how to stop company memos from disappearing like dust in the wind

The internet's number one small business operations podcast in the entire world. I'm Peter Lohmann. I'm here with my co-host, John Matzner. How are you, John?

Welcome back. You all can stop calling, texting, emailing, sending, sending me FedExes. Peter was traveling. That's why we didn't record. You all were insatiable in your desire for more content from our brilliant minds, and it is back upon us. So be still your beating hearts.

It's good to be back.

Is it? I've seen some posts on LinkedIn that suggest otherwise.

Yeah, I do miss the sandy shores of Tulum, Mexico, and mostly what I miss is the 85 degrees and sunny. That was phenomenal.

I can give you a quick tip on solving that one, Lohmann.

It's not 85 degrees in San Diego right now. Yeah, it is. Really?

75. We went to the beach today.

Yeah, well, 75 is not 85.

Oh, you're fair. You got me. I, I influenced her that I just, I just rounded, you know, rounded up. Guilty as charged.

Yeah, next thing you know, 85 degrees 365 days a year, you know, 0 to 10 million in 3 days.

He's selling an info product in a mastermind. But, uh, what, what do we have in store for the people today, uh, who have been waiting so thirstily for our brilliance to be brought upon them?

So I took 50 people to Tulum, Mexico with Crane. I want to talk about that, lessons learned, how it went, why we did it, all that.

Do that first or second?

Let's do that second. Um, okay.

First, you were also include show notes so that your competitors can mimic the events or they're gonna have to put those together themselves?

We'll give the whole debrief, you know, play by play.

Margins.

Exactly. The P&L for the event. We're gonna share all that in public.

Good. So excellent. Good.

Cause you know, copying people is in vogue right now. Seen, seen that. So let's make it easy for them. Um, thank you.

Appreciate that though.

But first we're gonna talk about, uh, we're gonna talk about this really interesting thing that I saw that you shared briefly when we were on a call the other day. And it was like a list of memos, like company memos. And at first I was like, why is he sharing a list of company memos with me? Cause it was like a Notion page or something. And then it looked like one. Um, and I asked you why and you explained why. And I was like, oh, I get it now. I understand. And like in a few seconds I went from being a skeptic to being a believer. So let me frame the problem. The problem is as a business owner. You write these emails to your team that are like, okay, whenever we talk to a customer, just so you guys know, we need to let them know first, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You write up this big memo that's like changing company policy, right? It's like, here's how we do things moving forward. And here's why, here's the background. You send out this email, you feel great. Everyone reads it, right? Maybe you talk about it during your L10 and then. It's gone. It's gone forever. No one ever reads it again. No one ever talks about it again. It doesn't get posted anywhere. And then the new executive who starts in 3 weeks never even got to read it in the first place, and no one forwards it to them because everyone forgot about it. And so this great, great idea you had about changing company policy or setting a new whatever vision— could be anything— is like dust in the wind. It's gone. And this is a problem I've actually thought a lot about over the years because I really recognize the issue. Um, and engineers are very lazy and I'm lazy in general. We don't like to do things twice. So if I write up this big long memo, I mean it more than once, John, has happened where I start writing something and I'm like, wait, I think I already wrote about this problem like 3 years ago. And I'll go find the email and it'll be like almost verbatim. I'm writing the same thing that I already wrote. So that's a disaster. So tell me a little bit about how you've solved this and where you got the idea.

There's another problem that I wanna start with too. Okay. To really hook this audience.

Oh, we're supposed to use hooks, I think. Yeah.

Yeah. More hooks, right? We're professionalizing here. More hooks, salacious hooks, which is as you are walking down the path, which I would say from a technologist standpoint, I'm weak, but from—

this is, you already derailed the hook. Okay. This needs to be short form ready, dude. Short form ready.

Short form ready. Are you trying to set up your company?

Did I not?

Is that right? Wait, I gotta like look off camera and then like make eye contact.

Yeah.

Oh, you're breaking my, you're breaking my mojo here. Uh, when you are trying to use AI in your company, one of the biggest issues you're gonna see is conflicting sources of truth. Mm-hmm. So you plug in your Slack, you plug in your Notion, you plug in your Rentvine, whatever. And the LLM—

Rentvine's getting some love on the pod today. Love it.

Uh, send them an invoice. Um, the LLM finds conflicting information. It's not weighed, right? Which is, wait, I saw in a Slack channel, cuz you plugged me into Slack, this pet policy, but in Notion, your SOP library, I saw this one. It doesn't know which one to pick. There's no weighting associated with sources of information when you all just plug everything into an LLM, which is what you should be doing like crazy because it's massively efficient.

Yeah.

So that's the other thing that this solves, by the way, on the down low, which I realized, which is, okay, so that's another problem it solves, which is the weighting of information because something that was said in the Slack channel is weighted differently and then something that was put in a Notion page, which is something that was put in the Cable database. And you can teach the LLM that.

That happens to human employees too, where they, they're like, well, Bob told me whenever something goes out of the office, it has to have a return. And then, but Jeff just sent me an email saying we don't do that anymore.

Yes.

So, you know, that's a classic, right?

Correct. So my inspiration came from my previous career. Embassies, consulates around the world have something that's called a cable system. And there's many, many pithy phrases, right? But generally speaking, it says, if it wasn't in a cable, it didn't happen.

So is a cable just an email? No.

Because it's got a level of, and you'll learn a little bit more about when I describe the system itself, there is a level of formality associated with generating a cable that does not exist via email or Slack or Teams or whatever. In that, for example, the ambassador or the deputy ambassador, deputy chief of mission or chief of mission or whatever, oftentimes they're the only people who can release cables. Because once it's released, it is from the word of the ambassador to China. If you look at strategic policy shifts in the post-Vietnam era in Southeast Asia, it was a cable that came out of Saigon in 1963 that said, "We need to start equipping the rebels to fight back against the communists." It could literally change geopolitical strategy. That is not something that you let anybody release out of the embassy.

Okay, got it.

Does that make sense? And so similarly with your company, there are certain types of topics that require a cable, right? That require a cable. So let me, let me talk about— so that's the inspiration. Somebody hit something in the chat. You can answer. Um, okay. Okay. So in my old world, right, if it wasn't in a cable, it didn't happen.. And I saw that there was a need for something that was like above email from a formality standpoint, but that wasn't like an SOP or like a permanent source of knowledge. Right.

Like, so it sounds to me like you were looking for a new form of correspondence.

I can tell by your face, you're going to say something. Go ahead, please.

A new form of correspondence was needed, a formal, Correspondence.

Yes. Yes. I know you're obsessed with correspondence. So as an example, there are—

you're just really pleased with yourself. I've had a long day, dude. This is like my 4th or 5th live thing I've done today. So I'm a little bonkers.

Just lean into it. It's fine. There's no rules here. So what I saw was an opportunity to mimic that system. And because of the power of AI coding agents, I was just like, let's just create a cable database. And what a cable system is, is that it has a few key parts that are really important that nobody other than me knew, so I had to walk through this very precisely. Anybody can write a cable, right? Anybody can draft a cable, and it's just normally like a drafting rich text. Okay. It's got action required at the top so that if somebody glances at it, they know action required, residential manager, please see paragraph 3. Head of Maintenance, please see paragraph 6, need updated API key, whatever it is, right? So that's all there. So anybody can write one, anybody can coordinate on one. And when you coordinate on one, you can accept it with no changes. You can accept it with changes where you edit the text of the cable, or you can reject it and send it back to the person before you and say, hey man, paragraph 4 is just a nightmare. We're not going to do that. We're not going to give gift cards for people who complain. Like, right? And so it becomes a process of formal coordination between departments that becomes the basis for meetings, that becomes the basis for problem solving, that becomes— it's how policy can get formulated across departments in a systematic way.

Okay. So this is specific to formulating policy.

Generally speaking, one of our first cables was the Sagan cable system. So I'm pulling it up right now. Right. And it says, I'll just read some select highlights from it. Why it matters. We're a remote company that spans multiple countries and time zones. We don't bump into each other in hallways. We don't overhear conversations. That means when something important happens, such as a policy change, a new process, a lesson learned, it can easily get lost in Slack and email noise. The cable system solves this. Cables are reviewed before release, which means they're accurate and clear. They're searchable, they're indexed, they're classified by audience. We'll talk about different databases and they're permanent, which means 6 months from now, anybody can find exactly what was decided and why. Slack is a conversation. Email is a conversation. A cable is a decision on the record. Ooh. So write a, what deserves a cable? A company policy is created or changed. A major customer process is established. Leadership makes a strategic decision. A significant lesson learned needs to be preserved. Organization structure, roles, or responsibility shifts, or a new tool, system, or vendor that is major is adopted. Don't write a cable when a quick update, the info only matters for a few days. It's a question or discussion. It's a how-to or step-by-step. You're brainstorming. It's personal, right? So just the simple test is if someone joins Sagan a year from now, would they need to know that? If yes, it's cable.

So that was the instruction. Yeah. I'm really interested in this. And have you seen my Peter's Guide to RL Communication?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, I'm like thinking about adding cable, like you need a little grid there, but yeah, it's like how I'm trying to think about how we're solving this right now. I mean, most of this ends up in Notion, like things that would be, have been a cable. Um, the results of that end up in company.

How do you notify people you've updated Notion?

We don't really. Yeah. There, there really isn't a good mo— like, I mean, that's why you had to basically create this system cuz there isn't a good way for a, especially a distributed company. Like you said, we're not bumping each other in hallways and stuff. We, we can't just put up a sign. Or announce it at the company meeting and expect everyone's there. So yeah, it's like, what is this replacing that is currently— what's like the locally optimized version of this that's not working well? I actually can't even think of something. It's email. It's probably email.

Yeah, it's probably email. It's email. And half the people, when I see my team's email, part of the reason why I did this too is I see my team's emails and I'm like, you all are going to give me a heart attack. Like the idea that they're gonna actually read and process an email. I'm like, oh, like I'm not sending emails anymore. I see your guys' Slack and emails.

Because you're saying you see that there's just so much noise in there.

It's so noisy. And they've, they've got unread, saved, and starred. And I'm like, oh my God, you, why I hate you all. Like, that's what I say, like to their faces, including my co-founder, came on. And so, but the other big thing for me too, that let me finish the structure by the way, just cause it'll be helpful, but then we'll talk about the problem it solves, which is anybody can write 'em, anybody can coordinate on 'em and do comments or, you know, kick it back a level. And what you do is the person who writes it initiates the chord chain and it's in sequence. So it says, I want this to go to Peter, then I, and it's usually by seniority, although not always. So you do think about like, look, I want maintenance's chop on this before it goes to my GM.

Yeah.

And then the last person is marketing who's just kind of like an FYI. And then I will release it. So it'll come back to me at the end once everybody's chopped on it, but I, they physically have to hit a button that says, I saw this, right? They have to approve. Right. Which also creates a paper trail that, hey, your head of maintenance now sees the new expense policy.

Dude, you know what? This, this is actually analogous to, I'm sorry, I keep interrupting you. No, no. It's like the old school.

You apologizing for interrupting me is the funniest thing ever. So we just, we don't ignore, we ignore those rules in this pod.

Especially, uh, our Jersey origins. Um, this is the old interoffice memo thing with a little manila envelope with a little loopy thing and everyone's signed. Sure thing.

Yeah, yeah. There's some of that. Eddie saw this.

Bob's—

yes. When you have a new expense policy and you send out an email, what do you say? Reply to me to confirm you've read this?

Oh, well, no, what you do is you send it from Outlook and you request read receipts. Yeah, I mean, if you're a Fortune 500 company, that's what you do. I can tell you that right now. Right.

Or it gets buried. And so now it's got a— because part of it too is the process is the output, which is I want Anya, our head of, you know, whatever, to see this before it becomes formal. Yeah. And so I put her in the chord chain. I'm like, Anya, can you take a look at paragraph 6? Because this new activation strategy really affects you. And she'll come in and she'll be like, hey, I'm not comfortable with this. Can we hop on a call? Yes. Now's the time. Not just me firing off a memo, but it allows for her to kind of like circulate it and work on it and all that stuff. And then last but not least, as of right now, there are 4 people that can release at our company, but there's really generally 3— me, Kayvon, Renee, our CFO, and Vincey. That's it. And so there's no chance of something sneaking out. It's like it has to go through, you know, some real, you know, it has to go— anyone can draft one, but the releasing is very choked because that's what makes it a cable, right? And when you look at a middle manager in the government in an embassy context, at the end of every day, often they're releasing cables. So it's one of their cues that they clear. And it's like, yeah, you know, I was— I had to stay late to release a few cables that needed to get out. Last parts of the cable is there's always an urgency, right? So routine priority Flash, whatever. We also pipe them into our Slack just because, just so people see that a new cable got one because we're living in Slack every day. And then last but not least is we have multiple databases with different release of, uh, with different releasers and different visibility. So we have an everyone cable database, we have an executive-only cable database, we have a technology one, and we will build a finance one as well. Because there are certain decisions like, you know, plan to downsize the workforce by 50% that I don't want the entire company to see, but I want my executive team to be working on. And so it sits in our executive database.

Okay, got it. So you can— this is like audiences.

Yeah, correct. It's like channels. Like you don't have everybody in your accountant Slack channel. Same thing with cable databases, which is there are oftentimes executive policies or whatever. Okay, cool. So that's, that's the quick and dirty. So just if you were to look quickly right now at our company-wide one, um, we updated a discount policy, we launched the cable system, we launched a new training group. That's when our company-wide one and our executive one— we did a reorganization of our departments. That should have been in, uh, company-wide, but, um We talked about a pricing change. We talked about some KPIs, and we talked about standardizing our remote professional setup. And those are examples of cables that have gone out pretty recently.

So those are all in like the last 2 weeks.

Yeah, since February 2nd was basically the first was when we launched the last 4 weeks. And again, this is authoritative information. And so I can point an LLM at this or I can point a new hire at this and say, go read some cables, man. And they'll get a very quick sense of our updated go-to-market strategy, our vivid vision. You write a cable with your vivid vision. You write a cable announcing your Q2 rocks.

Yeah.

I love this. And you also then store, but it just becomes an exercise that I think provides a little— I always ask you to repeat this because I always fucking forget it, but I love it so much. Let's see if I can get it. Values drive policy. Policy drives systems and systems drive technology.

Yeah, I think that was right. So values drive policy, policy drives process. Process, not systems. Process drives the tech. Yeah.

So this is really the policy layer, which is how are you routinely with a coordinated approach, getting the input of various members of your team on policy decisions and making them official.

That's what this solves. Very cool. So yeah, the, the best summary I think you gave out of all of that was early on you said a cable is a decision on the record, and I think that's a great succinct way to distill this idea down, and I like it a lot.

So yeah, so we'll, you know, we're playing with it. The, the last thing I'll say too, oftentimes with my team, because I'm used to having this happen in the context of the government, which is as a leader I will look at Sarah, Bincy's chief of staff, and say, hey, uh, go ahead and put that on a cable, make sure you coordinate with Soph and Jesus, and put me on for release. And she knows what that means now. Yeah, because we'll be in a meeting and I'll be like, I want to see this again before we change the policy. You write the cable. I told you to put on cord and you put it to me for release or put, put Bincy on for release. And so I oftentimes will kind of instruct like that. And I know she knows what that means. And I know that Bincy is going to see it before it goes out the door.

I'm surprised this isn't the very first thing you put together at your first job out of the government.

We didn't need this level. We weren't sophisticated and big enough, right, to kind of need this level. We're changing and moving so fast though, and we have so many different things going on that it's, it's very hard though for the left hand to know what the right hand's doing.

Yeah.

You know, you have to be—

if it's not in the cable system, it didn't happen, right?

At that, at the policy level.

Yeah.

So yeah, that was one of the first things I was taught in the government. So good. Final thoughts or questions on this?

Really good, man. Yeah. I mean, how do we, how do we get this going? I want this.

We could probably clone it. We're, we're doing AI agent builds for, uh, Sagan members. So, oh dude, we'll build it for you. It's, uh, it's one, one credit or $500, either one.

Okay.

We can just build it for you. So, and you're a whatever, so we'll, yeah, we can just build it for you.

Easy. That's cool.

You just gotta plug in emails and stuff cuz it has like email notifications and stuff, but Pretty easy.

Yeah. I mean, we're not big enough to need this at Crane yet, but, um, RL could definitely use something like this for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you just got to get your team on board with it and start using it in leadership meetings. Hey, throw that in cable for me.

Put me on for release. Yeah. Like, how's your team react to this? So they just kind of roll in their eyes at all the formality and like government lingo, or are they like, like they're excited, they're on board?

I think that I'm so far the other way usually that they're actually welcoming a little bit of structure because I realize like You know what I mean? Like I realized like somebody on our executive team, like didn't know one of the names of like a major product, like literally like somebody who's arguably like in the top 5 or 6 people and had no idea that we'd been making like real money over here. And I'm like, all right, I should probably put a little bit more structure to some of the stuff we're doing. Cause we're so fast and loose and moving so fast. I was like, this is like de minimis structure and just having this, which is just like, oh. We have a training group now. I didn't know that. Like, because unless I was, oftentimes what was happening was I was the glue, which was I would do something and then if I didn't tell somebody, they wouldn't know. Yeah. And it's just, it's moved beyond my capacity to do that. So any other thoughts? Yeah, seriously, pay me.

We'll build it for you. Okay. Really cool stuff. That's like a totally new, I've never heard anyone talk about something like this before, which is, you know, I'm just an innovator, man.

No, I'm just ripping from the government. I'm trying to take the best things from the government. And this was one where I was just like, no, man, like, this is, this is nice. It's really nice. So, okay, transition.

Yeah, yeah, we can talk about my trip. So Crane does an annual retreat, we call it Horizons, with all of our members, or it's open for all members.

Every year, the ropes course one last year, that was a year ago.

Well, actually that was in June, so it hasn't, hasn't been here yet. But yeah, in June last year we went to Denver. We did a high ropes course, we did whitewater rafting. It was kind of an adventure-oriented— we stayed at this really cool hotel by Red Rocks. It's kind of an adventure-oriented trip. And on that one we had like 20-ish people, I think. Um, Crane's grown since then, and so, um, this year it was bigger. We had close to 50 people once because we decided to allow people to bring like spouses and partners. And we also had more people from the Crane team. So yeah, we did Tulum, Mexico, which is just a little south of Cancun. We decided we're going to kind of alternate between like an adventure-oriented trip and more of a retreat vacation-oriented trip. So this one was at an all-inclusive resort. We did tour the Mayan ruins, we swam in the cenotes, we hung out by the beach and the pool and we did a little bit of programming in there. So we flew Christian down. He spent the whole week with us.

Explain Christian in 3 sentences, just in case people don't know who that is.

So Christian Ruff is a good friend of John and ours. He flew helicopters with the 160th, like most elite helicopter pilots in the whole world. Same group that went in and did some crazy stuff for the government on multiple occasions.

Well, they flew helicopters with bin Laden and a 160th— big week for the 160th. Uh, one of their pilots just got the Medal of Honor. Oh, that's amazing.

Uh, who's—

didn't know that.

He—

on the Medoro raid, he got all shot up and he kept flying. And Christian and Dan know him really well. Uh, if you know Dan, there's another part— like, Christian, like, knows the guy really well. He just got the Medal of Honor 2 days ago.

Amazing.

It's a huge deal. Yeah, so really cool.

Yeah, that's one. Yeah, so Christian, um, out of the military now for a while, and he runs a really successful recruiting business. Um, and it's just an all-around great guy. He does some of this sort of retreat, uh, he helps guide discussions and facilitates workshops and things like that. He's really good at that type of thing. Um, he's, you know, you're expecting this big, tough, loud, high-ego type guy. He's the opposite, right? He's quiet, he's a great listener, he's very insightful. He's just— it's, it's an interesting dynamic.

Um, you know what he studied in college?

What?

Forestry. Nice. At University of Vermont. Yeah. So just, just note that for your records.

So continue. Yeah. So we had him down to— I wanted to bring somebody from the outside to help facilitate some discussions, and that went really well, you know, got people really opening up. Because nice thing about Crane is it's a closed group, so all of the members have been vetted and have engaged with each other in the private community. So familiar faces, but a lot of them haven't met face to face. But once they do, like, the trust and rapport is built extremely quickly because they have that common ground of owning a management company and being part of this community. So the whole thing was just really special. It kind of reset the bar for me in terms of what Crane can do and what we can do for members. So yeah, I don't know what questions you have or where we want to go with that, but that's basically what I was up to last week.

I think this blend— you've, you've done something really special, which I think Sagan has pieces of as well. We both backed into it. But is there a single piece of that event that is going to be affected by AI?

Right?

And I think there's a lot of business owners right now who are thinking about like the future of their value proposition and stuff. And I think that there are, there are versions. You and I have talked about this, about like opportunity vehicle. And one of the things that I think you have to look at as you're looking at where to invest your precious time and cycles is things that are going to endure. And I think that when you look at what you were able to put together, which is for the first time a property management owner found somebody else who's also X or Y, and they got to like their spouses to meet and they finally got to like say, I love being a business owner, but there's a part of me that thinks I should just have a W-2 because my phone would ring less and nobody like laughs at them. In fact, they encourage them to keep— like that dynamic is, is, is so robust that I, that's, I think that's what catches my eye about it is it's so robust in an era where everything feels like it's like, oh, it's like everything's, everything's new. It's like, yeah, I got a bunch of people who are similar in the in the same room in a nice place. Yeah. And, and, and we realized it was way more rewarding than basically anything we've done in the last 6 months.

It's like, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's so cool to see these members form these connections. I mean, already we have members who had met previously at different Crane events, you know, doing business together and just like partnerships. And it's very rewarding to bring people together who form these tight bonds, and it's just like value add for, for both of them. Um, special to be able to be a part of what brought those folks together. I mean, anyone who's run a conference, you know, has done the same thing, but, um, there's something about the intimate nature of it and the focused sort of private, uh, venue that is a little different than just a conference.

I had an experience a few weeks ago and it made me really, uh, aware of don't fuck with the space. And it was just about— and, uh, it was Rich Jordan's brother Will who was talking about this. And it was like, it was— he had some name for it, like the second body or something. He had some hippie name for it, which I loved. Um, but it was like, you can tell you've created a second space when if a new person walks in, it ruins the vibe. That, and it's like, imagine halfway through, a vendor walked in.

Yeah.

It would be like a dart hitting a balloon, because it would just be like, oh man, like, I'm not going to stand up and talk about what's really bugging me right now, because he's going to come pitch me at the buffet. Yeah, exactly. Or whatever it is. And so like, and so creating the ability to like, create and then preserve the space is something I've been like thinking a lot about, like, the venue, the how much programming versus non-programming. Yes. The travel time, the, the arrival day. Do you arrive on the weekend or the weekday? Is it 3 days or 4 days? Like, all of that stuff is about cultivating the mother effing space. And I think that's a really cool, you know, yeah.

And the team put a ton of thought into all of those questions. By the way, I had nothing to do with planning this. I got to show up and be a guest at my own event, which is Fantastic. That's really special. Yeah. So Danny and Wolf did the whole thing, and this was really special for Danny too, because she's from Mexico and this was in Mexico, and she was really excited to show off her country and her culture. And I loved it. It was very fun.

And, you know, I've never been— Spanish speaker floating around is awesome.

Oh, very.

Yeah.

And we actually had many Spanish speakers among our Crane members, surprisingly, which was really cool too. So yeah, and like that whole setting of like, you know, how long is it, when does it start, how much programming, super relevant, very hard and tricky to get right. Yeah. One wrong move there and members come away kind of like, eh, it was all right, felt a little long. Yeah. Yeah. You never—

it's hard to predict. You know, we kind of like were on buses most of the time because the activity was a little too far and you're like, ah, I killed the space.

Yeah. So we did a, you know, the team did a fantastic job. It went really well in that regard. The biggest decision that we made was no vendors. Now we have Crane Partners and they're at all of our other stuff. They're in our community, they're at our, you know, cruises that we do alongside NARPM events. They're, you know, all the stuff that we do, they're a part of because they themselves are carefully selected and vetted to not be pitching at the buffet. Yeah.

Whoever pays the most.

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

When you say vetted, you mean—

Yeah, I mean, I said we vetted them. I didn't say— Yeah.

I mean, vetted is a very ambiguous term.

Yeah. So, but you know, this event was expensive, right? Yeah. You know, this is— and by the way, this, I think this is the largest international gathering of property managers ever, as far as I'm concerned. So, so cool. You know, we— this is an all-inclusive thing. We paid for— we paid for that. Now, CRAIM members chipped in a little kind of token amount. It was more about just reserving the slot, making sure we didn't get some no-shows than anything else. Um, and so the vendor thing, it's like we could have paid for the whole thing twice over.

It's an interesting question. You could have, you could, you could ask, oh no, wait, but you paid for it. So the vet, I was going to say, of course they're going to prefer that if you, if you do it.

Yeah, that's a good question. So yeah, I mean, if we, if we allowed, allowed vendors to sponsor and come along, you know, crank, we could have got the whole thing paid twice over by them, but we decided no, we heard some feedback from members that they would really enjoy like a, you know, a PM only time and space. And so we honored that and it was the right decision for sure, but it wasn't without cost. Yeah. Um, so I'm happy we did it and it was, it was, I'm glad we had the courage to, you know, would you do something, but you didn't really to push back slightly.

There was no trade-off associated with them saying we'd prefer no vendors. Meaning if you'd said, hey, we can stay at the Four Seasons or we can stay at the Ramada with no sponsors or the Four Seasons with sponsors, you want sponsors? Or, you know, like, like meaning if there was, or we could do these twice a quarter with sponsors or once a year without sponsors, or right. Like you didn't really establish a price for no sponsors because they didn't foot the bill. You did. So of course they're gonna say no sponsor. If it comes at no cost. So if you said, you know, would you— again, you could say like, guys, we can do this at the Four Seasons Mandalay Bay, baby, and fly business class. All I got to do is just let AppFolio in our pants. And, and they'd be like, I like business class and I like Four Seasons Mandalay Bay, baby. And they might say yes eagerly, or they'd say, actually, I'd prefer even if it's— I gotta sit in the middle seat, uh, you know, whatever. So I, I, I think as you're exploring the lessons from this, that's interesting to establish a trade-off associated with the no sponsors decision.

Yeah, that's, that's worth thinking through. I mean, my reaction to that is like, there's definitely some people who would have said, yeah, I want the fancy thing, but there would have been a bunch of members.

Fancy might not be the answer though. Meaning, yeah. Uh, you know, um, we could fly in experts who could do deep— I could fly the best EOS. I could get Gino.

From EOS. I just messaged him on LinkedIn to see if he'll come on my podcast. That's what I'm saying. So waiting on a response.

But his, his fly fee is $15 grand, and you can easily get a sponsor to pick that up. But without it, you can't get Gino. And so like, what I would say is it might not just be luxury. I mean, there's other costs or activities.

But don't you think there's something to this idea of like, it's like if I asked everyone what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Like there's something about curating the space, like you said, with around the values of Crane and in the long-term interests of members and future members.

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I'd be nervous about as we look at stuff like this at SegWit— and then I have, uh, one suggestion for you, and then I'm gonna pitch you on something.

Okay.

Um, that I'm not actually gonna do, but it's just fun to pitch you on stuff. Uh, the, uh, the only thing when we've thought about this is in order to attend for free, you have to lock in next year's membership. Because if somebody was about to leave Crane in 3 weeks, you really want to rip whatever it was, 25% of their annual membership, and hope they renew? That's true. So I might, you know, like, must-have at least, and like, for the right— everybody's got to— they don't owe you any money more now. They just have basically said, you don't owe me any money today, but you got to lock in next year because I'm not gonna like make that a requirement to attend. And then you're happy to subsidize it.

Yep.

You know, so that's one thing as we've thought about doing these like very generous benefits, we're like, I'm happy to do it. I'm not gonna do that on day 364 when I don't know if you're renewing. That's right. So like, that's, we've, we've played around with that. That's fine. Um, the second thing I would say is as soon as possible, you're probably already late if you haven't already done this, is get Danny and, and Wolf and you on and debrief it. So like what worked and record it. And institute, write a cable or whatever version. What did we love? Let's not forget that. What did we hate? What could we have done better? Where did we win? Where did we lose? What were comments we got? What feedback? And get all of that written. So when you start planning the next one, the first thing you do is look at the debrief document.

Yeah, we have a thread going in Slack about that exact topic. Lots of good discussion in there. We also sent a survey to members. We're waiting on all the responses come back. Perfect.

Yeah. Great. Yeah. So just debrief that as soon as possible. After the last event I did, I just turned on voice recorder on my cell phone. And we just sat around and talked about like, okay, it was good that we came in on Wednesday night, not Thursday night. Because Wednesday, that means we had— could fly back on Saturday, which means we had a day at our families before we had to go back to work.

Great.

But I'm not gonna remember that next time we do an event.

So how many days was it? So everyone flew in on kind of like day one, and we had a welcome dinner. Um, and then there was—

what day of the week was that?

That was Tuesday. Okay. And then Wednesday and Thursday— no, no, that was Monday. Then Tuesday was programming and hang out by the pool day and the beach. Okay. Wednesday was adventure day. Thursday everyone flew home. Or maybe that was all one day. Maybe it was Friday we flew home.

I can't remember. Um, okay. Uh, so does this count as a crane break since they stepped away from the PM company in the middle of the week?

If they did it for 7 days, yes, that's the one-week crane break. Oh, okay.

One week, 5 business days. Yeah. My second thing was, is I think Sagan could build an entire— I've probably mentioned this before. If anybody is listening to this and wants to come in and start this, I'll do some splits with you on it. Um, I think Sagan could start an entire business. There are entire hotels and concepts in Vegas or in Hawaii and Mexico that are all about letting doctors or other high-profile people write off travel to a destination that they already want to go to. Like, there is an entire industry that is about getting doctors to Cabo San Lucas for continued education, and they do education in the morning for 51% of the time, which is what the IRS says you have to do. It's normal and ordinary. So you're— if you get audited, it's like It was a whatever, and then you fish in the afternoon or whatever the hell you wanted to do. And I think you could build an entire business off the back of Sagan organizing stuff. 'Cause we, you could write off a trip to South Africa. Let's go do a job fair in South Africa for US employers. It's normal and ordinary to visit your team and we'll do job interviews and training in the morning in South Africa and then go on a safari in the afternoon. Let's go. And it is totally above the line 'cause you're visiting your team and you hire internationally and you hire people in South Africa And so this element of like international kind of network orientation stuff that becomes, you know, a business expense, I think is a, is a fun one that I've, I've considered. Cause I'm like, I could hire some people in Ireland. Let's go.

Yeah. Right. So I mean, the international thing was totally, totally a gamble, right? We didn't know if people would be willing to go international for something like this. I actually had never been to Mexico, so this was fun for me. It was my first time. Wow. Yeah. Surprisingly. So yeah. That's pretty cool. So I don't know, we're thinking about, you know, new ideas, new destinations for next time.

It's exciting, man. Christian and I have talked a lot about like what we wanna do more of. And one of 'em is, is events.

Yeah. When we should ask him what he thought of it.

Yeah. I made fun of him cuz, uh, I'm guessing you offered to pay him and he said no.

Yeah.

Um, if I know Christian, and so I made fun of him about how his like pro bono trip was.

I mean, he got a— his contribution was like 2 hours. I mean, he got, he got a 96-hour vacation for free or whatever. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. I— but point, point being is I like to give him a hard time. So that's all I know so far about his experience was me giving a hard time.

I did try to pay him, for the record.

Of course, I, I know 100% you tried to pay him and he was like, nah, it's fine, I'll just, I'll get a customer out of it, it's fine. Like, I know Christian because he's a dweeb. So, um, cool, man. Any final thoughts on that before we wind up? No, I think that covered it. Uh, okay, uh, tools, um, tools, tricks, quotes, poems, anything, uh, jumping out to you?

Uh, let's see. Can't think of anything off the top of my head. I mean, I've been consuming a bunch of OpenClaw content recently that's been great.

Give me a quick OpenClaw update. Were you using it when you were in Mexico?

You know, it crashed like the hour I left. Yeah, so it was offline the whole trip.

So finicky. You got to set up, uh, Termius and I know Tailwind or whatever.

Yeah, but Andrew, my marketing guy, got a Mac Mini. He got his up and running. He's all hyped about it now, really excited about that. Um, I did have— I did have my claw do like a deep dive research, competitor research, prepare dossier thing for me like when I was on the plane to Mexico. It was phenomenal. I was so happy with how it turned out. I was like, hey, do this, and then when you're done This was the thing I got from you. Put it in a Google Doc and share it with me. It worked. I was so excited. It's great. Loved it. Useful.

Yeah. That's awesome. Um, one of the, uh, things that I think is most useful that I've been doing these days is taking, um, it's a very easy thing and it sounds so silly, but taking Claw, um, Cloud, uh, online. It's the lightest weight version. It's the easiest one to use. And they have native connectors now to Gmail, your calendar, Slack. You could— there's a bunch of connectors. And literally you can just say, hey, I've been offline, catch me up for the last 24 hours. Anything you think the CEO should know.

Ooh, I like that. What, what is this?

What, what, what tool? This is Cloud, uh, just And there's connectors, they're called, and they're just native integrations. It's you swipe a tab and then you log in with your— you know, it's like an OAuth flow. It's not super fragile like OpenClaw. And now you can just say— and I mean, it's getting me to the point where I think I might be able to leave Slack. Nice. Or at least all of the channels in Slack because I'm still a member so that it has access to them. Oh, sure. But I'm not like I still am in there for DMs or whatever, but it lets me have visibility and say anything I should have eyes on, and it'll be like, nope, everything looks normal. Some Stripe came in, some— here's this issue, whatever. But, uh, really easy, easy way to get good situational awareness rapidly. I like that.

Yeah. So, all right, man, it's good to be back.

Welcome back.

Talk soon. All right, bye.