What a 5 Hour Work Day Really Looks Like, With Roland Frasier and Ryan Deiss

Foreign. You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table.

Hey, everybody, Roland Frazier here with the Business Lunch podcast. And I have my wonderful business partner, Ryan Dice. Yes, the one and only Ryan.

Loud enough and enthusiastic.

I'm wearing a Ryan Dice, you know, with a. We need to get the effects going on here.

I mean, like entrance music, like a wrestler or something like that. I think that's.

That's really important.

Yeah, something like. And the big voice like that, that introduces the one, the only Ryan Dice.

Flames and everything else happening. I like it.

I like it.

Cool.

Well, now that we've had this wonderful intro, what do we want to talk about today? We got some fun stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I read. I know. I sent you this article. I think it'd be worth discussing. Business Insider. I saw this post come through and it was this article. This entrepreneur said, I moved my company to a five hour workday when business was booming, and then we almost went bankrupt. Here's where things went wrong. And I thought it was interesting because I was like, yeah, it's funny, I remember there being a guy who actually.

Tested this in his business.

He tested, let's switch from a standard eight hour workday to a five hour workday and actually wrote a book about it. So I was like, oh, that's interesting. I guess somebody else tried the same thing and it didn't work.

Well, the funny thing was it was the same guy. So the same guy that back in 2016, this article was written about him again in the same publication in Business Insider writes a story, my company implemented.

A five hour workday and the results have been outstanding.

Well, apparently five years later, after running.

The test, it worked less good. And basically the article talks about how it turned out that maybe that wasn't the best idea. It worked in the moment. It definitely didn't scale. It definitely wasn't something that he plans on repeating. In fact, it almost bankrupted his entire company.

I'm seeing a lot of this right now.

I thought this was worth talking about because I'm seeing a lot of people. One, it's not new. You see a lot of people thinking like, let's reinvent business. Right? Let's reinvent the way we do business.

And we were talking about Iceland with the four day work week that they've just tested, apparently. And it did go well, according to them.

Yeah, they had big companies in Iceland go and do a four day work week as opposed to a five day, and found that, you know, and found that it worked. So now it worked over their testing period. Who knows if they're still doing it in a couple of years?

So I thought it'd be a fun.

Discussion and I want to what do you think about all this stuff? Now, I know you're not always seen as the let's be super warm and fuzzy and give the people what they want. You're kind of the bloodthirsty capitalist. So I want to get your bloodthirsty capitalistic perspective on this.

I'm not completely sure that I'm seen as the bloodthirsty capitalist, but the yeah, I assume, and I did not have the benefit of having read the 2016 book, but what I would assume that that's based on is the science that says that we are typically only productive about two to two and a half hours a day, and yet our workday is typically three times longer than our actual ability to be productive. Therefore, if we could reduce the hours in the day, which is kind of arbitrary, how we came up with that. Anyway, I believe it was like World War II that they changed the workday hours to being nine to five. And so I think that the idea behind it makes sense that if we could get people to be productive during that time, the challenge is that I don't believe that that addresses the human nature of needing to do different things and having different rhythms in how your body works throughout the day and your ability to focus. And God forbid you're doing creative stuff like you and I do, where you kind of have to have the muse strike. And so I don't think it's productivity on demand. And so I think the idea behind having a shorter workday is great if you can figure out a way to optimize productivity and harness it within that period of time, if you can, it would make sense that you could for sure have a five hour workday or even a three hour workday and maybe get so excited about, hey, if I just power through this stuff and am productive during that time, I'm going to actually have all this other time free. I'm not sure that interdependencies on other people doing things and work in, work out, and getting warmed up to doing something to where you're actually productive and handling the other things within the day that you have to deal with. Allow it, but I would certainly be open to it and run the experiment. I don't feel a need to make people work beyond their ability to be productive and sit there in an office just to wait for time to go by. So you probably know more about what the experiment was initially. So I'd love to hear.

Yeah, let me make the business case for it.

So this is the case that was.

Made back in 2016. An entrepreneur, by the way, his name is Stefan Arstall, I believe is how you pronounce it. He has a stand up paddleboard company actually based out of your hood in San Diego, California. And so I want to say just at the outset, it is very easy to go and criticize somebody when they're trying something new and it doesn't work out. That's not what I want to do here. It might make for like a good podcast, but I don't want to hate.

On this because I think anytime somebody.

Tries something and they show their work.

Especially when they're willing to come back and say, hey, you know that thing.

That I said we were doing and that I said made all the difference? Yeah. It turned out that didn't work at all. Like, so that's tough to do. And so I'd say, like, number one, you know, Stefan, like, kudos to you if you happen to come across this. I would love to, like, follow up. Maybe we could have a, maybe we could even have him on the pod sometime or have him out to one of our events. Because I think it's freaking cool that he tried it and I think it's cool that he came back after the fact and was like, yeah, it didn't work out because, man, dogma is expensive. And especially when you write a book on something and you kind of build a lot of your identity around it, it can be tough to pivot. So I want to come back to that and kind of if you want to test some of these, like some ways to do it, but kind of going back to 2016, this was the reasoning behind it in the business case that was made. So he said, number one, humans are not machines. Right? So this idea that you're just going to work from this time to this time like a machine, same point that you made. People are going to have different levels of productivity. It's going to come, it's going to go, it's going to operate at different times. Also, number two, happiness. Happy people are more productive. So frankly, if we can give people more time off, they're going to be happier, they're going to be more productive. He felt it was especially important, given that he had a lifestyle company that you're selling stand up paddle, that people should be out using the product, enjoying life. It's going to make them more passionate about the work that they do. But the big thing and the point that I think makes the most sense is that fewer hours create scarcity. Right? And so if you constrain the amount of time that people have to work.

They'Re going to be more efficient with.

The time that they have, right? So if you tell people, hey, you only have these five hours to work and then get out of here, then they're going to naturally be more efficient with the time that they have. So that was the idea. And I guess in the beginning, right, it, you know, it seemed to work pretty well. And then over time, what they found, especially when things started to dip, you know, they went through the same kind of issue that a lot of businesses did with the pandemic. They faced a lot of competition, they were selling a lot of things on Amazon. Just as competition crept up, as things got really hard, ultimately they found like, you know, we need to work more to keep up.

So there's a couple things that I'll.

Just kind of throw out. If you want to innovate around the work schedule, specifically if you say, like, we want to work less, the thing that you have less hours or less hard or less whatever, you know, we want to test a five hour workday or a four day work week. If you want to test on that, you got to know you're not doing that in a vacuum.

There's a really good chance if you're.

In a competitive market and especially if you're trying to grow, you know, there's.

A really good chance that your competitor isn't doing that.

Right? And so you can say all day long like, oh, we shouldn't need to.

Do this, but if your competitor is.

Working harder than you are, and they're working harder on behalf of the customer.

You got to know that they're probably going to beat you.

They're going to innovate more, they're going to be there answering customer support in inbound sales inquiries. When you're not, they're going to show up more. And so they're going to win more business than you are. That's just kind of one thing to keep in mind. You've got to decide, like, am I trying to like, win a gold medal at the Olympics? If you are, then you shouldn't seek to optimize for you and your team's personal leisure. You really do need to optimize for the customer experience. And sometimes that's going to come at the expense of you and your team's personal leisure.

So I just think in a Lot of these.

We're innovating the wrong things. Right. I think companies should, should first say you got to start with the customer first. I think there's just been so much, you know, I don't know, so much thought and so much like employee first, like let's make the employees happy and everything else will work itself out.

I just don't buy it.

I don't buy it. I think ultimately the companies that serve the customers the best are going to be the ones that win. Yeah, it's a balance. I mean, if you burn your people out, nothing's going to work.

But if you, if you just seek.

To optimize for the employee experience, somebody who's optimizing for the customer experience is going to kick your butt. What do you think?

Yeah, I agree 100%. So how does this translate in your mind into digital marketer? And before that, I want to say for me, looking at you and how you work and Richard and other entrepreneurs, I know, I do believe that we have significantly more than a couple hours a day of productivity. And I think that if we constrained ourselves to three hours or five hours as opposed to the number of hours we work, we wouldn't be able to get done the things that we need to get done. So that's, I know because just knowing what your schedule and my schedule is today, it is absolute at least two and a half times that three hours of productivity. Because it has to be, because we're literally producing four other people on the record like this during that time. So it's kind of hard to argue otherwise. Right.

So I guess my warning to entrepreneurs, especially like first time founders and things like that, it's very tempting when you experience that first little bit of success to decide that you are now God's gift to business and that you can innovate across all aspects of business. Right.

We've just got to remember, like business.

Has been happening for a while, you know. Yes, the original 5 day work week might have been arbitrary, the original 8 hour workday might have been arbitrary, but.

The fact that it has persisted is somewhat instructive. And so you've just got to decide.

If you're going to invest innovative energy right at your company, if you're going to invest that time.

Is that innovative energy really best directed at coming up with a new way of doing work or should you just.

Innovate in ways that are going to better serve the customer? Now, if you find that better serving, you know, in better serving the customer, that changes how we do work, totally fine. But I would just say kind of caution number one is don't seek to innovate on the way that work is done. Seek to innovate on the value you deliver on behalf of your customers. The second kind of thing that I would make is all of these are arbitrary. You know, the idea of let's go to a. And this is kind of the point I think that you were making, Roland, going from a five day work week to a four day work week like they tested in Iceland, right? Sure. I'm sure that that can work. Going from an eight hour to a five hour.

I guess, I'm sure that can work. I guess my question is why that unit of measurement at all?

Like, why are we really looking at time? I think it's far better when you're thinking about your teams to say what's the work that we need to get done and can we all agree on when it's going to get done and if it gets done faster or slower based on how much time, how many hours people are putting in? Cool, let's talk about that. But fixing it and saying that five hours is enough and you need to stop versus eight hours, I just think that's the wrong thing.

And it also changes from team to team.

There are some teams at the company that as companies scale, there's going to.

Be some teams where no, they basically.

Need to be on call. Like if you're in sales and you're like, sorry, I'm in. You know, at this company we only work five hours and you're in sales.

You tell that to a good salesperson, they're like, screw you. You just told me that I can't.

Make as much money as I feel like I should. You just limited my upside, which they.

Actually do do in countries like France, where I was just reading somebody who said that they spent, I think it was five years working in France at an ad agency and that they were told they could not work on two weekdays a week and they had mandatory limitations on hours per day and all these other things and that it was quite challenging for them. Yet France as a country does have output, yet at the same time they aren't particularly near the top of innovative companies and things that are coming out either. So it's like that's the work life balance that they're looking at. I like what you're saying about task based and I was thinking, as you were saying, yeah, but what about customer service? Because they need to be their hours like you're talking about for sales, but that could be tasked out with some sort of standard cost with variation or standard unit of production. Like number of calls handled. Sales could be the same thing. Number of calls handled. But like you said, and like I mentioned earlier, you have too many things that are dependent on other people getting back to say that I'm only here during these hours of the day. We open offices in one of our businesses here in California significantly earlier, three hours earlier, simply because we serve the United States and there's another time zone that's three hours later. So we need to be there for business hours. And if we weren't and we're like we're open from midnight to 4 because that suits us, that's just not going to work. So. So I think hours of time in the day have to be informed by who's your audience and your customer and what are their normal hours that are convenient for them. Because the business that serves the customer best ultimately wins. And you can't do that if you're only focused internally.

Yeah. And what's the season that we're in right now? There's times when you're in a sprint and what everybody really wants to do is burn the midnight oil and it's really good. And what's going to follow that is a time where we chill and there's.

Other groups where it's just steady. So I think just having a company.

Wide mandate about anything that's time restrictive is just in general a mistake.

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Now, if you don't have any restrictions or guidelines whatsoever, then, yeah, the pendulum will swing to the other time where, whether intentionally or unintentionally, you've got a company of workaholics, burnout is kind of the norm.

So you can't have that. So I think it's good to generally say to your team, for their sake.

And for the company's sake, customer's sake.

Look, take some days off, take the weekend, you should take some holiday.

I know something that's been tested in many places, especially in California, because it also has certain taxes, benefits, is the notion of unlimited time off.

Take as much time as you need.

Well, they've now found that if you offer people unlimited time off, guess what, they take less time off. Because you haven't specified how much time.

Is it okay to take.

You know, so we say depending on how long somebody's been with the company, they'll have anywhere from three weeks to six weeks.

So take that time, that is your time.

And we don't allow it to roll over because we want to encourage people to use it.

But that's just leadership, right? That's just, frankly, it's maturity, right? It's acknowledging that both of these extremes is bad.

Let's have some general guidelines. And what I would simply submit is the general guidelines of an eight hour, five day work week is pretty solid. I would start from there and then allow some flexibility within the teams.

But for us, we don't think about.

It in terms of hours at all for us. And you know, you know, we just did this. We every quarter we get together and we plan out what are our big key initiatives that we're going to get done in that 90 day period. And it's, we all agree that these.

Are the things that need to get.

Done to hit our goals. Yep. Okay, let's break down who's going to be doing what to achieve.

These people commit to getting those things done. And frankly, if they get the things done early, then nobody's going to say, well, why aren't you still here? I do think that's the beauty of.

A lot of the remote things that are happening is it's not nobody has to play work as much anymore.

So to the extent that we can.

Get there and just treat people like the adults that they are, I think that's what everybody wants.

I agree. Yeah. And I think one of the things that you can do is don't think about it as for example, a five hour, five contiguous hours. They don't have to all line up and be next to each other because of the inputs, outputs. So just like I know you time block in your schedule and I do as well to get things done effectively, we schedule deep work time, focus, time, whatever you want to call it. And we have days that we take off and times that we beat say we're not available. And that's as a schedule template for your individual productivity that can be really, really effective. And it could be the same for a five hour workday. It's just that I think that a lot of people would think about a five hour workday as that, okay, that's nine to two and then you're really not being available and you're not probably going to get the most productivity because they generally we do need time up and down. So maybe it's more of a five hour time blocked workday. If you're trying to work something like that out and saying that I'm going to be available during these hours, but there's going to be breaks in between where I'm allowing myself to be not productive or I'm allowing myself to do other things or recharge or let the things that I've put out into the world start to have time to come back so that I can deal with them in a batch. But even just basic productivity things to me that I don't see most people using or most offices or businesses using, I think that alone could really increase happiness and reduce the time that it takes to get things done. And I like the idea of, hey, It's a guideline, 8 to 5, 9 to 5. That's kind of our guideline because that's generally when the world is expecting to do business. But we're going to inform that with, look, if you get the Things done that you need to get done and we're hitting the goals that we've set and those goals are reasonable, then we don't really care.

Right, I agree. So Stefan Arstol, Tower paddleboard, by the way, Tower paddleboard, give him a shout out. So if you're interested in, you know, stand up, paddle, check out tower paddleboard. Thank you for trying. Thank you for reporting. Thank you for following up five years later and saying, ah, my bad, that wasn't that good of an idea. Respect the innovation. I would just everybody else out there, innovate with your customer in mind. I think you and your team come second. That's what it means to run a business, right? We're all in the business of serving those who are paying us the monies.

I agree.

And if you like this kind of.

Stuff that we're talking about here and you're enjoying the podcast, we would definitely appreciate that you review it at least subscribe so you don't miss out on any of the cool things we're talking about today. We're only talking about one thing because we wanted to go a little bit deeper into it. Sometimes we talk about three, sometimes we talk about more. But if you do enjoy the podcast, we would love for you to subscribe so you don't miss out on anything. And I think that's it for today. Ryan, anything else to say in closing?

No.

Great stuff, I'd say.

Sometimes we talk about wine. I will also say in closing, if you don't have a good system for prioritizing the things to get done. We talk about that in great depth in our scalable operating system accelerator, which a new cohort is opening up very shortly, literally in a matter of days. So be sure to check out Scalable co. It's if you're not on the waiting list for the scalable OS accelerator, make sure that you get on it because that's where we break down. Here's how we do our 90 day planning. Here's how we have visibility with scorecards. Here's how we plan out our systems and processes so everybody knows what they're supposed to be doing. We can build efficiencies there, but at the end of the day, innovate for your dang customers. Don't innovate for your team. You love them. You do, just like you love yourself. But innovate. You know, we're all working for somebody, right? You're working for your customers and just like we're working for you. So that's all I got.

All right. Guys, thank you.

You've been listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. If you're enjoying the show, let us know by subscribing and leaving a review. And for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com.

Thank you for listening. Foreign.

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