Sean, Chuck, and Paul learn five concrete signals that a movement has shifted from startup to sustain mode: monthly recurring revenue covering expenses, a core group of engaged participants, an 18-month timeline for changes to stick, technology setup dropping from hours to minutes, and refined processes that don't require constant reinvention.
Chapters
What are some of the indicators? And you've got kind of talked about it's like, how do you know that you're in start a movement state versus sustain a movement state? How do you know the difference between start and, and sustain? And, um, I wrote some of these things down, um, of that. And, and one of those pieces that you've heard before, uh, Sean, is monthly recurring revenue. Uh, so, so part of knowing you're in a sustainable state is when you have monthly recurring revenue. And so, Chuck, you're in a place of going like, yep, that's exactly what I'm working on now is I need to work on the next thing. So is Paul. And so I was saying like, what's the next thing? Because I'd like to have that back. What I like about you and Paul with this is like, it's not 20 years ago. It's like, oh my God, my hair's on fire, I don't have the next thing, oh my God, you know, it's like that. It's just, it's not that. It's like, okay, I trust the universe a little bit more. I got to figure some stuff out. I'm going to look at the stuff and I want to be a little selective. I want to make sure it fits and all that kind of stuff too. So it has a different feel to it, even though you're in a start mode on that side, which is good. So, so monthly recurring revenue is a financial way to look at, oh, I'm in a stable state now. Not, I'm not working towards that anymore. I might be working towards having money to do this or that or something else, but it's like I have the monthly recurring revenue that's covering expenses. If you think about your business, it's got that. Um, I wanted to put another— a few of these out there. So there's a financial component of it. I wrote down a community part of what this looks like. And so, Sean, taking a look at your world, it's like, is there a critical mass of people. So that's in a sustain mode too, to have a critical mass of people. And I look at this monthly program, it's like, oh, I'm really on the edge of that. I, I don't ever want to do this alone, but you know, 4 or 5 people in this is like just enough that I, you know, that I feel like I have the critical mass to go, um, which is great. Um, so community, there's a critical mass. Also, when I write my book someday, critical mass is also a science term that actually— talk— yeah, you're going with it, Chuck. It's like, oh, let's do half-lives of like uranium-235. It's like, what? It's like, so yeah, that'll probably be in the book somehow. But critical mass is a thing, right? Do we have people, uh, in our movement? The next one I put out there, and this is really, um, a great life lesson, is rhythm. And I'm gonna say there's a magic number of 18 months There's a rhythm of 18 months when you know you're in sustain mode of a thing. Okay. And where that goes back to, when I was early in my days at Accenture, there's a thing called quality circles. And companies implemented these quality circles and they gave like, hey everybody, we're going to create this quality circle of a cross-section of people from the company. And you're going to suggest process improvements for the company. And it took, you know, at month 12, they were like, oh, we're figuring out how to save 12 cents here, 1 penny there, and it wasn't working. A lot of companies, you know, deactivated those. But at about 18 months, it's when they started looking at, oh, we could save $100 grand if we have a different way of setting this up on the machines and stuff like that. It's like, so, and then when people joined Accenture an executive— I was an executive coach— they'd come in and they'd say, hey, I'm here, I'm a new partner at Accenture. I'd say, stick for 18 months. They're like, why? I was like, because it takes 18 months to figure out a new culture. And by the way, you have 5 deficits right now that you need to learn those to catch up with everybody at your level. Once you get there, then we can— then you can start using the assets that we hired you for. But until then, everybody's gonna look at you as a deficit. They're like, oh, that's tough, Chuck. You know how that goes, right? Because it happened to you, right? Part of that is like, you got to get up to speed on certain things as an experienced hire. So part of that is that, that 18 months just seems to be kind of a magic number of how long you need to go stick at something to know that you're in it. And even how you just described, Sean, about your podcast, you're past 18 months. Right, so it's like, yeah, I kind of know. And so there's other things with that 18 months, uh, technology, right? Coming down here to my studio, it takes me like 4 or 5 minutes to set this thing up. Oh, that's not how it was when I started this. I would come down here, this wouldn't work. I took it up here, the audio was off. I didn't know this, I couldn't get this thing working and all that kind of stuff. It's like, and everything was this huge thing, so I'd come down an hour and a half ahead of time to set up That now takes 5 minutes. Now, if I showed you, if I turn my computer around and stuff, if I showed you, I have a DSLR camera, I have 2 computers, I got wires everywhere, but you're not seeing that because it's all nice and clean because it's really nice here. But behind us all, it's messy, but I know how everything works. So there's a technology piece, a piece of this that is— no, you're in there. And then the process, you mentioned it too, Sean. Process improvements. You're not just, you know, designing new processes. Chuck, you mentioned it's like, look, I just, I just know how to do this. Working out now is not what it was to start with. That means you're in sustain mode. Does that make sense for folks to know the difference between the two? So think about that a little bit as you go forward. It's like, is this in sustain mode or start mode? If something's in start mode it's going to require more energy probably than you think. But also, it's important to recognize we have sustained mode of the things that we settle into when we're overwhelmed, um, that we have ground to step, you know, solid ground to step on— relationships, music, working out, those kind of things. We need to do those proactively to remind ourselves. Cool. All good. All right, so let me do this. Let me offer 2 challenges for this, for this month. One is I want you to, um, identify metrics or milestones that indicate that you're in sustain mode for your movement. So what are some of the milestones or metrics that you'd say, okay, I'm in start mode maybe of this movement Or maybe you're in sustain mode, but what are some of the milestones or metrics that say I'm now in sustain mode?
