This message is NOT for everyone, but — I’ve had some interesting convos recently being in rooms for the first time.
People who have real money (define that how you will) — and think it came “easy” may have something to prove, which can get them in a lot of financial trouble …
If your money came to you in a way that you feel lucky, or that you feel you were born into the right family at the right time, doesn’t matter. What matters is having the ability to govern your desire to “build another company” or something where you can prove to the world, and maybe yourself that you are “good at business” make sure you protect that downside, because your “real money” can take significant hits because you are out there trying to prove to yourself, your parents, other people, etc that “you are good at business”.
Knowing this can help you protect that nest egg.
While this is about money, constantly knowing where you are trying to prove yourself (all of us are) is a critical “self unlock” — knowing that you are doing it, and why you are doing it is valuable…even if you do it anyway.
Close your eyes, imagine it is 2023, just 6 yeras from now? Are you retired? If not, you need to think about your value in an AI world.
There’s a lot of studies out there, McKinsey, Forrester, others — and while Forrester calls for 7.5% of jobs to be replaced, I can’t help but wonder what about the jobs that are partially replaced, consolidated?
McKinsey Report
I can’t remember where I read it, but CEOs overestimate job automation and workers severely underestimate the ability for AI to replace them. I think this AI world still can’t overcome the idea that “no, not me, I’m too good at my job to be relaced” syndrome.
People keep thinking “others” aren’t as good as I am, so they might be replaced but I wont be.
That -18% I think most of us in marketing will gloss over as “office support” thinking, that isn’t me, that is a mistake.
Here are two areas I was thinking of this morning where you can make your marketing job more resilient against AI in the next 10 years.
The more conventional your consulting advice is the more automatable you are.
Joe Pulizzi said it best: AI is Average Intelligence.
Generative AI, built on the average intelligence of data inputs, tends to perpetuate industry norms. If you’re leaning solely on best practices, you’re in danger of becoming replaceable. Think about it everyone did tactic X, we found that works, so you should do it.
See this recommendation, is it the best example of Average Intelligence? Want to rank for word, put word in title tag. First that is a horrible recommendation, anyone in SEO knows that. BUUUUUUT where you get to do the unconvenional thing is “where does google reward high value keywords where the word doesn’t need to be in the title.”
What are your industry’s best practices that you find yourself disagreeing with, how can you find out where it does / doesn’t make sense, how can you validate that? That person creates more value in an AI world, they keep you ahead of the “average intelligence” and to be honest the average intelligence works most of the time, you need to find where it doesn’t so you are offering unique insights that it will not.
“Our jobs will be to truly lead with our thoughts, question those thoughts, and find new ways of thinking about solutions that are not the industry standard. Run those as hard as we can until they become more standard.”
So what this means is winning, as it’s always been, will be on the fray who’s finding the 2% to 10% in their strategies that are not the average intelligence in their industry. That will allow your clients to win in these nooks and crannies of your industry. These nooks and crannies will only show themselves to the people who aren’t OK following the “way things have always been done” or “best practices” or “what Google says” — which I think for the most part some search people are very well positioned for.
The time has come, you need opinions, regularly. You need to validate those opinions faster (using AI), and then find where you can not be “average intelligence” to your clients.
Your Network Is Resilient Against Automation
Did you go remote or quit your job during the great resignation or recently thereafter? Is your “network” of people who know you and will bend over backwards to help you larger in your new org as a % of company or smaller? Do you find yourself still texting your co-workers from your old job, more than your new remote one? I have my hunches, but deep relationships matter, and they are harder to build.
“People still buy services from people.”
While it’s tempting to measure network growth by the number of LinkedIn contacts, or CRM contacts.
What do people in your network think of you? When they hear your name or your company’s name, are the thoughts positive, or is your corporate brand prettyt much “we sell shit for more than we pay for it” and we’ll do as much of that as possible. Leaving you as just another name vying for a sale? Are you doing drivebys acting like you care, when really you only care enough about me to close a deal? (Watch BD people, LLM use to personalize your emails is likely a “drive by”, so be careful).
Last week, I was at an airport waiting for my coffee when a stranger approached me, saying, “I love the things you put out on LinkedIn.” (Man having dreadlocks helps me get noticed so much more, dreads as business value?? Hmmm).
The real value of a network in not its size, but in how people feel about you.
Some people there ran businesses, while I’m not there to pitch anyone, I did grow relationships with people highly likely to run large scale orgs, and people walked away taking notes in my session on how they can also do small things in their businesses to build better ones.
These interactions make people more likeable, period. I think being likeable is a competitive advantage when services are not picked on logic all the time, you'd be amazed at how people choose to give your company a shot.
Remember this: Skills are fungible, they create more value and less value over time as industries change. Parts of jobs get automated, some parts don’t, new opportunities are created, old ones go away. But you know what creates value day in and day out…having people think of you as someone they like, someone who is going to be honest, and someone who is authentic. As I see it AI ain’t going to help there, so maybe that is another area you can focus.
If you’vbe gotten this far and you are looking for a tip: Here’s one…we rarely forget the people who change our views. In the work world, when is the last time you taught your boss or your bosses boss, something they didn’t know that changed how they think about a topic or created value for them. FYI if it was over a year ago, they might have forgotten. hat is another thing people don’t forget, the “people” who make them smarter, in a world of average intelligence, I never forget the people in my company that changed my thinking.
Last year was GREAT for me. Last year punched me in the face too.
Life is always great when I am in this position w/ my life and family
I’ve hit my point of enough My house is enough, my cars are enough, my kids private school is enough, my vacation fund is enough. I’ve seen enough of the world. My rainy day fund is enough, my take my parents on vacation fund is enough, my buy a small house for my in laws to move near their grandkids fund is enough. There is no more “Life changing money” for me. I’ve lived a life well within my means, so what do I do when I’m content?
I had the honor recently of speaking to a group of veteran entrepreneurs as part of the Veteran’s Shark Tank here in Philly. My dad is a vet and I work with veteran entrepreneurs to honor the role the military played in his life, and thus mine. If you wanna get involved with veteran entreprenurs Bunker Labs is a GREAT way to get started.
Problem: I get 0 joy from speaking to entrepreneurs on some inspirational business BS
But when it comes time to speak to immigrant, veteran, or formerly incarcerated entrepreneurs I’m in.
So what should I talk about … winning — that’s what we do right? Get an entrepreneur on the stage to talk about winning, and how these other entrepreneurs can do it too and be just like me.
I could show that Seer has grown by double digits every year for 18 years in a row. I could stop the story there…18 years in a row, razzle dazzle, you can do it too.
Proof point 2 — “how did this happen to lil ol me?”
Not bad for a teacher with humble upbringings, oh and I’m black, lets throw that in too cause you know it’s hard out here for a black entrepreneurs to grow a business, people love that part of the story. Throw that in and boom, inspiring keynote.
There is just one problem. That isn’t the whole story and it sure AF isn’t the most recent events. The real story is that I’m up on stage supposed to inspire them, when the reality is…
For the first time in 20 years, my business is down.
I reminded those veterans of a quote my dad would say — My dad was an aircraft mechanic on KC131 in flight refuel planes.
“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”
One thing I’ve always loved about the veterans I’ve met, is that broadly (I know I am generalizing here), they face facts and appreciate brutal honesty. For veteran entrepreneurs that is a strength. Most of us non-veteran entrepreneurs tell so many incomplete success stories to each other about our businesses, that why so many entrepreneurs never feel like they are doing good enough because everyone around them are telling incomplete stories.
This is how most of us portray our successes to the world, incompletely.
Instead I told them the whole story, yes all those things above are true, but I told them what I also true… year 20 I’m down.
This is the reality of entreprenurship, the past is over. That old glory is fine and all but it’s not indicative of how I feel about my job as a CEO today. I gotta get to work and I’m excited to get back at it.
So often the headline is only one part of the story, these are the realities for so many of us.
We grew 450% in 5 years, let me inspire you
but we aren’t profitable and will run out of money in 7 months
I exited at 7x EBITDA, I’m rich, let me inspire you
but I didn’t get 40% of my earn out
but my competitors sold for 2x that much
but I miss working with my team, I’ve lost my purpose
This is the reality behind so many of our stories, and veterans should lean on one another to be honest, face facts — it takes strength to show others your business is struggling, it takes strength to tell complete stories.
Entrepreneurship is lonely, especially when ya phony
Here’s the funny thing about being honest first. Others will let down their “crushing it” façade and tell you “me too” sometimes. Which in turn makes you say…oh dang…I’m not the only one.
I’ve always told myself if I struggled I would write about it, but when it came time to put pen to paper, it was hard if I’m being honest.
So I’ll give you the advice that I gave them, you gain strength when you accept without excuses your weaknesses and failures. If you can find other entrepreneurs who are wiling to do the same, the journey won’t be as lonely.
What also inspired me to write this is another founder who said in a post recently growth has been slow/flat for 2–3 years, he mentioned that on LinkedIn (Jason, it’s you, but I can’t find the post, you kind of mentioned it in passing)! How refreshing. Another friend hit me up to say say WTF happened in Q3/Q4 of 2022? The other friend who grew 20% but hasn’t made a profit in 2 years. In private we have these chats, and I can’t share their stories but I can share mine and ask you to share yours with someone too. This is how we get stronger and show the world what entrepreneurship really is about
Entrepreneurship is not this:
Entrepreneurship is my 2021 & 2022. When we blew up in 2021 and had record everything — that level of growth showed all the cracks that made that unsustainable in 2022. We had to pause biz, re-tool, re-hire, and rethink how we get back to growth.
Here’s a few things about Seer as I see it…
Growing this business has been easy. I wish I had some crazy sacrifices I’ve made story. I don’t. I never went in debt, we’ve been profitable almost every month for 20 years. I’ve found great leaders / execs — and I cared about them and their families enough that they decided to stay around with me. I then got out of their way and let them take this business to levels I couldn’t.
This story ain’t so inspirational, I got lucky, built something that outstripped my skills and let others run it. So why am I on stage talking about “my” success :)?
TLDR: Can you teach someone to be “unafraid” to act when they recognize that the risks are low?
Since I was 14 I always took risks, I calculated the risk and wasn’t afraid of the consequences and I did things that others ask “who told you that it was OK to do that?” To which I respond…what was the worst thing that could happen?
Here are 3 examples of me processing risk and acting w/o seeking permission.
Age 16 — I once tried to help the sneaker company I worked at selling shoes hit a goal. So I hired a friend to stad outside and wave a sign to get people to stop in. Did I ask my boss if that was OK, nope. I just did it. I was pretty sure if I got fired for trying to help him hit his goals, then it wasn’t the right place for me.
Result: We crushed goal, I kept my job.
Age 18 — Freshman year I didn’t have a scholarship. I lived in a dorm with a bunch of other dudes who were on scholarship though. First semester I got a 4.0, I saw kids who partied all first semester get put on academic probation, then they came back in the second semester and kept partying. I got a 3.7. But they had scholarship money and I did not.
So I wrote down their names and went to the financial aid office, and I said here are names of kids I know were on probation and I saw that they kept partying, so I bet a large # of them lost their scholarship $. What happens to the money? Cause ya’ll should have bet on me. No one told me to connect the dots, I just did and figured what was the worst that could happen?
Result: I got a full 4 year ride after my freshman year (paid for both senior years)
Age 22 — I made a list of 6 companies I wanted to work with, put a suit on and started knocking on doors. First company whose door I knocked on, gave me a job in search. The rest is history. But most people have never knocked on a door to try to get a job in their lives, they leave working at companies they really want to work with up to chance. I never understood that.
So recently I was exploring these are all important lessons in my career growth. Heck my life. Why don’t more people “Just f’ing do it” as my buddy Alex Hillman would say.
Alex Hillman w/ JFDI tattoo
So it was in a chat with a co-worker that I asked her…can you teach someone to not overthink things like this and just be unafraid?
Then at a dinner with Alex and Dan, I asked the question…can you teach this, or is is just innate in some of us to not be afraid.
To which Dan Mall said…hold up, let me challenge that…fear is a good thing, it is a good signal to be afraid, to stop and process that fear.
That helped me reframe the question.
Dan went on to say, you can teach people to assess risk. Courage once you’ve processed how “risky” something is, can be taught. Dan then said processing risk is like getting better at meditation, it can be practiced.
So now with that reframe, here’s the question… Can you teach someone to get better at assessing risk, then being unfraid to act when they recognize that the risks are low? Or are certain people just wired naturally / innately to overthink low risks, which can paralyze them from acting. Cause if it is teachable, I would love to learn how to. I see a lot of people in my company and in the world whom I have the highest confidence in, but they don’t always have it in themselves and I’d like to help them break through.
Every week anyone in our company can submit a social question, this week someone asked…do you have a side hustle, if yes, tell us about it — link out to it. I loved the question for a bunch of reasons:
It came from a brand new employee, meaning she felt comfortable in her first month disclosing her side hustle. She leaned into our values around transparency and trusted us enough to believe we would support her (she was right).
This dialogue enables others to see “oh this is a place where I can talk about my side hustle w/o immediate assumptions about “dedication to the company”.
Lastly, it was an opportunity for me to learn about other’s interests, someone (also brand new to Seer) owns a 10 acre kelp farm and in 2022, produced ~4,000 wet/pounds of sugar kelp, sequestering 894lbs of Carbon and removing 71.5lbs of Nitrogen from the water.
This was all GREAT right? Yup. But it was 2 answers that really stood out to me as brave.
Here is one:
Alternative perspective — I quit mine!
I’m at a phase of life where I don’t get a lot of time to myself. Selling my me-time did not make me happy even though I was making good money.
I also made peace with the fact that I don’t want to be an entrepreneur when I grow up. I used to read and hang with a lot of people who had this attitude like “you’re a sucker if you’re not trying to go out on your own.” I understand some people have a high intrinsic need to be self-employed, or are wired to easily juggle 2+ jobs — that’s not me, and so the sacrifices (which I think most agree are real) are simply not worth it.
Why did I love this? It was brave. In a world of more, having enough and verbalizing it gets you some stares, it can make people think you aren’t ambitious. I bet there are people who kind feel like they should have a sode hustle because not having one could make them look like they aren’t ambitious.
Also I love how Jason owned NOT having a side hustle, he could have just not responded.
So often once you got kids, they become the main hustle and your job feels like the side hustle.
Side hustles & main hustles have a cost — time away from other things that matter.
Then I got another answer from one of our 20 “emily’s” that was a picture of her kid — and she said…THIS is my side hustle. It’s funny how we have equated side hustle in many ways to ambition, creativity, growth in BUSINESS, but when you break the attributes of a side hustle down, you could replace etsy shop with our kids names 🙂
We put in time, hoping to grow them into good little people someday (our ROI), we pick ourselves up when we just don’t wanna drive to another practice, blend another smoothie, answer another question, etc — these little kids come into our zooms, get sick and ruin our plans and we get through it anyway.
Cheers to people who own, NOT having a side hustle because it has a cost that individually we all must determine the value of. Cheers to all you parents out there, doing this job is a whole other type of side hustle, yet b/c it doesn’t have a balance sheet and an EIN number we have somehow devalued that work.
I’m OK being the first black anything. I’m an innovator, by my nature I like going into things others likely haven’t done. So when it comes to race…I’ve actually never needed to “see black people” in the role to feel like it was possible for me. (However in my years as a hockey goalie, Grant Fuhr and Pokey Reddick were 2 of my heroes.)
I spoke at Searchlove last week and as we got closer to the conference I asked if I could get 2 tickets for a few folks whom were underrepresented in our industry and they instantly said sure.
Cursing at work
Swearing at work, or even worse on stage, is unprofessional is a widely held belief — to which I say and have continued to say “Fuck that, I’mma be me.”
I’ve been saying that for 15+ years of speaking, my motivation was always: “I’mma be me and I’m going to put the pressure on myself to add enough value that I’ll be invited back in spite of some people being put off.”
I can’t present nearly as well, if my internal dialogue is constantly being filtered to be professional. That is also me being inauthentic to myself and I’m not good at that.
So it was a shock to me when a young black man (whom I invited to come) came up to me and had some feedback about my presentation. But first…
The curse of being a young black man who “can make it”
Here’s a little thing about being black and “articulate / smart / etc” when you are young… A lot of well meaning people will tell you “you’ve got a shot, keep being like XYZ, and you can really make it.”
Heck, my mother used to say “Be more Grant Hill and less Allen Iverson.”
So this week when I was on stage letting it rip, as I do, one of the young men from Hopeworks was in the crowd. Hopeworks is an organization that Seer peeps have poured a lot of time (and money) into over the years to help young folks get exposure to careers in digital.
Here’s a few of us doing mock interview training.
“I’ve never seen anything like you did Wil”
There it was.
One of the young men said that to me. He had been told his whole life as a smart, articulate black man who grew up in Camden NJ (at one point the most dangerous city in the US), that saying “swear words” and other “urban slang” would keep him from getting opportunities in the professional world much less opportunities to present his passions on stages.
Being authentic to myself was inspirational to him
I don’t like to think of myself as inspirational to anyone because it is presumptuous. Saying “I inspire people” is just not how I get down.
As I left the conference, I reminded him 2x to hit me up and set up a time for me to walk him through the presentations and answer any questions he may have had from the various presenters (he has set that meeting up!) and in exchange he’ll teach me more about tik tok — as he’s gone viral 10+ times and knows a ton more than I do 🙂 (He reminded me that I had met him 2 years earlier at a mentoring session). Here’s his message!
He used “Dope” more than likely b/c he knew I’d be ok w/ it.
Re: Diversity I’m not the “make a statement CEO”
When I say I am comfortable with Seer’s slow progress on diversity, what I mean is that I’m in the field doing real shit with young black and brown people, I make mentorship / volunteering a priority and I allow all Seer people to do this work at any time of the day they want. Fuck a statement, I gotta look at myself in the mirror and ask…am I doing all I can.
Whether I’m running through neighborhoods impacted by gun violence like Frankford “yelling miles up guns down, don’t shoot protect the youth” with other people or using my heft as a speaker to get a few people invited to a conference to expose them to digital. I’m putting my time in — in a TON of places right now and I’m proud of the work I’m putting in.
Shout outs
This young man’s experience was only possible due to a lot of other people and they should also get their flowers.
Lauren “buck nasty” Boyd
Thank you for putting in the work with Hopeworks day in and day out — when I reached out looking for impressive underrepresented young people, there you were you knew exactly who to reach out to and yeah he’s impressive AF, you’ve been at this for YEARS and thank you for mentoring with Hopeworks young people for years, you put in extra work before, during, and after work to help so many of their youth impress people in interviews.
Lauren working on interview skills with someone from Hopeworks 6 years ago!
Lynsey Jones
Lyns, it’s impossible to find a photo of us together because you are always in the background making things run. When I had a request of you to help me get more young underrepresented folks in the room, you were all about it. You inspired me to start thinking…how can I use my heft as a speaker to try to leverage that heft to get more opportunities to get young people coming up into rooms like these, lets see what I come up with. Come back to Philly next year and lets do something BIGGER together.
Rand Fishkin & Will Critchlow & Shawn Collins
You all in your own ways ran organizations that allowed me to “be me” when I presented. That gave me confidence to bring my authentic self to the stage year after year after year. You put me in a position for this to happen, just maybe if I had gotten enough “You should tone it downs” over the years this wouldn’t have happened.
Brad Aronson
I wouldn’t have even known who Hopeworks was if it wasn’t for you. Thank you for always finding ways to put good into the world. If ya’ll want a copy of the book I got a few to give out (kindle only).
My dad hustled, so I didn’t have to. It’s in his DNA and thus, likely mine. It’s all I saw my entire life, and I do mean entire.
This is my dad, on my mom’s 80th birthday in 96 degree weather. Yeah that is not a typo. NINETY SIX!
Here is the kicker, it wasn’t even OUR lawn he’s tending to. It was our neighbor’s, was that neighbor an elderly person unable to do it themselves and my dad was her savior? Nope. She had 50 bux — so he had time.
Now, I had made dinner, brought it over with some special champagne, for mom’s 80th, I brought the 2 kids over and he said hello and went back to edging the lawn.
Hey dad, I can pay you 50 bux to spend time with your grandkids and mom on her 80th, but it’s not just about the 50 bux, it’s about staying busy and productive.
This is the same father who said to me one day…
“If I come over your house to work on projects and you and I do it together it is free, if you have me come over to work on it and you are at work, 25 bux/hr.”
The man can’t sit still, he’s always had 2–3 side gigs. Even when he worked full time, he used the weekends to “play soldier” as he called it in the reserves after a 6 year stint in the air force, he played soldier until he was to old to serve.
He grew up on welfare in poverty, the military was his only way out of that situation, keep me busy, regimented, focused. You can not tell this man to take a break, even at 76 years old in 96 degree weather.
He lived around people who “took a break” a lot of them got wrapped up in bad things, drugs / alcohol, now they take a break ALL day drunk or fucked up.
He was on the front lines of poverty & because of his upbringing I’m one generation removed from that extreme poverty, I got to see it when I visited uncles — 1 of them died of overdose, other one lost his legs while being drunk walking in front of a moving car.
Don’t work…bad things happen. Work a 9am–5pm job, bad things happen from 5pm–10pm, don’t work on Sunday to “rest” — bad things happen. This is how my dad grew up.
This is in my DNA — don’t sit still for too long, don’t get lazy — bad things happen, you could end up like your uncles.
Now that I am a dad…I’m taking my Sunday’s to bring my kids to mom’s house to sing happy birthday, read her some books, and make some halibut. I’ll never work like that, but deep down inside I’m my dad’s son.
My dad hustled, so I have a choice to hustle or not.
This is why I don’t knock people who contribute to the culture around hustle, you never know where they come from. If my dad didn’t hustle, then we probably wouldn’t have gotten our first computer — we got it as a hand me down from a neighbor, I can’t help but wonder if he mowed a few lawns for free to get me that Commodore Vic-20, which lead to everything I have today. Thanks for the hustle pops.
I was up till 3:30am the other night working on an open source CCTV troubleshooting project, I went from zero knowledge and thinking it would be a 10 minute fix at 9pm to working on this problem until 3:30am and fixing it, kinda.
I share this because it reminds me of how I got my first job in search, I was told to go home and make a website at 5pm and come back the next day and show it to the owners Ettore Rossetti & Angelo A. Rossetti — I went home and learned how to make a site on Geocities, it was all about my 88 jeep wrangler Sahara. So I learned it and loaded everything up. That next morning, I checked everything at home, looked great.
I went to the office in Bridgeport, CT to show off my skills. Guess what? None of the images loaded, not one of them.
Ettore (Right) — Angelo (Left)
I just effed up this interview, I assumed. I was wrong.
Ettore pulled me aside and said, we’re hiring you anyway. He showed me how I needed to change my image locations from c:/mydocs to wherever the location was on the server, right there in the interview he taught me how to use CuteFTP and how to edit the HTML and he said, we’re hiring you anyway.
I was shocked, I thought I messed up the interview.
He said, we need people who are unafraid to make mistakes, and who become obsessive about figuring things out, optimizing on altavista/lycos/excite isn’t about what you know, it’s about how obsessed you are about getting to the top.
Once I teach you CuteFTP in 10 minutes you’ll never forget how to fix this problem again — but I can’t teach you in 10 minutes to be unfraid, to rely on your instincts, and I can’t teach you in 10 minutes to know that it’s within you to do hard things.
3:30am on a Tuesday night, I went to bed PUMPED with adrenaline, that feeling that I can do hard things, if I put in the work was coursing through my veins, almost made it hard to go to sleep. “Boy, you still got it”.
Was I tired the next morning, not really, I had a choice break my streak or not. So I got up at 5:42am to go for my morning run, hello world, I’m ready for the day, worked a full day, made it to t-ball practice and then that night got a good solid 8.5 to take on the next day.
2 new questions to consider asking in interviews
There’s a lot of “skills and wins” in resumes — but you know what they never tell you — the intangibles. So maybe in your next interview ask someone
“when is the last time you did something for the first time?”
or
“when is the last time you got so into something (work or not) that you basically forgot to eat”
These kinds of questions might help you find the next diamond in the rough.
Thank you Ettore for seeing past my today skills for the skills you could see I would acquire.
“NO such thing as a life that is better than yours, no such thing, no such thing.” — J. Cole.
One of the most profound statements in my 23 year professional career came from a client who sold to Alibaba — in a pretty big deal, all over crunchbase etc etc. Millions — he was the founder / CEO so I was at the highest levels of the biz.
Me: “Congrats man, what a ride!” Him: “Wil, sometimes it is better to own a lot of something small then to own a little of something big, I gotta run.”
That hit me, hard. This man just sold for “likely low 9 figures” and had a significant ownership stake — this was the FIRST thing he thought to say to me days after? Damn.
I shared that with Alex Hillman recently to which he replied, “there’s a lot of people out there Rich and Sad.”
Got me thinking even harder. There’s a lot of Rich & Sad out there behind the facade. Alex went on to say, “Anytime someone sells their business, my first question is “are you OK, not congratulations.”
Happy on social, sad in real life
I was listening to a podcast about “van life” today and how much it sucked for someone who tried it, wait what, it sucked? But the awesome photos, the dropping the 9–5, the waking up every day to do what you want, how could that not be dope? Look. At. This. Life.
My morning, was boooooring.
The author talked about how it looks on vanlife tiktok and she described how that was what she expected, but the reality was a lot of skuzzy bathrooms, flat tires, really bad sleep, feeling like she couldn’t breathe in humid days(bad AC), rainy days, lack of showering, etc, etc.
This broadly gets me thinking of one J. Cole song I love, called Love Yourz — watch the lyrics video, but this line gets repeated a lot.
Start vs Finish (Getting married vs staying married)
Something else constantly on my mind is the start vs the finish.
When is the last time you were at a huge celebration of family members, likely a wedding right? 2 people committing to a life together starting today, lets send them off and throw a huge party, right?
Did you throw a big party on their 5th year of STAYING together, shocking how much effort and money we spend to send people off day 1, but on day 3,000 of being together, you send some happy anniversary cards. I wanna live in a world where we praise staying together cause staying together is hard.
Start vs Finish (Business edition)
I have a few companies whom I track, they are often written up in the press for raising money or moving into their new offices for expansion. The CEO’s typically are quoted with what they expect to happen over a few years.
Once a year I get the emails come back into my inbox, just to see where are they now, and how many of their interview stats played out?
There’s a lot of people out there saying “we’re going to triple in 3 years” who grow 50% in 3 years — which to me is still worth celebrating, but it does make me reflect how we entrepreneurs say a lot of stuff that never happens (Hey Elon, still waiting for my car to drive itself).
Are we putting out the highlights like “we’re going to grow revenue by 500% in 5 years” but no one holds us accountable to “did you actually do that?”. Where are the year 1, 2, 3 check in stories that start off like “Last year you said you were going to double headcount in 5 years, are you on pace?”
Contentment — Try it on for size
The world is telling us to do something different, start something new, get bigger, buy stuff, sell stuff — try to keep doing the same thing in those moments and try to find a new joy in the same old.
Every day I wake up, lace my shoes up, and I am reminded that there’s no such thing as a life that is better than mine, so I don’t seek one, I’ve felt this way pretty much every day for the last 20 years — and I’ve only had 1 day in 20 years I didn’t want to come to work, but that story is for another time.
Yeah, we’ve all heard that one and most of us believe it, but how many of us have flipped it?
“Employees aren’t attracted to companies, they are attracted to managers.”
Sure companies matter a ton! A company provides the environment for a manager to operate within. But what about manager’s role? I, as CEO, make the environment — but the daily execution of those guardrails is in the hands of managers.
Ever have a great brand to work on, but a horrible point of contact?
I’ve had TONS of client brands that were GREAT, but the point of contact we worked with stunk, right? How did I feel about the brand after that experience? Ever have that client point of contact leave and suddenly the project was great all of a sudden? Yup. So it’s not just about the company it’s about the people in the company, right?
I was getting ready to post a job on LinkedIn and thought, maybe it’s just noise, that is what inspired me to post this and reflect on who we are & are not built for.
Consider posting why someone should work with YOU as the manager, what value do you add to their career / life. What is your manager brand?
Try to finish this sentence, at least 50% of the people whom I managed have gone on to do ___________. Saying things like that shape your manager brand.
How many of you have ever written up and articulated why someone should work in your organization with YOU. What value will YOU (the applicant) gain by working with ME. Not the company, ME.
As a CEO my job is to create an environment to make it easy for manager to thrive, but ultimately the execution varies manager to manager.
Individual managers might need management brands. (I hate personal branding, FYI), but as a manager there’s real value in sitting in an interview and articulating why working with YOU drives value for them.
If there are 30 middle managers in your company, why should someone be on YOUR team. Not at the company, but with YOU. Imagine if we let the front line workers take the power back and they could choose any manager they wanted, how would you recruit for your team? What would you say? What is your track record, where are you an inflection point for people?
Let me go first — this is my manager brand
I build teams who do things for the first time, we take raw materials that maybe others see but don’t refine into value and turn them into new things on the hope we create value.
I have no problem looking at my failures honestly, but we don’t make excuses — you will learn that vulnerability is a safety blanket, it’s attractive more than you’ve been told, and I’ll be modeling it for you daily.
We’re going to be humble, when we win we get back to work. (We’ve won inc 5000 7 or 8 times, I don’t post about it, win awards whatever, get back to work).
I move roadblocks for you to see just how good you / your strategies are — wanna see how good you are, join my team.
Be willing to accept that as I remove those roadblocks, if you aren’t as good as you thought, that is OK lets work on leveling you up, but we don’t make excuses.
You will have a LOT of flexibility / with that comes a lot of accountability — you will learn to embrace your mistakes / shortcomings as part of growing.
You will learn a lot because I read a lot and challenge my default thinking a lot, it’s how I grow — so expect that I’ll challenge your thinking.
My job is to make it easy for you to do the right thing
You will level up your data skills, presentation skills, and critical thinking skills, work with me and you’ll likely be better at pitching clients to take action than you were before you worked with me
You’ll make mistakes here as making mistakes is on the path to greatness — My latitude for mistake making is SUPER high, make sure you are protecting my back so we don’t make fatal mistakes.
You’ll be a better human — I want to build better humans and I’ll always lead by example.
Your network will grow exponentially — My network is massive and how I operate means a lot of people are willing to do a favor for me, often times that means you get access to people 1:1 that you usually only see on stage. I can use that network to get you your dream client or dream industry, get you on stage, get your beliefs out to the world — fast.
Pride — Ultimately, I wanna give you something you built that when our time is over you can look back and your impact was UNDENIABLE and it was impactful to this business and it’s goals.
Exhausting — I’m not good at long term scalability, working with me is TURBULENT because of that, if you get tired working with me it’s going to be because I’m always changing stuff and that can get old.
Too Fast — I am impatient that has major pros and cons, know thyself.
Bad pacesetter — I work on vacations, this job is a hobby for me — I delay send all my emails so I don’t expect you to, but it makes me a bad pacesetter at times — don’t try to keep pace, this is a hobby I don’t need to get away from it.
This is what I bring, wanna know what my team thinks of working with me?
What would your brand be as a leader??
Imagine if your boss said to you, today I’m letting everyone pick their manager at our company, what would your pitch be? How much time have you put into thinking about that pitch, could you give it right now?
Before you jump in watch this video, and yes you will cringe — you gotta look within, that’s where all growth starts.
