep work done Wednesday. So the idea we have is to move all of our team calls and curriculum calls and group calls to Thursdays that would then leave open Friday for travel, like you said. But what it really does is gives you just a buffer day. It's just a baked in buffer to put things if you need to. Because what ends up happening when we have these calls on Fridays, it's like 3pm Someone's gotta go to dinner. Someone's got this, someone's got that. And then I'm kind of always like. Or if I'm traveling, I'm trying to piece all these things together. Most people travel on Fridays. And that last couple hours of Friday, I always feel this cortisol in me because I feel the open loops aren't closed. We're about to go to Saturday where people definitely don't want to be thinking about work, doing work. Most Saturdays, I think that's family time, other whatever, right? Hobbies, exploration. The whole reason you work for an entrepreneurial business or you own your own business is to have full flexibility of all that time. So I'm with George and he's, he goes, yeah, we just do all our calls on Thursday and Friday's just kind of an informal day. And I'm like, sometimes you hear something that sounds literally go, dude, that's genius. Like that solves so many of our problems. Because now there's no frantic like, hey, the whole team needs to be. Because the, the key is like Friday it's not you're off. It's informally the buffer day. So it's not like, oh, I got a scramble. It's like, no, we're probably still going to show up on Friday. But it's intentionally like we're going to have bigger picture conversations. We might jump together as a team. We could have people over to the compound to have, you know, group discussions, things like that, but it prevents that end of week, like rush before the weekend. And George said, and I can already see this happening, like when you wake up Friday and you start to think more about the things already being in their place. You go to bed Friday much more peacefully than you might have Friday before. You're not as tired going into the weekend. Saturday you're almost like fully re energized and you can fully take advantage of that Saturday. And then Sunday you kind of want to work again. You've had one and a half. Because I don't really enjoy taking two days off in a row from thinking about things. I think I either want to go four to eight or just I need one day. It's like cool. And then I wake up the next morning and I usually have so many ideas from sitting around the day before that's like, I gotta go talk about these. So that transitions nicely into one of these other bullets I put here of the ability to take a four day weekend at least once every six weeks and then potentially a seven day week off the grid once a quarter. The four day weekend and the seven day completely off the grid goes to this quarterly ideal optimization of. I think that is the best container to set goals. It's enough time to make progress on something, but not so short that or not so long that if you set it, you're stuck to it forever. And I find that 13 week with in the middle of the quarter you get a full on weekend to reorient Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And then with this schedule, how that builds on it, it's like, okay, I'm just tapping out a day early. I do the morning work Thursday and then I'm gone. And we can play off each other's strengths with that. And then the next is spending an entire week off the grid. And what I like most about these two things, the ability for one of us or both to take seven complete days off without any messages forces you to build your business so that that is achievable. When you start with this end in mind, you, you look at all the things you're currently doing and saying, I could not do that while these current activities are going on. Which means I need to reevaluate the new activities I'm doing. I need to change the way I operate. And I really, that was my favorite part of this reflection was what are all the things right now that would prevent one of us from taking seven days off? And how can we start to work towards that? Because those seven day critical thinking periods where you really get to tap out of the Internet and social media and think holistically about where you are, where you're headed, how things are going, where you want to spend your time are so critical and otherwise they get lost. And these are different than just general travel. They're intentional recharging experiences. Not. It's just, yeah, I go trip somewhere because I personally find most trips draining more than my day to day. So I get back and then I'm even more tired versus I thought that was going to be a recharging trip.

Yeah. The thing about that is it's, it's such a brutally honest and uncomfortable question to ask where if the average, you know, whether you're a solopreneur creator or if you're a entrepreneur or however big your team is, if you go, I can't step away for a week. Make a list of all of the things keeping you from being able to and realize those are all the things you need to fix in your business. Because the whole purpose of building a business is to give yourself levels of freedom that you don't get working just any old job, right? So there it's almost like someone goes, I want to live life on my own terms. And they're like, I want to be entrepreneurial. But then you're not even getting half of the benefits. So if you don't feel like you can step away, ask yourself why and then surgically go solve all of those problems in your business so that you can. The second component to that is the reason why I think these step away periods are so important is because there's a huge difference and there's a big mental difference between working in the business and working on the business. If all you're doing all day, every day, is just working in the business, you're just doing the work. You're cranking through the to do list, you're fulfilling the work for the clients. You're just in it. You're never really going to see the bigger picture. And, and you know, we talk about this in pga. This is one of like the big mindset shifts that we give even ghostwriters is like, you should not be working at 100% capacity. The goal is not for you to figure out where 100% is and then push yourself to live at 100%. You should actually build a business for yourself. Even if you're just working for yourself. You should build a business for yourself where you're working closer to 80 or 90%. And I like thinking of that last 10% as like a time tax where you intentionally leave some time open to work on your business to think about how do I improve efficiencies? Is this what I want to be focused on? What should the next priority be? What would the next thing that I could create really move the needle? And if you never give yourself that time, you are going to grow slower and you are going to get lapped by a lot of other people that leave that time open because you're never able to see the forest from the trees.

And this leads nicely into the realization that I'm not sure if we needed to go seven days off right now. We could because the clarity of exactly what you would cover for me and I would cover for you is not really there. Same with the team and how that would change. So I think we are going to sit down and spend some time this month looking at the different changes we would need to make to be able to do that. And so I started to, I slacked it to you but like I started to put together the immediate list of things we could do and then as we start to put those into place, I think that the very first one is establishing the informal Friday buffer day because once you have that, that shortens your the number of loops you need to close for you to take a four day weekend and then that will then shorten the number you need to take seven. And then there's like small things you can do with your team here that where you set expectations around when they check in and when you're expected to check in and beginning of day, end of days where if you set the intention where hey, I'm more than likely unreachable until X time. So let's make sure that we don't end the day with any open loops around things that need to be accomplished the next morning because then you're not able to work the next day. So it's a delicate balance. Right? Like I found the last two days I've been here, I've been on my phone at like 11pm, I'm six hours ahead, but I'm still Like shutting down the day and so being very intentional with those boundaries of, hey, again, this isn't, I need to be out of the business and I need to shut my phone off. Otherwise, like, my world's over so no one can talk to me. It's simply a container that forces you to be intentional about the way you design the business. I think that is what's changed my mind of, like, no, I don't want to just say, hey, I don't look at my phone past 7pm and make it feel like I'm just trying to step away and like, I need my free time and all this stuff. It's like, no, a healthy business does not need me to be on my phone past 7pm which means that's actually a symptom of a. Of a root cause that we need to go and fix. So why don't we set that as an intention and then do what's necessary to fulfill that? And as I'm talking that out loud, that's what I'm kind of realizing. Because if you say, hey, I'm not reachable before 1pm what are all the things you could potentially need me for? Let's make sure we have ways of you getting access to that information, etc. Let's make sure your end of day is crisp. So I could always get that. I think there are some more things for us to think about, especially as the team expands a little bit on setting up those intentions and communication protocols and everything that goes into it.

I totally agree. I like the thinking of it being a symptom. So, like, understanding the root cause of why that's happening, I. I really think. And it's just. It rings so true for me because I like drowned with this, like, really, really struggled with it with my first business. So seeing it from this vantage point now is so visceral for me. But something else, like another great example of this, Dickie, is, you know, you and I both like to prioritize going to the gym and like, where do you fit that in during the day? And I think a really great realization that we both have had, and you really had this when we were, you know, getting the. The sales team trained up and things like that is when you're sort of the owner operators of a business and your job is to align people for the day. You have the alignment that happens in the morning, and then you sort of have the alignment that happens at the end of the day to go, okay, so what did we do today? And. And close the loops. And when you and I were going to the gym later in the day. I would find myself every single day, like going to the gym and then coming home, like right at dinner time. And then right when I'm trying to, like, sit down and decompress and have dinner and everything, I'm like, oh, there's all these open loops. I have to go close them. And you were doing the same thing. And all of a sudden, you know, we're on Slack until 8 or 9pm and really, you know, if you're an owner operator and your team is starting to grow, a more ideal time of day to go do, like go to the gym or do personal things, run errands, is actually right in the middle of the day. Because in. In the morning or late morning, you can align the team. This is. This is what we're focused on. Make sure everyone's doing what they're doing. Make sure we've unblocked anybody if they need to go do something, if, you know they're focused on something today. And then while everyone else has their priorities, you go, okay, I'm gonna go. Step away. And then when you come back, the day is starting to finish. And then you can sit down and go, now I'm going to check in with everyone. How did everything go? Close all of the loops. And I think that did not click for me until very recently. Where the ideal setting for an owner operator is actually the barbell of late morning getting people aligned and then late afternoon closing all the loops. And your pockets are early morning, middle of day and late at night.

Yeah, I felt that a ton as I'm responding and answering slacks till 8pm the two. I think this is my ideal entrepreneurial workday. It's wake up naturally around five to six. Because I've always just been an early riser. I want zero recurring responsibilities until at least noon. If I have all that time, I know that I have plenty of buffer to think, to walk to move all of that, where I know that I'm moving the needle forward in some way. Then you condense that alignment time from like 12 to 2, where most people know what they're getting done in the morning. And then you kind of check in middle of the day, unblock anything that someone needed from that like 12 to 2 time. I think that's when you should do meetings, eat lunch around that time. And I personally find I'm the least effective in the two hours after lunch. I'm just. That just my energy tends to. My mental clarity goes down a little bit. And so that two to four slot to the gym, it's like, just maximize that time because. Or to the gym, personal, whatever you need to do because you're going to be the least effective. And then if you're kind of back shutting loops from four to six and you say, hey, that's when I'm again reachable, I'll close any loops. Make sure everyone's working tomorrow and 6 o' clock free for the rest of the day. That to me is a long term thing that I know I want to be able to do.

And here's, here's the little mic drop I want to leave everyone with on that is that if anyone listening heard that. Ideal day for you, Dickie. And your inner monologue is going, yeah, easy for you to say, but you don't understand. I can't do that, not with my business. I have all these responsibilities. There's no way I could possibly do that. That would be impossible. The really uncomfortable thing to realize is that that is all self inflicted. And sometimes like I had to do with my first business, I had to blow up my first business. I had to be like, this was not the life that I wanted to design for myself. I'm gonna get rid of it and I'm gonna try again. And sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes you have to realize that the life that you've designed for yourself is, I don't need 30 employees, I need 10. All right, well, you got to go let 20 of them go. Like, these are the really hard decisions. But I just, you know, I went through it and I've seen a lot of friends go through it. I've seen a lot of other founders that I've gotten to know just through my network go through it. One of the, I think the worst case scenario is to build a business that you don't end up loving. You end up building a prison instead of a castle. And then you tell yourself all the reasons why you can't ever change it. And so then you're just stuck. And I really, really encourage everyone listening where, if that's your situation, A would love to hear what the situation is. If you want to leave a comment and just kind of share like, this is the situation I'm in. This is what I'm struggling with. You know, Dickie, we could kind of go through and see if there's certain recommendations we could give people. I love talking about that stuff. But also ask yourself the challenging questions. Why can't you step away for a weekend? Why can't your team have a four day work week instead of a five day work week. Why can't you step away for a week off the grid so you can work on the business, not in the business? And whatever those answers are, that becomes your new priority list of these are the things I need to fix to build my ideal business.

And so I think we have some of those to reflect on as well. So maybe we'll make a future video on all the changes we made. But I am very excited to launch our newsletter around this because these are the types of topics that we could really crystallize and for anyone kind of. We talked about this in the last episode. We're working on launching our business Bottlenecks newsletter. We're going to be talking about these kind of things. Anything to do with digital business, hiring, scaling, marketing, fulfillment, all of that is all going to be packaged up into a newsletter where in the long term these will be kind of jam sessions where we go back and forth like today. Then we're going to re listen, sit down, crystallize all of them and then make a tightly produced video in our new studio which will be ready in about a month, maybe a little longer, about five, six weeks. We're going to be coming to you live from the shipyard, so be on the lookout for that. That's all we got today though. Anything else, Cole?

No, I just, I, I just feel super strongly about this topic. It's also one I have often with other friends of mine that are stuck in their businesses. So yeah, there's probably a whole rabbit hole of things we could dig into here over time, but this is a nice bird's eye view of the things that we're thinking about.

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