Why We're Changing Our Core Values After Just 2 Years

The business can't grow if you and I feel like we can't rely, AKA we can't trust anyone else.

If we ask you to do something, we expect you to move it forward as far as possible. Otherwise we wouldn't have asked you to do it.

We have to do everything. We have to check everything. We have to, you know, we're responsible for everything. Obviously we're responsible for everything, but that was the word that kept coming up for me. And then I just sort of played out. What is the result of that.

If they make a mistake, we're okay. If it doesn't get moved as quickly as we would have liked, because that's part of what allows us to focus our time on the highest leverage thing.

I like the peer to peer friendly competition aspect of it a lot because it forces each person to ask the question, like, why? Why not you?

There are clearly milestones to get there. So why don't we start here? Here, Here, here, here. And now you have five goals, and let's just focus on getting that first one. Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour where the running joke is this is going to be much longer than an hour. But I don't know if it will today. I think we got a handful of things we want to jam on. It's 2:47, so I'm less hyped up on caffeine than I was this morning. But the Mexico City coffee man, I'll tell you what, the number of cafes within an arm's reach. They have these things called cafe passports that all of them have. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And there's for each, like, little neighborhood, a passport for all the cafes around there. And they all collaborate, and then like once a quarter, they put out a new one and they just go around and collect stamps. So all that would be all that said, I'm drinking like two or three espressos a day right now just because I'm. I'm in stamp collection mode.

You're. You're traveling around the world.

Literally. Literally.

You know what spot I miss? I was thinking about this the other day. I miss that coffee spot, downtown, midtown, where they had beans from all over the world. And you could pick the different beans for the espresso. I thought that that was. Yeah, that was so cool.

Good stuff. It's good stuff. But there's no shortage of caffeine here. And good beans. So nice. Where you want to start today? I have a couple things we could talk about.

Dive right in. Take me on A journey.

All right, let's go for it. So we said last time, last espresso hour, which I don't know if that's live yet. I think it is. I'm not sure if the first.

No, it's not.

Okay. First episode of the year is not live. So we are. Our content clip is high right now, which is very exciting, and we're going to run into new bottlenecks. But theme of the year that we talked about during our first all hands of maturity. So, like, let's start with when you were doing the thought process. Were there any other kind of themes of the year that you thought were in the running? And how do you settle on maturity? Because you're the one who presented this to me. I was like, that makes great sense.

The other word which I also brought up and we talked about was trust. You know, and coincidentally, this is also. This has been a recurring topic for me in my weekly therapy sessions, which is also just as you grow, the growth process being how do you enable yourself to trust people more? And that the challenge with that is trust. The other side of trust is reliance. So part of what makes trust so difficult is you rely on other people, which inherently makes you more vulnerable. Right. And that's. That is why it's uncomfortable. And I think, you know, looking at that, on. On the personal side is one thing, and on the business side, it's sort of the same idea. It's just less emotional, which is the fact that the business can't grow. If you and I feel like we can't rely, AKA we can't trust anyone else. And so, like, we have to do everything. We have to check everything, we have to, you know, we're. We're responsible for everything. Obviously, we're responsible for everything, but that was the word that kept coming up for me. And then I just sort of played out what is the result of that. And the result of that is a level of maturity, because it's sort of like as you become more reliant on other people and as trust builds, the maturity comes from knowing that if something goes wrong, it's all gonna be okay. You know, you'll. You'll still be able to. You'll bounce back, you'll figure it out, you'll solve the problem, like, your whole world's not gonna explode. You know, it's fine.

I think as you said this or as you said maturity and trust being like a pillar of that. The other ones that came to mind are, if maturity is the big theme, what are the things that come underneath. Trust is one of them. And I have a couple frameworks to talk about on that, I think either defensibility or decentralization. So risk reduction is another part of maturity. And we talked about that at the Hormuzzi workshop. And then I think the third would be iteration, because maturity is just. We're doing very few new things, like very few new things are slotted, whereas last year there was a decent number of new things. Maturity is just the improvement of something you already have. And so those things decentralizing, trusting and iterating make up a more mature business. And so that's where the majority of our time is going to be spent this year in terms of project allocation is. Is it increasing defensibility? Is it leading us to trust someone more? Or is it. What was the third one I said iteration leading to iteration in some way?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, another component of the maturity piece is I think part of maturity is recognizing that slow is faster than fast. Like doing less is what allows you to do more. And I've certainly felt it just personally over the years. I feel like every year I get older, I actually aspire to do fewer things because I become aware that when you try and do so many things at once, you prohibit yourself from doing a single one well. And a really impactful moment for me at the Hormozi workshop was he was in the middle of his keynote or something, he was talking and he was sharing a similar concept, saying how he's really had to come to terms with the fact that he probably is only going to have another three, maybe four entrepreneurial seasons in his life. And you could hear the pain as he said that, where it's almost like a. Like a kid being told, you're not going to be able to play this video game forever, you know, or an athlete, like, knowing that you have to retire soon. And I thought that was so. I think that definitely played into that word for me as well. Where I see it in our business, like, think. Think about how many ideas we entertained the first year. And then the second year it was like, no, we have to narrow down, but we still entertained a lot of ideas. And then the third year we were like, no, we have to narrow down again. We had to fight, you know, competing ideas. And now this year literally feels like there are no, no new ideas. It's literally just you have to take the thing, you have to not get distracted. And the mature, quote, unquote person, just like how someone matures in life doesn't feel like I Need to go prove myself in 20 other domains. You know, you don't need all that.

Right, right. And part of this maturity process, I think, comes from us talking about maturity and then laying out and operationalizing what that means, which is why I spent a good chunk of time this week on updating our vision, mission, values, and principles that we really hadn't touched since 2022 and, like, early 23, when we started to hire a couple people.

People.

And so I have two frameworks that are extremely relevant to what we just talked about and then one more on. Or let me start with this. So trust. I defined this framework within our principles. So the way I laid it out was like, mission or vision, where we want to go, mission, why we want to do it, core values, kind of the what, and then operating principles, the how, our operating principles. I put one here called total trust. And this is something that I think we can do a better job over, communicating that anyone we talk to or anyone we have building something within our team, we have total trust as a default. And so the way I explained it was like, there's two ways to look at trust as a battery. One, that the battery is empty when you start and you have to build it up, and another where the battery is completely full and you have to. It can only go in one direction. The more that we can tell people and feel something or feel ourselves that we have a full trust battery, the better we're going to be able to trust people. Because I think we both defaulted to, like, we can't trust everyone fully. They have to earn that. And I'd rather just over, like, tell everyone, if we ask you to do something, we expect you to move it forward as far as possible. Otherwise we wouldn't have asked you to do it, or we wouldn't trust you in doing it. And then I laid out these three types of decisions. Hats, haircuts, and tattoos from James Clear and basically said, we want you making all the hat and haircut decisions as much as possible and only come to us with tattoo decisions that you think there's a big downside if you get incorrect. And then we have to have the ability to give someone something and say we don't. Like, we're okay if they make a mistake. We're okay if it doesn't get moved as quickly as we would have liked, because that's part of what allows us to focus our time on the highest leverage thing.

Yeah.

I've been thinking a lot about why that's such a hard concept. I think for so Many people, you and I do a lot of these things fairly intuitively. I mean, even the beginning of our relationship is a great example. Like, we. We just both walked in and were like, full battery, full trust. And then, you know, it. It can only go down. It can't go up. Like, full trust. And it worked out really well. But something I think about a lot is I think the apprehension that team members feel of being wrong or doing something wrong or like, what's going to happen if, you know. And I've. I don't know that there's one clear answer. Like, it's probably a combination of everything from parents to organized education to the previous manager you had all swirled together in a chili soup, you know? But I do agree that something that comes very intuitively to us is worth articulating over and over and over again. Like, I really don't. I really don't care if there's a mistake. Just, is there a reason for it and did we learn from it?

You know, and the more that we can give them, like, part of why I put these principles together is just to give us the slogans to start to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. And so if someone comes to us with a decision, we should immediately, rather than answering, go, is this a hat haircut or tattoo? And then get them to say, actually, yeah, this is a hat decision. I didn't need to come and get approval for this. And then reward that behavior of, okay, next time, what would you do? And then get them to do the correct thing and then they keep moving. And that is a skill. Giving feedback to train behavior is the most important managerial skill you can have. And it's what we're going to work on a lot this year.

Yep.

We manage the bigger the team, etc.

Yep.

Something that has been cool. Obviously, we came up with our first list of core values two years ago or whenever. That was what's cool about this exercise. And like, things like core values have a bad reputation. And I am just as guilty over the years of being like, that's stupid. Why would you spend time thinking about that? You know? But I've really observed over the past two years how even just picking, you know, no more than three, but. But picking three big ones and then you can have sort of sub points within each one and. And finding a memorable or sticky way of communicating that value as. As a phrase for each one. It's been really cool to see people use it or parrot it or embody it over the past couple years. And you can see how it is such a simple thing where if you have simple phrases repeated over and over and over become the default, you know. And so the counterpoint is you can also see how ineffectively, if you're like a Fortune 500 company and you're like one of our core values is honesty. Honesty, right. It's like, it's like, is the repeating of that building some sort of positive, repeatable behavior, you know, and if not, then the core value isn't fulfilling the, the purpose that it's supposed to serve.

Here. You want to talk about the evolution a little bit? Because I think it's really, it's related to what you just said of like, you only have a handful of things that you can do given the current spot you're in. Because I think how I laid out this values evolution was let me just make this a little bigger. We had. So I laid this out of like, okay, from 0 to 10k a year can even think about a business from 0 to 1 million. We didn't have a vision, mission or value and spending any time on them would have been a waste. All we were trying to do is.

Sell something on stripe.

Literally, like we were trying to make money. And I said that a couple times in the video. From one to three per year, like our only mission was just do more of what we were doing. So we wanted to help more people start riding online. And that was all 2022. There was no reason to cast a big vision or anything. Then from 3 to 6 million and from 5 to 30 team members, we did have to start creating values. One, because in the hiring process, you need to be able to like have a conversation around it and you just needed some kind of lightweight mission and vision so that we had and our values. Not enough people talk about the evolution of a company's values and you hear Fortune 500, they're naturally going to have like the broadest, least impactful, least rock the boat values because they're such a big ship that you can't really do much. And so for us, we had three extreme ownership, relentless tempo, and championship energy. It was all based around individual responsibility, speed and competitiveness. Those same values are not the ones that are going to get us from 6 to 20 million a year and then ultimately far beyond that. So that's why I wanted to start to redo these. And I started with peaceful iteration, which you just hit the nail on the head. In the early stages. We just wanted to move quickly on everything that came with a trade off of either. So yes, we were Able to move quickly. And we prided ourselves on like doing more in a week than most people do in six months. But off a lot of times it meant we moved quickly on the wrong things. Prioritizing speed over deliberation or rushing the execution of something that was lower quality than we otherwise could have had. So instead I'm like, okay, peaceful iteration. Peaceful is being more deliberate in what we choose, knowing that we can't fix that many things and we can only pursue so many things. And then iteration, which is just. We're very rarely going to do peaceful like peaceful new initiatives. It's really just fixing or improving the really small parts of things we already have.

Yep.

I love maturity. Go ahead.

Yeah, there's a lot of good clarity in here. I always love when I get to see your brain spend a lot of time on one specific topic.

And so I spent the morning filming like a pretty big video on this because going from. So that was one peaceful iteration. The second was going from extreme ownership, which is very like military. And I do think that how I. How I wanted to phrase these and why I like the acquisition values and I put this in the video too. It's like you're really just finding a way to add a couple words that are memorable to like a few core ideas. And for us it's like how you behave, how you show up energy wise and then how you improve. So the type of person we want to work with, the type of energy we want them to show up with and how we improve as a business. Extreme ownership, like the emphasis of it was like when you're given something, you do it, you take ownership for its outcome. That's great when there's individual responsibility, but now with how much the team relies on one another and the fact that there are other departments working together, I put this of set the standard instead of extreme ownership. The big reason being if we want you, it works recursively or I guess hierarchically. Hierarchically, however you want to say that. So if we want to set the standard as a company for product quality and client experience in the education industry, that's a great lens for everything we do. Right? We are setting the standard with everything we create. That goes a layer below. That's like, okay, so if each department sets the standard for all other departments to try to emulate, we're going to be a more successful company. Right. If each department not competing against each other, but it's just trying to do their absolute best, such that wow, sales is absolutely killing it. The success team who manages the same way. Like, or the marketing team, for example, they have the same numbers. Not the same numbers, but they look at like their personal numbers, see that it's not as good as how sales is doing. They're naturally going to raise their standards within each department. Each individual contributor can say, I'm going to set the standard in the department such that everyone else emulates me. And if everyone else is trying to set the standard in a collaborative way, it just ultimately leads to a better performing department. And then each individual. How this extends to like personal life is, are you taking care of your health, relationships, habits, mindset, everything that allows you to set the standard within your department. That allows the department to set the standard and ultimately allows us to. And that I just continue to break this down and like, okay, if we have that, how's that going to change our behavior? And I think just having a handful of questions to ask ourselves of like, is this person setting the standard? Are we setting the standard? Are you and I every. With how we're conducting and managing and prioritizing setting the standard. And if we can, I already can see this value starting to reinforce such that when someone does a behavior that was like moving something forward in the past, we use the tempo and ownership emoji. But like when someone's just going above and beyond and really having a high level of performance, it's very clear to call them out and shout them out and say, this person is setting the standard now we need to emulate what they're doing.

Yep.

Yeah, I do like that one quite a bit. I like the, the peer to peer friendly competition aspect of it a lot because it forces each person to ask the question like why? Why not you?

And if we can't answer that question, it's probably that we shouldn't keep working with them.

Mm, yeah.

And that takes us to the third one, which was my favorite one to write because it just felt the coolest, like a level of growth and it's upgrading championship energy to dynasty energy. And so I put. When we first started, we had to take the approach of winning our first championship. And really before that we made the choice that we're not a family, we're a team. And all the downstream effects of like competitiveness and we have a mission that's separate from the things we do outside of that mission. All influence, like the way we talk to one another. And I don't know if you've ever been a part of a team called it won a championship after being not that good. And usually what happens Is there's like a handful of players that are really good and they just win on the back of them. And then everyone looks backwards like, how the heck did that happen? And no one really knows. And then if you go from a championship team to a dynasty, you start this perpetual flywheel that's like after the first one, a couple free agents or other people or new players who join the team, they're high performers and they emulate the highest performance performers from the previous team or the ones that are still on it. The lower performers churn out because they can't keep up, and the higher performers wouldn't put up with them. And that creates new space for more people to come that are attracted to winning. And then on and on and on, that flywheel spins. And so that's where we need to go from here. It's rather than seeing winning as the goal, it's winning as the standard. And just no ounce of toleration or tolerance for anything that could put the dynasty at risk. And so if you study any of the best teams that go on this generational run and then they fall, right? Because every dynasty falls at some point and it's always after like one subpar season. And then there's like, someone on the team gets a little bit more of a voice that isn't as good. And then murmurs start and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down until boom. It's like, what the heck happened? How did they fall so quickly?

Y.

And so this is like a nice double edged sword of, like, anyone who doesn't see winning as the standard and potentially brings down anyone else. The highest performers will not tolerate that. And then that's how you build the dynasty. So this was. I'm excited to, like, change from the ring emoji to the Jordan with five rings. Because that's where we're trying to get to is like, we've done it once to keep doing it, it has to become the standard, not the goal.

Yep.

A, I love that. B, I love that. My reaction to that is I love the team that we have. You know, like, I have lived situations where I laughed when Alex and Layla were talking about building their first company and they got to the end. Like, I hate working with all these people, you know, and there were people that I really loved working with when I was building my agency, and we also hired people that I was like, that was a mistake. And I did it over and over again. So I feel. I love the feeling that we have a really great team. And also everyone Wants different things in life, you know, and inevitably not everyone, yeah, not everyone wants the same things and over different time horizons. And sometimes people change what they want and you know, the team will change, but the goal will not. Or the team might change or the team will change to varying degrees, but the goal will not.

Agreed. And so I really enjoyed doing that and I'm excited to get that video live because the more that I can double dip content that increases retention and buy in and drive from our team and either builds my audience on YouTube or attracts people that ultimately would come work for us, that's like my whole goal with organic. So I took that video that I filmed internally and just added a hook and was like, we've generated X amount of revenue. Here's the exact values we're taking to go from A to B. Let's dive in and like straight into the video from there. And that's my whole lens. It's like I can't remember, I think it was from as you said, it's like if you have content that is free, the people that have paid you will ascribe the value of their purchase to your free content. And so it continues to reinforce their purchase decision. And then if employees and customers are the same, the more that you have content, they will ascribe. Even if it's free content that lives outside of internal, they will ascribe the value of that to the value of working with you. And so it's like, okay, these are really the same mechanisms at play. And it all comes down to just having videos on YouTube and that's where we're going.

Yep.

Which is a nice realization of having the one thing it's like we both make YouTube videos solves everything at least.

Yeah. YouTube continues to be such a fascinating platform for me. I, I, it's the long tail nature of it that I think is why it's so powerful. I, I'm loving, I mean it's been this way for a couple years, but you can just get such crazy distribution on X still. And that's what makes it such a cool platform. But I also hate the fact that it's like you write something that's so valuable and then it goes viral for two days and then it sort of disappears and no one finds it again, you know, and so which again goes back to everything we talk about, which is like build your library, copy, paste it, share it across multiple platforms, reuse it, slice it, you know, whatever. But yeah, making YouTube a non negotiable for the year will be, will Be really interesting. It's also a really fun creative outlet. It forces you to think and articulate things in a very different way than, than just pure writing because, you know, you have to say it out loud.

I'm enjoying it more because I find that the friction for me in writing is like the last 10% of formatting and turning it into, you know, a. More. I find just the, like having to find the sentence structure for something I really think is just better off as a fragmented bullet and then riffing on it. And that's why like, for me, my YouTube strategy is just outline, outline, outline, talk over outline, and then maybe transcribe and have AI turn it into a written post. But I, I am never excited when I have the piece 80 to 90% done, then have to go edit it. I would rather just do the outline and then talk for the editing part. And so that is like, I'm just eliminating that friction from my workflow entirely. It's like, I'm not going to publish it. I'm just going to publish the outline and then publish the video. It's like, you can read the outline. It will make more sense with the video because I go deeper on it.

Yep.

You know, another cool thing I feel like you did this past week, not that we have to share anything like super personal about it, but just the exercise of going through and asking different team members, like, I know you did this with the sales guys, like, what are your goals for the year and how are you tracking that and what are you going to do that's going to get you there? And I, I'm such a big believer in whatever type of work you do is the vehicle through which you learn all the other skills. And I think so many people have that backwards where they're like, but if I pick a different thing, I'm gonna. Somehow it's different. It never is. It never is. You learn all the same fundamental skills in whatever vehicle you pick. And I also feel like that's a very powerful. I even hesitate calling it like a retention tool because we care more than that. But I think it's a really effective way of getting continuous buy in from team members where they have to see their work as more than just a job. It is the vehicle through which you are facilitating your growth. It's almost like our responsibility to help them and mirror back and help them understand how much they were growing and all the different ways that they're growing. Because otherwise you're just, it's like you perform the tasks and it's like watching your hair grow in the mirror. Like, you don't see the ways that you've changed.

I enjoyed doing that. It took a lot of energy. But I said, I sent. So I've managed the sales team, and we really should do this at the highest level, too, with, like, our whole executive and department head team, because that's ultimately who we repeat or who reports to us. But I asked them, what's your income goal for the year and how much did you make last year? Why do you want that income goal? Like, what fundamentally will change, what changes in your day to day? And I started there with them, and then I just phrased a simple question of like, okay, so you made blank last year. Your goal is to make blank this year. What are you going to do differently? And just left it at that. And like, just being asked that question is like, oh, yeah, I actually have to do something different in or better or more effectively, more consistently. And just watching their brains kind of go, yeah, I guess I just have to. I do have to do something different.

Wow.

I didn't really think about that. It's not just going to happen. And I wish someone had asked me that. And I'm like, asking myself, that is, what am I going to do differently this year? Because if you have a bigger goal, I think that Tom Belew quote was really good of, like, your goals create demands, and so they demand a different level of intention or whatever. And if you can't decide with what, if you can't tie something tangibly different, you actually don't want that goal. You just. You just want to say it.

Mm.

And so that was like, in a couple of them, they couldn't come up with. I was like, so do you really want that goal or do you just enjoy the thought of it, but actually don't think it's possible and therefore you're not already failing? So, side note, side quest here is like, after that workshop, I emerged with full belief that we could build something worth a hundred million dollars. A belief I didn't have before that, which implicitly means I'm, by not building it, I'm failing because I have the ability to. Rather than if you don't believe you have the ability to, you're not failing. It's like, I just couldn't do it, so I'm actually not failing. And so that's why I framed it to them. I was like, well, here are the numbers that get you to that exact income goal that you just laid out. And here are examples of other people that you Talk to on a daily basis doing that, therefore it is possible. And then what I would do is like, here's your best month ever. Here's how close you are to that goal. So you're almost there on your best month. So it is possible. And that's more uncomfortable to confront then the opposite. It's like, wow, okay, now I'm just as a default, I'm failing right now. Which sucks because if I don't do it then, you know, I just thought that was an interesting thing I've been sitting with is like if it's possible and you aren't doing it, your default failing. And that's a good thing. Good thing if you take it the right way.

Yeah.

In the most, you know, non condescending way. I find that the vast majority of people, especially when it comes to financial goals, have absolutely no idea why they picked the number that they picked, myself included. You know, like if I trace back my own past, like I remember I, I have such a vivid memory of like a couple weeks before I graduated college. I was like, I had just read Think and Grow Rich and I was like, oh, I just have to write down the number. Desire. I just have to write down the number. And I have such a vivid memory of me sitting at my desk in my college apartment and writing I will make a million dollars next year. And I remember writing that and going, I have absolutely no idea how that I can't even fathom a million dollars and yet think Napoleon Hill was like, but if you write it down, it's going to happen, right? And like I, this is another topic. This might be something I write up next week is, is just like, everyone wants to know how to make a million dollars before they've made 100 grand. And everyone wants to know how to make 100 grand before they've made a dollar on the Internet, you know, and like all of these things are levels and they require such different. That's. I think that's the hardest component is like they require you to live differently. And yeah, a lot of, a lot of times when you spell it out and you're like, this is actually doable. You just have to completely change how you're living your life. People are like, yeah, I don't know that I really want to do that. Which is fine. Like, which is fine. But yeah, I, I love the like, ask the question and then just let the silence linger because you have to sit in that uncomfortable silence to figure out, you know, why did you just say the thing that you said?

And that's what I did in terms of chunking the goals. Every single one of them gave me a goal that was, like, three times what they'd done previously. And so I was like, okay, well, they're clearly milestones to get there. So why don't we start here? Here, Here, here, here. And now you have five goals. And let's just focus on getting that first one, because by getting that first one, it makes it easier to get it second, and on and on. And then getting as specific as possible on what those numbers were. To be honest, we could do a better job of that on, like, next revenue level, I think we jump to, like, wanting a consistent million from 600. And it's like, probably there's a world where it's, like, just 750 or 708, and then, like, that on its own is what gets you all the way there. So this exercise was so good in just showing me where my weaknesses were. And that's why I like doing it, is because it just. I kept saying, and trust me, I've done this the entire time. And I'm making this exact point to remind myself. So I say it out loud and don't forget it, you know, and that's. This whole game is just recognizing where our blind spots are and. But I feel good about having this done to start the year and then starting to reference it as a team, because it just creates such a clear. Like, we say these things all the time. We haven't constructed, like, a very clear. Where. Now I'm just going to. If. If someone comes to me with a decision that is a hat decision, I'm just gonna link them to this part of the video and say, here you go. Like, I've explained why this is not what we want to do and how that is not going to get us to where we want to go, and then just keep building that reinforcement pattern of, like, shared language.

Yep. Yep.

There's so many fun things ahead of us this year, and I'm so excited to see where things go. And. And the team's still growing. Like, I mean, even we're in the process of hiring two more people. And I think that's it. After that. I think that's it. I. I think so, too. I think we need to. Because we do still have some excess capacity. We. We have. We definitely have headroom to grow into, for sure.

And then having that, we can then continue to focus on more marketing and choose. And that's the whole prioritization process. And so I'm gonna spend it probably won't be this week, but I think us getting into a project management software, it's time such that we have a centralized place of just so everyone else. I should. I should see everyone else's number one priority at any given time. And that is what, from a resource allocation perspective, allows me to see the whole business in the best way. Way.

Yeah.

I feel like with that, I think it probably makes sense to start that excluding all the daily recurring tasks.

Right, agreed. And then a different exercise, though, is like, what are. I think that you just dictate with calendar, because the daily recurring thing should be blocked into the calendar anyway. And then the discretionary time needs to be put into that. But we should do the same exercise of what are the recurring things? And then if we were to put them in there, where would they go? But I think the easiest way is to, like, you have rituals and you have projects.

Yeah.

Or whatever. You have recurring and you have projects. Things that must get done every week to continue to grow the business. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna think more on that and talk to some people on it. But that prioritization exercise that we did, that was the most, like, aha moment I've ever had. And it's probably. Someone else has probably done the exact same thing and like, duh. But ranking every project, comparing every single one to the each one above it until you find the final actual order. That took like 30, 45 minutes to do and probably saved us 12 hours this week.

The most illuminating part about that was.

A.

Myself included, everyone's like, visceral reaction of, I don't want to do this, because it's like, you're like, I don't want to sit here and think through whether or not each one of these things is important, relevant to each other. We're related to each other, which is like, the whole point, you know? And then second is all the things on that list that I intuitively went, oh, I'll just go knock those out. First were the lowest priority things.

Right.

And you realize I. That it was so illuminating for me because it made me realize how many times I reach for the thing that's easiest to do first. And I'm like, oh, well, if I just get it done, then it's done. But you don't realize that you just wasted effort and used up some of that, you know, finite brain power each day doing something that really didn't move the needle at all. So interesting.

And then if we can just have that for us, because right now it's still on a note that we really haven't looked at. And then if you just have that for the whole team and then each team has an individual view where it's like, what's the highest ranking thing that my face is attached to? And then as a department, what are those? And then for me and you, what are those?

Yeah.

And there's no perfect way to do it. But I think that this week was a great example of like, I'm leaving this week feeling extremely productive because of that prioritization. And that required trust us to give trust in Daniel to like, own the marketing calendar that I didn't even think about how that was going to get fleshed out. And then having the thing on the calendar on Mondays where anything that I need to communicate to people, I know I'm going to be able to on Monday. So if I have ideas for it, rather than like, oh, we need to go do this thing. I'm just like keeping a list of random items to talk about during that that have come up. And then you communicate them all at the same time rather than just hear and we'll screw it up as we keep going and we'll forget it and then we'll be doing too many things again. But I think that this was. This week felt like the actual start of the year in terms of mobilizing. And that was because we went to the workshop and we got back and the year started on a Wednesday. So that week was kind of a wash. This week was like, okay, we got priorities. Let's put them into practice. And we're sticking with our espresso hour, which was another big win. We said it was a priority. We're gonna do it. It's 3:20. It's the last thing we did this week. But I think that's the right time to do it. It's like, what do we learn this week? What are some things we want to flesh out? And then people who are interested in following along, they can. Sorry.

Meredith's losing it in the background.

Hey. She's like, feed me or whatever. She's gotta go do All's good. I can't really hear it. For what it's worth.

Really.

Okay.

I can't tell if someone's at the door or not. Sometimes. Sometimes it's just the mailman. And she's like, how dare you? How dare you drop off the mail, dude.

Okay. This might be the most dog friendly city in. On earth.

Really?

We'll finish there. So at the gym, they have a dog area in Every gym that you get to bring your dog and they just get to hang and watch you work out and, like, chill with other dogs. Even in, like, every cafe is dog friendly. Every restaurant, dogs are allowed to just come inside with you. We haven't been turned away. One time. I'd say 80% of dogs are off leash walking throughout the city with their owner, which ultimately makes the dogs calmer because they get to, like, flesh out the social hierarchy of it. What else? Even at, like, the Spin studio we did a class on, there was just, like, a little part in the spin room that the dogs got to hang out in. So cool.

That's awesome.

And I've eaten my weight and tacos. Found a good gym.

Nice.

Things are good.

Nice, good tacos. Hard to beat. Hard to beat. You need one night when you don't care about being productive. The next morning, you need to go find the spot that has, like. Like the tequila mezcal flight tasting experience.

Okay, I'm in. Yeah, that's. I've been doing date nights on Wednesday because Thursday I usually have a handful of calls and then fall asleep early Thursday and have a productive Friday of filming and stuff like that.

Nice.

We'll see, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. For now, I'm gonna go eat something. This is a lot of fun.

Nice.

Excited to keep this cranking throughout the year? Drop a comment with your biggest takeaway. What are you focused on in 2025? How are you embodying the maturity if you're maturing in your own business? Any takeaways? We always love to hear them. If you got requests for future videos, drop a comment if you're on Spotify five star review. Tag us on Instagram, where we're starting to create more now with a screenshot of this and we'll throw it on our story. Other than that, another mess around in the books.

That's right. We'll see you next week.

Next week. Bottom.