Building a 100M HoldCo with Michael Girdley

All right. Welcome back to Owner Occupied. I'm so excited today to be on with Michael Gerdley. Michael and I have known each other for a couple years now, mostly through Twitter. We met at a conference briefly and he's got a lot going on. So Michael owns a holding company or a holdco as the cool kids call it these days. And those are in vogue right now. And he can probably share a little bit about why that's good or bad actually, because there's always a flip side to everything. Michael, I'd love if, for those who aren't familiar, if you wouldn't mind just giving like a 90-second background to kind of bring the audience up to speed on what you've been up to and what you're doing now.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, thanks again for having me. Um, yeah, my career journey, like I started as like a computer programmer, decided I didn't like computers as much as I like people and ended up in marketing. Um, and I did that all in kind of in the Bay Area, moved back to San Antonio where I live now back in 2003. And I got into entrepreneurship the old-fashioned way. I joined a family business. Uh, and that was a great experience. I was CEO of that company, and then, you know, about a decade ago started doing what I do now, which is spend a lot more time working on businesses than in them. If I do things right, I don't actually have a CEO job. Um, and, you know, I think a nutshell of what I do today is having a holding company. There's about a dozen businesses that I have significant stakes in, and I spend my time as a board chair, and coach and supporter of those businesses and the CEOs that run them. So, um, all, you know, I'm somewhat unique in that I have a very diversified set of stuff, everything from a fireworks company to a training school to a software business. And each one is really, you know, an atomic unit that, you know, I help supervise and spend my time working on those businesses rather than, than in them. Um, and so, yeah, and I have a ton of fun, and I got a bunch of hobbies and a good life, and I'm very thankful for being very fortunate.

Perfect. I love it. And for those who aren't already following you on Twitter, Michael's a great follow. He shares a ton. In fact, some of the way that I interact on Twitter is actually modeled off of how you share a lot of your playbooks and your ways of thinking, and you go into detail with these awesome threads. So huge value add there, and just thank you for adding to the community of small business folks on Twitter. Real estate Twitter's got their whole thing going on. And then I actually really like the small business side. Property management straddles, so we've kind of got a foot in both of those worlds, which I like too. So the holding company, so you said almost a dozen businesses or about a dozen businesses. And I just want to paint a picture for the audience. Some of these are big businesses. I think you're on the record as saying over $100 million in annual revenue across the whole portfolio. So one of the things that I'm really interested in these days is evaluating opportunities. What should I be doing with my time? What's worth getting involved in? And I think as a property management company owner, we see a lot of opportunities because property management sits at the intersection of a lot of different things. You can do brokerage, you can start a maintenance company, you can grow your management company really big. I played around with doing a window restoration business. Because a lot of things are coming across your plate. You could grow a big real estate private equity business. So you've obviously gotten quite clear-headed, I think, about what's worth messing with and what's a great opportunity versus not a great opportunity. I'd love to hear you maybe riff a little bit about some of the frameworks you use there.

Yeah. I think there's a couple ideas that I like around this. One is I think that being middle-aged is really good. There's a lot to be great. I'm almost 50. Because you're still at that age for me where I feel like I have a ton of energy. You still feel like you're mostly like you're 35, but even though you can see the cracks happening. But you've added another 20 years or 15 years of experience to start to know more about yourself. So for example, I go to cocktail parties. I hate them. I don't like them. But I go, right? And like, I've figured out some techniques to deal with them. But like, people are like, come to this cocktail party. I'm like, uh, no, not interested. Like, I don't like— I don't like unstructured social situations. I love structured social situations, but I hate unstructured. So that's a big benefit of all this. And so, but to get to that point, I think one of the lenses I like to use to think about opportunities is like to be prolific, like try a bunch of stuff. And go use that as the fastest way to learn what's going to truly make you happy, which I think is the overarching lens of how I encourage people to think about, "Okay, what should I work on?" is don't think about what other people want you to do. I mean, we all hear that. Don't think about potentially what's going to make you the most money. Don't think about potentially what your parents want you to do or any of that kind of stuff. Or don't use a framework to be like, "Okay, here's a 2x2 matrix for where BCG would say I should do that." I would actually invert it, and it's kind of akin to— and I don't know if you've heard this— have you heard this idea that, um, the rubric you should always just make a choice for whatever will create the most entertainment, like on social media? It's, it's a really— it's— Elon talks about it, um, and it's basically this idea that, uh, when, uh, if you're— if you can't make a hard decision, just choose whatever path will be like, uh, the, the give you the most interesting content, like the most entertaining. Yeah, yeah, the most entertaining one. And I think that And when I pondered on that and where I've ended up is like, I encourage people to do what I do, which is, you know, if you're gonna consider making a decision on something, do whatever's gonna give you the most joy on a day-to-day basis. Because I fundamentally think that's how you maximize life happiness. It's not like coming up with a Christopher Columbus, hey, we're gonna go from Portugal and hopefully the United States is over there and we're gonna discover Cuba. No, it's the other way around, which is like fundamentally, how do I build my day-to-day so every one of those minutes maximally has an opportunity to be something that's going to give me the most joy, and then go figure out, okay, how can I make money from that? How can I make that sustainable? How can I fix all that? You know, and for me, as I look at what I enjoy, like, I enjoy coaching, I enjoy helping develop and creating opportunities for other people. And like, if I optimize for those types of activities and those types of business ventures, like, I get a ton of joy out of those. And so anyway, that's a backwards way of saying it, but I think it's foolproof. Because you can go and say, "Okay, well, here's how I'm going to spend every single minute." And if you know I'm going to spend every single minute doing things that I maximally find joy in, then pretty good chance I'm going to really enjoy my life. Whereas if you do this BCG framework thing or Porter's Five Forces on opportunities, that's maybe not going to make you happy. But I know if you go from the bottom up, it has got a really good chance of making you happy.

Yeah, I love that. I wrote a blog a while ago about how to work on your business, not in your business. One of the things I said in there is that procrastination is a signal. So if you're constantly putting something off, that probably means you just shouldn't do it. It's either not in your area of expertise or it's taking you down a path that's not bringing you joy or whatever. And that reminded me what you were saying. It's like it should feel good. And I've got a couple irons in the fire right now. And it's interesting to observe the opportunities and what they feel like when you start Um, I've noticed that the ones that seem to have legs, like what's that thing about like how something starts is how it is or whatever. Like they're, they're high velocity. There's a lot of back and forth. There's a lot of excitement. I'm like working on it in my spare time and it's not like a chore. Yeah.

And I, I tweet that a lot and nobody likes the tweet, but it's like, look, here's the reality. Like stuff that finishes great starts great. And like it, like that's, I think what you're talking about, like I love that principle. And like, you know, I talked to my CEO group yesterday and they were like, asked me, we had to present who we are and all that kind of stuff because we rotate as members. So I'm in Vistage and that yesterday was my day. And they asked me like, what, what are my biggest regrets? And I look at all my biggest regrets and they're actually regrets of inaction, not regrets of action. It's like, I didn't do things sooner, I didn't do things faster, or I didn't, I didn't make a decision and take that leap into doing stuff. Those are all, that's the theme of all my regrets. And so I think that ties back to what we're talking about here in terms of how do you make those decisions? Anyway, I also ramble, so sorry.

No, I got you. Yeah. So I can't move on from the holdco without asking a question that I know everyone is wondering about, which is a dozen companies, how do you spend your time? You know, and I know a little bit, I've listened, you know, to you on some other shows and you've gone into some detail here. And I think I understand this framework, but I think for a lot of folks who are in the trenches of running a small business, it's like literally unfathomable that you could have 12 operating companies where you don't have any day-to-day responsibilities. So I'm interested to hear like, what was the transition like when you first moved from an operator to a true almost like a board member role. How did— like, what, what had to be true about your mindset in order to enable this to happen?

Yeah, so I mean, to answer the first part of your question, like, I don't actually operate anything. Um, like, my job is to be a board chairman, um, or to be a board member, right? And that is a very different role than an operating CEO, you know. And, and like, at a core of it Uh, if, if somebody who's an operating CEO running one of the businesses has a problem, they come to me with a problem. It's different than your scenario when you're owning and operating a business, right? You like, somebody comes to you and, hey, we have this problem, what do you have to do? You have to go fix it. My job as board chairman is to be like, well, that sounds terrible, what are you going to do about it? You know, and like, and make sure I do my job there. And so, you know, if I look at what my typical week looks like, I actually broke this down yesterday at my Vistage group and I talked about like, okay, well, I spend 8 hours a week doing coaching and mentoring and spending time with CEOs, like in one-on-ones, and helping them be their best selves. Um, and I'm not, I'm not managing them as much as it's like, that's like a coaching type, type situation. Um, and then there's another kind of 6 to 8 hours a week that's spent in the cadence of normal supervision of a business. So board meetings, interim calls, um, all those kind of things that happen there. And then the rest of the week I'm spending like writing Twitter threads and creating and trying to sharpen the saw and get better. Um, Spending time on the media efforts that I'm doing now and getting more and more serious about it. But that's basically how all that works. And if I end up going in and doing the job of the CEO, that means something's fundamentally broken and I need to restructure things. But that doesn't mean that I don't spend usually about a day a week on what I call special projects. Like a CEO quits, we need to hire a new one. That hasn't happened in 4 years, so that's a good thing. We just did some M&A to sell a business, so that was a special project working on that business. So I will do stuff like that, banking choices, fundraising. I'll get involved in that kind of stuff. And that's about another 8 to 10 hours a week of how I spend my time.

You definitely spend a few hours a week recording podcasts because I think you've got several. So do you think of your Twitter, your newsletter, your podcast, is that an operating— a media business? Do you think of that as one of your companies or is that just kind of stuff you do?

Um, so we have, uh, so last year I had— let me back all this up. Last year I had an insight about, um, about media in general, right? Like, there's an opportunity to get revenue there. Um, I want to do social media because I like to help people, and it's also an opportunity that having an audience helps make things easier in my business world, right? Like, we started ScalePath this year, which is basically like a Vistage but for companies that aren't ready for Vistage yet. And like, or YPO or EO or something like that. And like, um, I— we could only do that because I have an audience. Like, it wouldn't have worked otherwise to get that off the ground. So, um, so the audience is very helpful, but it doesn't really— it's not going to move the needle financially. I just wanted to break even. Um, and then the second insight I had is like, I really like the creating and teaching part of stuff. I hate like the whole business part of media, like selling ads. Like, it's poke me in the eye. Like, I just don't want to do that. The numbers are relatively small, it's a hassle, it makes me feel yucky. Like, I don't want to do that kind of stuff. And I don't like distribution either, so like, I don't want to be like, you know, reposting threads and stuff like that, which we have to do, you know, as a content creator. So anyway, bring all that forward. I also built a course, I got paid for that. I hated the business side of the course, I loved creating the course and the teaching part. Like, all that's super fun. So this year I've taken kind of this ad hoc stuff. I hired a CEO, um, who has already started working and comes full-time in July. He'll own that whole media stuff, so like my newsletter business, my course business, which, you know, it is what it is, and then like my content production, like owning the funnel, that kind of stuff. I'm getting paid to do speaking gigs, which is kind of fun. I was like, yay. Like, um, so all that kind of stuff. And then I have some consulting gigs too, whatever. Like, that all lives underneath the CEO who will have a P&L, and he'll like do all that part that I don't like which is I just want to teach and I want to create, and then he can own all that stuff. So that is Girdley Media. I haven't come up with a better name, but it is basically me and also the podcast business too. So we run Acquisitions Anonymous, which is my only surviving podcast currently. Yeah, I've started 5 podcasts. I've killed 4 of them.

Oh, interesting. Okay. I didn't realize that some of those had stopped.

Well, yeah, that's maybe why they did. It's a sign they weren't working.

Acquisitions Anonymous is great. I was on the show talking about a property management deal or two that way in the early days, like it was probably one of your first 15 episodes or so. But yeah, that's really taken off and it's a fun listen. I love what you guys have done. You pivoted a little bit and it's got more of a laid-back vibe and a lot of jokes and it's really fun. It's like one of those podcasts that like I always look forward to listening to.

Thank you. Well, I think the big, the big— and if you're going to start a podcast, this is something I learned way too way too late. Like, for sure you need to be in like a green space where other people aren't. I think you are with this podcast, you know, for your audience. Uh, maybe not today's episode, but we'll see how that goes. Um, but like, you want to be in green space. And then the second thing that's like super important, and what changed Acquisitions Anonymous, was us having the mindset that number one, people want to be entertained in a podcast, and number two, they want to be educated. And if they have to pick one, they just want to be entertained. And if you want to get people to open up your podcast, it has to be entertaining. And that's where we really shifted. Like, we would bring in like these, like folks that were really experts in their thing. Excuse me, um, Johnny will edit that out for me coughing everywhere. Um, but we bring in experts and like, you were a great guest, but there were other people that weren't very entertaining guests. And like, yeah, you might learn something about like, you know, small-scale SaaS, but it would— you wouldn't leave being like, you know what, that was really fun.

Yeah, let me share it. Yeah.

We switched that mindset last August, and like the podcast went from like hovering, you know, 90, 100 rating in entrepreneurship, and then a couple weeks ago we hit 18 overall.

Super.

Um, which the charts are what the charts are, but like still, like that's up there with like Founders. Like My First Million was 15 that week. Like I was like, oh, like, yeah, it's legit.

Cool. Um, so I wanna, I wanna grab a question from Twitter. Um, Ben H. Allen III asks, what were the early actions you took that shaped where you landed later? And I'm interested in this too because I think a lot of people listening are like, this sounds like the dream, right? This is like what everyone wants to do is just sit at the top of this huge holdco and don't have any operating responsibilities. I've got these great CEOs who never leave and like all this cash rolls up to me and I get to be a, you know, a real deal capital allocator, right? So there must have been— you know, from, from your software to your marketing to the fireworks business, there was a path. Like, what do you credit with getting you going in the right direction here?

I think, um, and this is not changeable for most people, like, I was really fortunate in life. Like, my parents were loving, great parents. Like, when I was 12, they moved us to the best school district in town, which I live in now. So because I want to do the same thing for my kids, like, I graduated college with no debt. Of course, it was 1997, it was kind of a different world there, but all of that was a great gift that I looked at my friends who left college and some of them had to go take high-paying jobs because they knew they had to start paying college payments. And I was somebody, they asked me, we had this computer science luncheon the last month for all the graduates, and there were 15 of us, and they went around the room and they're like, "Okay, what are you going to do?" And I was like, They're all like, "I'm going to work at Accenture. I'm going to work at this engineering firm." And I was like, "I think I'm going to go drive across America." I was like, "I don't know what all these other people are doing, but I know that sucks." And so that's something, look, I just have to be thankful. And to some extent, what drives me to do a lot of teaching and giving is an acceptance and an appreciation for what I was fortunate to live, be born in the state of Texas, in America, to great parents, uh, as a man. Like, there's just a lot of unfair things that were given to me, and I need to give back around that kind of stuff. So, but secondarily, like, like, I can remember being, ever since my early 20s, that kid that me and my friends would go to the beach and I would have a book. Like, and it's also because I'm introverted and odd, but like But at the same time, if you think about the theme there that I think successful people have, they are curious people. They are always learning. They are always trying to develop. I can remember reading Alfred Sloan's book about General Motors and all this kind of stuff early on to really just try to grow and get more wisdom as quickly as I can. And back then, you would go to Barnes Noble and hope wisdom would come to you. Now you can just go out on the internet and people are giving it away for free. It's so much easier than it used to be. 30 years ago. But yeah, I think that's the thing. You just got to just be studying, learning, growing, make that investment in yourself and it compounds. It's the Charlie Munger idea of that kind of stuff. And that's the number one thing I would encourage people really to be doing. And there's a lot of other decisions. I'm happy to dig into any of them, but that's one I would be like, "Look, kids, anybody, read a lot, study a lot, be curious." [Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] Do you still read a lot of books? [Speaker:CHRIS_HILL] Books have slowed down. I just spent about a year and a half not reading many books. And then I got new glasses, and now I've started reading books again. How I read books has really changed because I've read all the greats. I'm not going to read Robert Kiyosaki's book and get some insight into the power of being capital versus labor. I will read books much more in an investigative fashion. Skimming stuff where I'm like, "Yep, I know this already." And now really my hope is to get through a book and maybe have 1 or 2 ideas that come out or 1 or 2 ways my mind changes and go from there.

Are there any that you return to consistently and reread?

I've read Dune 3 times.

A lot of business insights in there.

There are a lot of good business insights there. Do you want to own a scarce resource?

Yes, you do. Yeah. So actually— That reminds me of something I was listening to a few episodes, uh, to prepare for this. And you mentioned the game Civilization. I just wanted to say that I'm a Civilization player fan as well. Yes. And I think there are a lot of business insights you can take away from, from playing Civilization. My first was Civilization II. I played a lot of Civ II and then, um, I played a lot of Civ V, like so much Civ V and then a little bit of Civ VI. Um, what, how did you get into that?

Well, I mean, I was a kid, right? And it's super fun. So I love that aspect of you create systems there, you identify opportunities, you exploit them, and you go from there. But it was also really telling for me where I have my limits and where I'm not good, which is like certain people, and I would guess you're one of these people, no matter how big your civilization gets, you can still manage all that stuff going on and you might find joy in it. And you can correct that if you want. But to me, once my civilization got to a certain point and I was like, oh crap, like I got to move this engineer all the way over here off of across 8 turns.

There's no way I could do that. Like I love the beginning part of the game to the point where I will, every time I sit down and play, I'll play like the first 2 hours and then I, I save the game, but I never come back to it.

I always just start a new one. And that's, and that, and that has translated in terms of how I do business. Like I will, I will shiny object like crazy. And I have to set up things if I know there's things I have to do that are repetitive and require my focus. Like, I have to set actually where I have my calendar, and it's like, okay, like once a month, which, you know, my meeting at the top of the hour is like an interim board call, so I can make sure I focus on this one company. Otherwise, like, like, I will just be up in the clouds and not even really think about it just because of how I'm wired. And so, like, how I played Civilization is actually how I play business, except with Civilization I couldn't automate things, but in business I get to make the rules, so I automate the a lot of things and make sure it's just set up in a way that, okay, here's the system put together and I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to depend on my memory to make sure this keeps going, and it'll squeak at me if it has problems, and then we keep going.

And that's how—

that's, that's why I do it the way I do it.

I love that. So just to return to kind of your, your path, your journey, like, I think, like, when I think about myself and a lot of my peers, we have a successful operating business that's thrown off maybe up to a couple million a year. But like, I think the default path here is just, oh, we're just going to keep growing. Like, we're just going to keep growing units under management. Maybe we'll acquire another business in another city and add that. And we're just like, I think the default path in a lot of people's minds when I talk to them at conferences and interview them on podcasts is like, what's next? And implicit in that is like, what's next for your business?. And we do a lot of things, even like the EOS stuff, right? And we're going to get into EOS a little bit because it's really popular among property management companies. EOS really encourages you, like, what's your 3-year, what's your 10-year, right? Like, and sort of implicit in that, or at least maybe I'm off base here, but it's like you as the CEO are taking your company and your team on this journey, and you're going to be there the whole time as a full-time operator. So how do we— like, is that wrong? And like, if it is, how do we break out of just this 'I have a business, I run it for my lifetime' mentality?

Yeah, why should we break out of it? I don't think there's anything— yeah, I mean, to answer your first question, I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I think there's nothing wrong with choosing a W-2 job. I have a whole Twitter thread that I wrote this morning about like, look, like most people, W-2 jobs are better. Like, you should just go You're going to be happier, so go do that. Just because Twitter tells you you should own a business, it's just stupid. It's mostly people trying to sell you stuff, including me. I'm selling stuff. Please buy my holdco course. But it comes back to this idea, a W-2 job is a perfectly fine lifestyle. I'm watching a YouTube video of a guy, he's a recovering alcoholic. He's riding a skateboard all the way across America and doing vlogs every day. That's right for him. It's crazy. It's crazy to me that people go on social media and they're like, this is the one way to live because of this stylistic choice you want to make. And there are principles that are timeless, but then you have these things where it's like this stylistic choice. And who am I to tell you, like, my style is going to be, you know, and my dreams are what's right for you? It's just such a bunch of BS. Like, I just hate it. Yeah. And it took me years to get over that, but now I'm fine anyway. But like, so if you— and most of my friends in my Vistage group, they run one business. They own it, they're the CEO of it, they control their own destiny, they're working in their business, and they're perfectly happy and fine doing that. And it's totally fine. And I show up and I'm like the weird tweeter who like, you know, does a whole co-business, right? And like, there's nothing wrong with my path either. And so I, you know, that's my rant about that. Like, I don't feel bad about it if, if that's what's right for you. Like, do that. Absolutely. Like, I'm not going to tell you to go do, live my lifestyle.

Like, that's just dumb. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting observation is that I think there's a lot of the circles I run in, there's kind of a default toward Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, holdco, capital allocation. For whatever reason, that's sort of held up on a pedestal as what we should all be aspiring to. And I think you're doing a great job of pointing out that it's not good or bad, it's not right or wrong. For some people, that's the right path, for other people it isn't, and you can be happy doing that or not doing that. But to pursue that just because a bunch of other people think it's the cool thing is probably a bad move.

[Speaker:TREY_LOCKERBIE] Yeah, it's never a good way. Yeah, think about what's going to make you happy. You know what Warren's happy about? He's happy reading the newspaper all day and making a few bets a year and running the shtick that is Warren. We should just be realistic about it. Every public media personality is a cultivated personality. And he and Charlie have this aw shucks thing that they've done. It is You think that they are that intentional about how they run their business, but they're not that intentional about how they put out their public persona and how that is all very handcrafted and intentional? It totally is. And if you dig into their personal lives, their personal lives are super interesting. Or how they got started. You know how they're super anti-debt now? When they both got started, it was debt craziness. They were borrowing money all over the place, leveraged 140%. It was like, so, so yeah, you gotta be really careful about under— taking that cultivated persona and then believing that's reality.

Yeah. And that's, that's the classic internet mistake that everyone makes, is you only see the best 1% of everyone's life on social media. You don't hear about their family and their, you know, yeah, skeletons in the closet.

Absolutely. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what more you want to hear from me on that. I feel very strongly about it. Maybe it's a middle-aged guy thing, where it's just like, "Stop telling people what to do! It's none of your business. Give them the freedom and the love to be their best people and go from there." Maybe this is being a teenager dad.

[Speaker:Kline] I think there's some deep wisdom there. Unfortunately, I think it's advice that you can hear 100 times, but until It just bounces off you until you're ready to hear it. It's like, what's that thing about, like, when the student is ready, the master appears? Um, it just, you know, until— and I almost think you need to have some level of success before you're ready for that message, because to people who aren't there yet, it just sounds like you're saying nonsense. Like, why would anyone not want what you have? But like, I believe you when you're saying it. Um, but there's a weird dynamic there. Um, so I'd let, uh Along a similar theme here, I wanted to get into a little bit about the value of your time, not your time specifically, but the value of one's time and how to think about spending your time. We talked a little bit about how you personally spend your time, but you've got an interesting way of thinking about selling your time, but not a lot of it, but at a price that scares away most people. I think historically, getting back to what everyone says on the internet, you should never sell your time. You need to do a SaaS business where you separate your time from the value you're creating. That's a big theme in even just any small business. You're supposed to be elevating, elevating, elevating so you're not selling your time. But you do sell some of your time, and I actually sell some of my time. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you think through this.

My son is— we talk about you don't know what's going on in people's lives a lot. My son has chronic health issues, so my wife and I are like— so his tutor just arrived and he decided not to get out of the room. I was like, "Get your ass down there and get to work." Yeah.

Kid stuff is, you never know when it's going to rise up and interrupt your day, and that's just life as a parent.

Yeah. No. Well, it's also how I think about social media, right? It's much easier when you're just like, "Look, I'm going to be reasonably transparent with everybody. Am I going to show you my audited financial statement? No. But am I going to lie to you? No. Is there any part of my life that I'm really living that I'm ashamed of? No. I'll just tell you. People can either be part of the journey or not." Anyway, I'm fine with that being there. Look, I think, um, back to selling time, it's something I've really struggled with. Um, you know, one of the things that happens when you put stuff out for free on social media and help other people is they think, well, okay, well, like, this person wants to help me personally. They develop a personal relationship with you. So I get a ton of DMs where it's like, hey, give me free consulting, or do this for me. And, um, it was a real struggle because I don't know how to filter out who to help. And I could go into that and really help people And they'll just keep taking. So, you know, eventually I ended up with, okay, if you really want my time, if it's super important to you, you can pay for it. Here's the— here's where I price it. I price it at $2,000 an hour. That's a lot of money. For some people, it's totally worth it. And it happens every once in a while. For most people, it's not worth it. And they'll be like, okay, well, someday it's there. And, you know, it has an added side effect, which is like, I want to work with people that are like intelligent, insightful, really committed. And when you put a price tag like that on it, it only attracts those kind of people. And it's also how I price my course. It's pretty darn expensive. And it's because I'm okay only selling 150 or 200 of them, but to people that are the type of people I want to spend time with. So yeah, that's how I do it. I think there's an added benefit of being a practitioner of all this stuff is that it feeds into sharpening the saw. Having those conversations, doing podcasts, you're not paying me, obviously. This, we're friends. But all of that has the benefit of sharpening the saw where 80% of my tweets are actually things that are just happening in the meeting that I'm in right there. And I'm like, "Oh, this would be a good tweet and I'm going to tweet exactly what this particular issue is." So the consulting also helps with that. In the grand scheme of things of economics, should I probably not do it at all? Is it probably just a distraction? Yeah, but I don't know.

Yeah, kind of fun. No, I get it. And, um, I've taken a similar approach. I've played around with my hourly rate. I mean, you can book an hour with me on my website. I'm not charging $2,000 an hour, but I'm charging— I think I have it set at $800 right now. And I do get, you know, I'll get one of those every other week. Someone will book, and I'm happy to do it. It's fun for me. Um, and then I do some very limited amount of, like, coaching with, you know, over 3-month engagements and Like, I, the way, sort of to circle back to what we were talking about at the beginning, I do it because it's fun for me. If it wasn't fun for me, I wouldn't do it. And I end up learning a lot and I end up in the course of helping folks, I surface actually great content because you pick up on themes. People are asking the same stuff over and over and you're like, okay, there's obviously an interest here and let me put together a Twitter thread or a blog post or a resource that now other people can access for free because there's something to this, there's something here that people want. Yeah. Um, I want to talk a little bit about operations. I really respect your operational, uh, mindset and the way you think about— which is funny because you're a big-time, like, visionary guy, 80,000-foot view, but you actually have some really great operational insights. Um, you have a great, uh, link on your website, uh, girdley.com/playbook, and it talks about The framework that you recommend for basically any small business. And I remember I first, uh, I've been following you on Twitter for quite a while. I first saw this, it must've been 2 to 3 years ago. And I pulled it up and I looked at it and I was like, I was like, okay, we're doing that already. That's super expensive. That's way too expensive. This is crazy expensive. I'm never going to do this. And then slowly over the course of the next 2 to 3 years, we ended up pretty much doing it. Verbatim. Like, so like all the stuff that I was like, no, we're not gonna do that, this is stupid, I'll figure it out myself— like, we ended up just doing all of it. And I'm guessing you went through a similar journey, which is why you now have this thing you put together, and this is how you recommend folks do it. So like Culture Index is on there, EOS is on there, um, there's a, a marketing methodology that's on there, and The stuff works. Like, it just works. And I, of course, had to learn all that the hard way by messing around with other stupid stuff that didn't end up working. Um, and so is this like, I'm assuming you recommend this playbook to all the companies in your holding company. Do you mandate it? Do you highly recommend, like, how does that play out? EOS is on there, of course.

Yeah, for sure. Um, yeah. And it's, it's, it's one of those things where it's like, well, sometimes you gotta just like learn the stove is hot.

Exactly.

That was exactly my experience. And it's, yeah, and it's, it's one of those things also where it's like on Twitter I'm just like, okay, well, like if people want to do stuff a certain way, like I'm, I've been wrong enough to have humility in terms of being like, no, no, like you got to do it my way. It's like, no, because I've been wrong so many times. It only takes a few advising of small businesses and telling them to do something stupid, and then they do something different and it works, and you're like, oh, okay, like there's, I need to, I need to temper how I recommend on stuff. Um, so in terms of how that playbook works with, with my companies, there's some elements of it that are mandated, uh, and then there are some elements of it it's like, okay, we'll figure out what you want. So like, um, we have Q12 in there as one of the ones I recommend for employee engagement. Um, there are actually, I think, 4 different versions of employee engagement measurement and employee satisfaction management measurement that are used inside of my portfolio of companies. One is like Homegrown, then there's like Culture Amp, and then I forgot the other one that people are using. Um, I see those numbers, but they're, they're not universal. Um, so that's— there's those elements of it are where the CEOs get to decide if they want to use that or not. Some people use Monday, some people use, um, what's that other one that, um, is, is a task tracking, like the task tracking one. So those are all kind of choices. Choices, yeah. Whatever, Asana, I guess, um, choices that they get to make. There are ones that are mandated where it's like, you know, if they— and it's somewhat implicitly because I interface with those things. So EOS is one where they're like, okay, where's our plan for next year? And I'm like, okay, where's your one-page strategic plan, the VTO? Like, show it to me. Like, or what's our— what's, you know, what's this? Or what do you think about this candidate, Michael? Okay, well, show me what their predictive index or culture index results are. Show me what their results are on the general mental aptitude, like, like, I test that we use. So those are pretty much there, but they're implicitly mandated. The contract I have with all the companies is, "Look, I'm going to ask everybody to use this. Ultimately, if you decide it's what's best for the businesses to go a different direction on them and use something different, go ahead. I trust you because you're the CEO and I'm not the CEO, and your job is to execute the mission, and my job is to make sure you have the best chance of doing that. If you want to do something different, that's great, but otherwise, I recommend you use this one." That's the implicit contract there that I have with them. And it's a little complex, but it reflects what's really important when you have a CEO, which is you got to lift the CEO CEO. And I try to minimize the number of times where I'm like, "I'm the owner. This is the way we're going to do it." That maybe happens once or twice a year where we'll disagree and I'm like, "I'm sorry, it's just going to be this way." And I try to minimize that because in the end, you want an entrepreneurial CEO because I'm not in there doing stuff every day. They should know more about the business than I should., just because of the way we have stuff structured.

Yeah, it's fascinating to me how universally applicable a lot of the items in that playbook are. Um, it's like one small business is just like another, even though they can be doing radically different things. One's products, one services, one SaaS, one's fireworks, right? Um, the EOS method has really taken off within the property management world. Um, I think, I mean, we run on it and have for years. We self-implemented it and then ended up bringing in a professional implementer. The visionary integrator dynamic, I think, really resonates with property management company owners. Classically, right? Everyone wants to be the visionary and struggles to find the integrators. And I feel like every time I post about anything having to do with visionary integrator and how I found my COO and everyone's just, it gets a lot of engagement because there's I think that's a real struggle for folks. The CEOs in your companies, are they like the visionary of that company, or is it like you're the visionary and then they're the integrator who's running that company, or does that not really apply?

I'm not the visionary. So with the companies, we want the vision, the culture, and all that stuff to be owned by the CEOs. So they have an entrepreneurial, you know, mindset in terms of approaching it. So yeah, they will fill the visionary and integrator roles themselves, and I don't do that. It would be impossible for me to be doing the visionary role because I'm not in there talking to their customers. I'm not in there seeing the day-to-day. I'm not in there getting the pulse of their culture. I can't and shouldn't be doing that as a board member.

Someone on Twitter got one more Twitter, I guess, point, because I always put a call out on Twitter, what should I ask Michael Girdley or Nick Huber? Someone said I should ask you about the chief of staff role, and this is relevant for me. I've never hired a chief of staff. I actually don't even have an executive assistant or anything. So the best way I heard someone articulate this, and it might have been you, because a lot of people are like, all right, what is chief of staff? Everyone's talking about this. The way I heard it described is it's a direct report to the CEO, but instead of being a manager, They are an individual contributor. So they're like, uh, uh, there's someone who's going to plow ahead and clear roadblocks for the CEO. They don't have direct reports. They actually are just like working on the CEO's specific projects.

Is that how you think of it? Uh, I think that's exactly right.

Right.

And I think, so let's say you're a CEO. Um, and I wrote a thread about this. There's like 4 types of, 4 types of tasks in front of you. Like there's, um, and responsibilities. There's like task number 1, which is like, it's below the line. You just shouldn't even be doing it. Right. Like just don't just say no to that type of stuff. Right? So that's easy. Then I think there's— for most CEOs, there's EA-type stuff, which is like coordination, making sure like schedules are aligned, meeting planning, making sure your, your expense reports get put in correctly. Like all that kind of stuff, like people need an EA for that. I don't need an EA because like my philosophy is if my schedule looks like that, that it's gotten so, so big that I don't have time to manage my schedule, then I'm really screwing up my schedule because that means I don't have enough creative time in my life. So I don't have an EA. I've never had one, and I don't really want one because like I could book my own flights. Like, it's kind of fun actually. Um, then there's this other bucket of stuff. And so let's go to number 3, which is like you're a CEO or a high performer and there's stuff that like is high impact and only you can do, right? And like that stuff where it's like one-on-one coaching sessions with CEOs, like we have a— we're meeting with a new financing source, like I gotta go to that stuff. Nobody can do stuff for me. That stuff needs to stay on my plate because it's that high impact, um, and, and only I can do it. Then there's the other step of it, which is in all the initiatives that you have as a high performer, there's high impact but somebody else could do it, right? And so for example, let's say you need to hire a new CEO for a holdco. There's 90% of that process that somebody else could run, like the screening of candidates, the putting together the job description, the, um, the checking daily on how you're advertising it, like tweaking that advertisement, um, All of that could be done by somebody else, but they need to have that kind of problem-solving ability to be able to get through those, right? Or you're getting ready to do an acquisition and you need somebody to come in and do a financial, basic financial model of that, right? And then help you work with the portfolio company. By the way, these are real projects my chief of staff does. And what that does is it allows you as the CEO or the high performer to hand that stuff off to somebody else to where you can magnify the time that you spend on high-impact, must-do type stuff. And so that's really where the chief of staff fits in is they're your force multiplier by taking that quadrant of things on your plate and owning those things so you can spend more time on the stuff that only you can do.

Yeah, that's well articulated. And I think, I mean, reflecting on my own growth over the last 10 years of starting and running the management company here. I think one of the biggest breakthroughs for me was getting more and more comfortable with handing stuff off, delegating. I think a huge limiting belief I had early on, and I'm still breaking through this continuously, is getting comfortable with the idea that other people can do stuff that I think only I can do. A lot of the stuff that you articulated that you've handed off to a chief of staff, Even I was like, ooh, mm, I don't know if I like, mm, that sounds really important. Like writing the job description for hiring a CEO. Like, um, so it's like the, and for me, the way I've broken continuously broken through this over and over and over, and I still got a long way to go is a couple of things. One, I observe it in action by being around other people who are ahead of me like you and hearing them talk about, oh yeah, no, dude, I just have my assistant do that. Like, what are you doing? Why are you still messing with that? Like almost like in a joking around shaming way. And I'm like, oh, well, I guess, I guess that's possible. Like this guy was like doing it for 3 years.

And, um, so it's like, so can I interrupt you? So here's, here's, here's what I think is super important. Like there is this distinction between abdicating a responsibility and like staying appropriately involved in that. So let's take the job description thing, super important to get right, super important to get right. Like in that, and if you have a chief of staff, for example, the chief of staff would spend an hour, or let's say 2 hours, doing what you would do, which is go research all the different job descriptions out there, come back with a good couple of examples, uh, write up a draft job description, revise it at least once, maybe twice, send it out for feedback, and then it gets published, right? So like where I would insert myself, because I'm with you, like that job description has got to be super good, we got to make sure it's really good, But instead of doing step 1 and step 2, which are pretty easily described for a smart person to do that, I'm going to show up probably at 50% completion before that first edit and then at 100% completion before it gets published. So what I've done is instead of that being a 3-hour project for me and taking up a lot of brain cycles and also the cost of energy to do that, I'm going to make it a 10-minute project for me. So that's why I say it's a force multiplier. Chief of staff doesn't let you abdicate responsibility for stuff. You still have to maintain your quality and get involved. It just lets you do it much more efficiently than if you were doing it on your own. Right. And so anyway, I don't know if you just— we just turned a discussion into a teaching moment, but like I heard you talking, I was like, oh no, no, no, I love how you should think about it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's— I think what you're describing is exactly what I need to hear, which probably means a lot of people in my audience need to hear this too. And for me, like, I pretty, I pretty quickly got comfortable delegating activities that I hated, low value, repetitive, right? The classic one in property management is showing properties, the leasing, showing up at a property and walking someone around a unit. I was totally fine with taking that off my plate. And I think what you're highlighting is that some activities you delegate once and forever and you don't— I don't check in on the leasing agents. I don't want a 50% update from them halfway through the showing or anything, right? So it was a new skill and a new muscle for me to have the distinction between, oh, this is something I can just completely get rid of and never think about again, to no, this is something that's pretty important, but that doesn't mean I need to do everything. I can still delegate, but I need to be involved minimally, right? So I love that. And so for me, it was like hearing other people talk about doing this. And then the second part of it was that I needed to be around higher-skilled people, right? Like, if you've never worked with someone incredible, you may not realize how skilled other people can be. I don't know, maybe that's a weird thing to say, but like, I didn't, I didn't have a lot of business experience before I started my company. And so it wasn't clear to me the range of skills and capabilities that existed within the people that I could hire, right? And some of that was budget, right? When you're starting, you can only afford very limited salaries and entry-level folks. And then when you get to the point where you are and where I'm starting to be, you can pull in much higher caliber people. And then you're like, oh yeah, there are super, super smart people, highly capable people that are willing to come work for me. And that means I can—

there's this whole category of things that I thought I had to do that I actually don't. And then the real mind-eff is when you start hiring people that can do things or own things that are an order of magnitude better than you can. Literally, there are companies in my portfolio being run by CEOs and they can do the job much better than I can, 100%. My chief of staff can do stuff better than I can. She manages me a lot. It's great. Our one-on-ones, 3 one-on-ones in, I was like, I'm like, wait, she's managing me. She's like, okay, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need this. What do you think about this? Like, you— like, I was like, I'm getting managed. Um, and it's like, you know, what taught me that lesson is when I was a CEO, we hired a guy who came in and he was just like a magical salesperson. Like, he would just go out and he'd be like, yeah, okay, well, I'll go take care of that. We'll be like, okay, we need this deal. And he's like, yeah, I'll go take care of that. And he would come back the next day and he's like, here's the signed contract. I'm like, how did you do that? Uh, he's like, oh, I would just go sit and talk to them about their grandkids, and then at the I would ask them to sign the contract. The problem was we had to fire him eventually because he would be 90% truthful with these people, but he would kind of get a little off on the last 10%. So the magic that let him be so successful was also the magic that got him into trouble. But it opened my mind to, oh, people have these superpowers, and your job as a boss is to identify them and then create an environment where they can thrive and focus on those.. And that was such a magical moment for me. And that's how I spend my days now. That's my whole job is like— and I don't mean to diminish people and turn them into things, but your job as a business leader eventually becomes just looking at the board of chess pieces and understanding the queen can do this and the bishop can do this. And how do I make sure the bishop does what the bishop is supposed to do? And let the bishop be the best bishop they can be. That's what I do all day. That's the core of it. Maybe that's why I like chess and I'm also bad at chess. I'm bad at chess because I have a bad memory. Chess is just a memorization game. It's not about computation. It's about those guys memorizing stuff. They all have crazy memories, which makes it kind of a dumb game, but also a good game.

Yeah. All the historical games, I've seen videos where they're like 2 moves in, they're like, "Oh yeah, this was the 1957 third game." It's crazy. Um, all right, we've got just a couple minutes left. I wanted to ask you about Scalepath. Uh, this is one of your more recently launched, uh, businesses. It's a paid community for folks who are looking to grow their companies. Um, how's that going? What was it like sort of ideating that there? And, um, just for anyone who might think it's a great thing, uh, share a little bit about what it is.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, it is for, um, business owners that want to scale their business. And we went out and talked to going on 50-plus small business owners, and these were people kind of in the $500K to $5 million range, um, and they all aspirationally wanted to scale themselves and their business, but they were kind of stuck. That's the phase where you're really stuck in the business rather than being able to work on it. You potentially don't have enough capital to hire right people. You don't even maybe know how to do it. Um, and so we have seen this model where peer groups have been very successful. For people like me, it's been transformative. But there was a period where I had to get from get to be ready to go into a Vistage or a YPO or an EO. Um, and like, we wanted to solve for that kind of transition period where you go from individual contributor to scalable business owner. And like, EO or Vistage, they expect you to know how to hire people when you show up. Like, but there's no class that teaches you how to do that. So we decided to build something specifically for those people, um, at a, at a price point they can afford. It's $200 a month. Um, it's all online, um, that we may be doing more in-person stuff. And then it has an educational component where where it's like, oh, you want to know how to hire? You want to know how to budget? Like, we're going to put it on a PDF for you and like you could just download it and use it because they didn't want to go to educational stuff, these people. They wanted to go to— they just wanted answers. Like, just tell me how to do it. That's what they want because they got to get back to their business. They can't go— they don't have the time to go spend a whole day in Vistage or YPO. Like, they just can't. So yeah, we built it, announced it on Twitter as an MVP. We've gotten close to 100 paying members already and we're building the plane as we're flying it. My associate Sam is the CEO. Uh, so he has grad— he has graduated off the payroll, and, uh, it's very exciting to see him, and he's so stoked with it. Like, um, he's just— the best part about it for me is he's just having so much fun building the business.

Like, he's just tap dancing to work like every day, and, uh, it's gonna go. That's a great success story.

Yeah.

Um, beautiful. I love the branding for it too. Um, I was checking out the, the website, and you've got some great like testimonials, and it's great stuff. Well, um, I know we've got a hard stop. Thank you for coming on, Michael. This has been really fun. I appreciate your time today. And for folks who follow along with you and your journey and what you're up to, where's the best place to do that?

Uh, Twitter's great. Um, I'm @Girdley on Twitter, G-I-R-D-L-E-Y, or, um, check out my website girdley.com. It will be better soon. My media team is fixing it and making it good. All right, sounds good.

All right, man, I appreciate you. All right, thanks, Michael.