Wil Reynolds

Category: Uncategorized

  • Imposter syndrome comes from not having a scoreboard

    Imposter syndrome comes from not having a scoreboard

    Duke coach Kara Lawson, talking to her team:

    “Don’t give external people the power to touch you that way. You control that. Don’t let me control whether you are going to have a good day or not, or if you feel good about yourself, or if you feel validated.”

    My way of doing that is a scoreboard.

    Imposter syndrome comes from not having a scoreboard.

    Find the data, and you stop needing other people to tell you you’re good.

    I spend most of my time coming up with new ideas and putting them out for public scrutiny. So how do I know if I’m good at that?

    It’s easy to look at followers. But followers can be insanely devoid of engagement. Seer’s LinkedIn page has roughly the same number of followers as I do. I’ve looked at influential people in our industry with the same follower count as me, and their most engaged posts just don’t perform as well.

    So here’s my scoreboard:

    • Do I get invited back to speak after I speak? How long does it take them to ask?
    • If a conference is new, do I gain followers?
    • How does each post do against my own other posts on the same platform? (I never blame the algorithm, I’m ceeding power to them if I say, oh it’s the algorithm).
    • Does the value of my activities outweigh my cost to the company? (I use things like CPCs for keywords, CPMs for LinkedIn Thought leader posts, etc, so I’m not using numbers that anyone could say “well wil, what is an impression worth?” I’ve already had an agent calculate based on deep research what it would cost a company to get my organic impressions.

    This is the type of scoreboard you need – and then you just need to be brutally honest with yourself when the scoreboard says… you ain’t doing so hot.

    Sometimes I look and go, man, my last 10 posts are 50% under my average from last year. I just don’t have great ideas right now. I’m not doing my job as well as I used to.

    What I don’t need is someone inside the company saying “Wil, your stuff isn’t hitting, bro.” I already know. And I don’t need someone telling me I crushed it either.

    FAILURE is part of the game

    You’re always going to have failures. Look at your scoreboard the way an athlete looks at missed shots or incompletions.

    Say you’ve had 10 clients at your company. Do you know the average retention or upsell rate? Let’s say 30% of clients get upsold within 12 months. If your clients upsell more, renew faster, or stay longer than average, that’s your answer.

    Sometimes you lose a client because they can’t implement. You could say that’s not your fault. Someone else might say: what makes me feel great about my job is that when clients can’t get things done, I have a really high rate of showing them the true value and changing their minds.

    Know your COST

    I’m fanatical about this, and it’s really gotten under Crystal’s skin. I’m often one of the top three highest paid people at Seer. Technically not the last 2 years, because I leave the profits in the business and only bring home my salary. That aside, I’ve always built a scoreboard to make sure my contribution is greater than my cost.

    Wouldn’t you want to know that about yourself? Now you’re getting ahead of the layoff. If the data says you’re good, great. If it says you’re not, that’s an opportunity, because now you know what to improve.

    BATTLE TEST it

    It’s human nature to want to feel good at your job. So be honest with yourself and get other perspectives. Don’t use peers. Use a CFO, a controller, or a COO. And not a cheerleader. You want someone who’ll say, “According to these numbers, you’re middle of the pack.”

    Now the scary part. Say your scoreboard has been battle tested, the data says you’re good, and you still believe you’re not. That means you can convince yourself of something in spite of the evidence.

    How is that any different from a flat earther or an anti-vaxxer? Believing something in spite of evidence is not a place I’d want to be.

  • A Hotel Stay Made Me Want to Be Better for My Clients

    A Hotel Stay Made Me Want to Be Better for My Clients

    This is now the second time I’ve stayed at Casa Polanco in Mexico City in nine months.

    And I honestly don’t know if I keep going back because I love Mexico City, or because every single time I stay at this hotel, I walk away so inspired to be better for my clients because of how my family is treated and thought of.

    And then I’m sitting there thinking: how do I take care of my clients the way they just took care of me?

    I’ve only been there twice, but it’s the same people both times. And here’s why that matters more than ever right now: in a world of personalized emails and CRMs, personalization has started to feel inauthentic.

    It doesn’t feel real, it doesn’t feel honest. Everybody’s radar is up for it now. So when a person you don’t actually know or recognize suddenly “knows” you, it feels weird, it’s the same reason so many people who prep for a call with me will drop in these little personal details they clearly looked up, and it just doesn’t land. It’s like, you don’t know me like that.

    One of the things I think has been critical to our “growth” is that we’ve concentrated our client relationships around the team with our highest retention, our client engagement team.

    Deep down a client wants access to the nerds, like me. But they want to know the nerd isn’t going to geek out so hard on the newest algorithm update that they forget the whole point is growing a business.

    That’s Seer’s attempt of having the same person greeting you every time, they get to know you in an authentic way.

    The “CE team” has a job and that job is making sure the relationship never gets lost in the work, the deliverables, the reports.

    There are so many small things they do that are otherworldly to me.

    The Mini Bar Stress Out

    “Take whatever you want, whenever you want, we’ll refill it and anything in your mini bar.”

    The real thing they’ve done is make it easy for people to enjoy without thinking.

    So often at a hotel you’re sitting there doing math in your head, I’m not paying six bucks for this Coke, and $10 for a bag of popcorn.

    The ask of money is friction. How can you say, unwind and relax, we’re here for you, and then be like “yo $10 bux for that fiji dog?”

    They just remove all of that, that thinking and convincing yourself.

    The small things are big things lesson at 7:30am

    Casa Polanco Bar Cart

    The picture above was taken at 7:30am, after a run. Look at the ice cube bucket, it is completely full. I’m looking at it thinking: this hotel is checking that the ice in an open bar hasn’t melted at 7:30am. That ice is going to melt in an hour or two regardless. Didn’t matter to them.

    If someone wanted a drink at 7:30am, they shouldn’t have to ask for ice.

    What’s the equivalent test at Seer, the thing I’d want our people doing for a client even in the moments where the client would genuinely never know either way?

    Will Guidara writes about something similar in Unreasonable Hospitality the host would spot a table paying their check and quietly send someone to move their coats up to the front, so by the time the table finished paying, their coats were already waiting by the door.

    He called it a magic trick. Nobody asks for that. Most people don’t even notice it’s happening, they just pat their pockets for the coat check tag, look up, and their coat is already there. That’s the same instinct as the ice tray. Nobody’s watching. Do it anyway. How do I build that?

    Cleaning a room, nope, Wolverine battle

    When they cleaned the room, they took my kids’ action figures and set them up in battle positions around the room. It was wild that they took that kind of care while cleaning sitting his little army men up in different poses.

    And since it was one of my kid’s birthdays, they’d found a piñata that day and attached it to a balloon for him. They’d just found out.

    I keep coming back to this through the lens of how it makes me want to be better for my clients. It really does. When you feel like somebody is taking care of you at that level, you can’t help but want to be that for the people you work with.

    Making Mistakes in client relationships

    There’s a book I love called Setting the Table by Danny Meyer, and one line from it has stuck with me for years:

    The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.

    It’s not that Polanco doesn’t make mistakes. It’s not that Fasano doesn’t make mistakes. It’s that when they do, they handle them well, and they hold themselves to a standard to keep it from happening again.

    When Seer drops the ball with a client , and every agency does , what would “handling it well” actually look like if we were holding ourselves to a Polanco-level standard, rather than just an apologetic-email standard?

    Danny Meyer has another thought from that book: write the best final chapter. Your client can leave, you can make mistakes, but you always have a chance to write a great final chapter.

    Mistakes are going to happen. The question is how you write the final chapter.

    I’m in the middle of writing one right now. An alum of Seer hired our company to help their new company, and for whatever reason, we didn’t live up to the standard they needed from us.

    I emailed them and said: I don’t know if you remember the book I shared with you when you were here, Setting the Table, but in it, Danny Meyer reminds us to write a great final chapter. That’s what I’m going to do. Even though you’ve executed your out clause, I’ll make myself available to help you or your executive team in any way possible. Because that’s just what we do.

    Watching us leave

    It reminds me of leaving Casa Polanco. When you get into the car to drive off, one or two staff members typically wait outside watching you and your family until you turn the corner and are out of their sight.

    They keep an eye on you until you’re no longer in view, looking for one more chance in case you need help.

    Forgot something? They see you out until they no longer can directly influence the quality of your stay. That is what i want to build.

    Not the biggest, not the most profitable, the one that made people feel like you know what…this was personal to Wil and his team at Seer.

  • Volunteering helped me break out of the cycle of venting about my employer and resulted in me…

    In the last few weeks, I have flown to Akron Ohio (we now have 10+ people in Ohio) and San Diego (we have about 8 people there too, and an office).

    If I’m being honest I miss having a bigger team there because we located in a tougher part of the city (at the time) and I felt we could be a part of helping something “get better” as a unit. Looking at the photo below reminds me of some of the awesome people we had there, do I miss it, yeah but I’m grateful AF that I had the experience with this big crew, lots of good peeps in this photo.

    Team San Diego after our profit share announcement, they did a boat thing 🙂

    At one point in my career, I got great joy from finding people to vent and complain to about the company I worked at. I owe 22 years of running Seer to the out of body experience I had one day where I looked at myself and said…look at you…you can’t wait for the clock to strike 12, and why…because you get 1 hour to talk crap on the company you work for and drag others into that complaint cycle. That was the highlight of my day. That was sad.

    Me in a hairnet, somewhere in Akron.

    I owe volunteering to assisting me to break out of that cycle. It wasn’t until I started volunteering at a children’s hospital was I able to see something greater than my “problems” and I stopped using my time to complain, it was OK that I was at a good company, full of good people, who were doing the best they could, even if that wasn’t right for me anymore. I decided to use my lunch breaks to learn a skill, sharpen my saw on search, do some non profit SEO work. Eventually when the timing was right, I quit, all those lunches that used to be spent complaining, were now used to do pro-bono work and some of my own client work, and sure enough when I left, the charities I was helping with digital marketing, showed up, referred me clients. Peter Madden at AgileCat said…this guy is pretty good and referred me to at least 3 clients, and that was the foundation of what got built today.

    It started by looking at myself in the mirror, getting a broader perspective on life, which lead me to the decision that complaining and venting about my employer was a waste of time, which lead me to doing pro bono work to stay sharp, which lead me to starting Seer full time. I still to this day put in time, real time to keep that spirit of volunteering alive with the team.

    Me, back in a hairnet, this time 2 weeks later in San Diego.

    A lot of good can come from volunteering and broadening your perspective in tough times. I had never worked in a food bank, never visited one, yet I saw the people in one recently and how much love goes into the people who work there, the chefs who teach people how to make multiple meals with the same ingredients, the dieticians who work with teams on how to manage diebetes or other health issues at a diet level, the workers at the food pantry, who set up the shelves and what not to feel like a grocery store, because just giving people food is a good start, but giving them the dignity of choosing food and filling their carts matters so much too.

    These last 2 weeks have further broadened my perspective and made me a better human, I got closer to my teams, whom I miss dearly connecting with at volunteer events and I also got to continue to broaden my perspective which I think helps me manage any kinds of tough times.

    Lastly, this shit comes at a cost…kids were at home and Nora was having to manage the household solo, doing these things have costs and I have to always make sure I am keeping those in check too.

  • Kindness in the form of a cup & a plug

    This morning, I’m sick. Some kind of brutal stomach bug. I got ready to brew my coffee and while it was brewing, I looked out my window.

    There was someone under blankets shaking, a lot.

    My block has probably 35 residences, I am one of only 2 with a window that faces the street. The new design in my neighborhood (which used to be a ton of warehouses) looks like this, all the homes face each other, and garages on the first floor.

    As I prepared my coffee I noticed that someone was curled up in a bunch of blankets… shivering underneath of those blankets. It is maybe 30 degrees out at best. The identity of the person was obscured by the layers of fabric, their humanity was there in plain sight, but if they were black or white, woman or man, child or adult.

    I decided that I’d take my morning cup and give it to whoever was under there, but I admit I delayed for 2 minutes. I was faced with that decision.

    It’s not all unicorns and rainbows…I love city life, and I dislike a lot about it too, but I stay because it gives me multiple opportunities every day to help someone who might need it, as I see people struggling some days and I choose to stay here and try to be a part of the solution. Monday I walked to Community College to help underdog entrepreneurs. Today I walked out my front door to help someone.

    I married the right chick

    And as my wife started backing out of the driveway to take the kids to school, she came back in the house. She said, I’m going to get him something. I told her I was already on it, she pointed me to where the disposable mugs were and I poured the coffee out of my mug and into the cardboard cup, put on my jacket and sat it next to him. I could see him moving, but he never responded when I said, repeatedly…there’s hot coffee by your feet. I walked back inside and looked out.

    Waking up this guys struggles were apparent, He definitely has mental health problems he is also definitely is somebody’s son or uncle or father or husband.

    We “optimize” for kindness in this house. Every day I ask my kids this simple question “what did you do kind today” or my back up “did you see kindness today” got to see their mother and father help an unknown man or woman underneath the blankets. They will either answer that question today with a way they were kind to someone, or I gave them something to say back…we saw you and mama help someone on the streets.

    It was a silent agreement of shared values, we extend a hand in this family.

    I get to confront my beliefs daily

    It’s easy to talk about homelessness, but living in the city, you live close to people, very close, to all kinds of people. And some of those people need help. It’s a daily confrontation with a choice: the comfort of routine, or buying into the “danger” the news would like us to believe or lean into the discomfort of engagement. Am I going to step over this person and get my day started, or am I going to brew them a cup of coffee & sit it next to them?

    This moment wasn’t just about a cup of coffee. It was a reminder of why I cherish city life, for all of its bumps and bruises. It’s a life filled with moments that challenge us to act, to reflect on our humanity and our connection to others. Some days, it’s just helping somebody with their bags… Sometimes it’s just saying hello… And some days, you look at a blue blanket moving up and down, and you know that it doesn’t take much to put a cup of coffee out next to somebody and say to them, here’s a cup of coffee.

    While I gotcha here…there’s another story I’ve been meaning to tell…

    The plug

    The first 3 weeks of moving into my new home, I saw on the security camera some homeless person was on my front steps. Charging their phone. Grrrrrr, I just moved into this home after dreaming of it for 7 years and now I got someone leaving their stuff on my front step! I was hot also, my kids and wife are inside.

    I had a choice to make do I get a plug with a lock on the front, have it removed, turn off the breaker? After all, I don’t want people stopping by every day charging their phones. It seemed like a normal, natural decision. But then I thought of my experiences hearing from homeless youth over the years, that phone is sometimes their only lifeline.

    This month I “celebrate” 2 years in my house, people have charged on my stoop, some have even damaged the plug, meaning I have already had to pay someone to come out. Not to lock it up, or brick it over, but to fix it. So it works for the next person who comes along. Come to think of it. I have never used that plug on the front of my house, but I have seen 6–10 people who have.

    If that is my small contribution that once every 18–24 months I gotta repair it, I’m ok with that.

    I challenge default states…default is lock it or brick it over for “safety”, what default state are you in that you aren’t questioning?

  • Delete my Instagram account or delete each of 3600+ Instagram photos one at a time, over 8+ hours?

    TLDR — There’s power in knowing when you are bullshitting yourself. The only way to get better at that is to occasionally take a step back and look at what put out in the world. When is the last time you asked yourself:

    “Why did I post that happy anniversary shout out to my wife Facebook when I could have just told her?” or “why do I take more pics when I am at expensive restaurants but none at the local diner?”

    This is the book (Mistakes were made but not by me) that started this entire journey of deep critical self reflection. It was the first book I read that didn’t affirm that I was doing things right / thinking right, instead it made me say…wait if all these people can BS themselves and it’s clear as day to me in this book, where am I BS’ing myself? It’s funny how the story of doctors fighting hand washing in the 1850’s kicked this whole thing off.

    If you want to improve the mental health of your friends, consider posting how awesome your life is a whole lot less on social media. We’re all part of the comparison culture problem, and we can do something about it.

    I decided to try to dig deep and look at my own behaviors on how often I pick up my phone, checking, getting dialed in to the urge to check even when I knew I wanted to check less.

    I could have zapped the entire account in 3 or 4 clicks but instead I deleted each photo which takes 3 taps per photo. I wanted to evaluate each of my own photos and words, critically, with a cynical eye. Looking at each photo I put out there from a “what were you trying to communicate?” lens.

    I was looking for “look how great my life is" style posts, humblebrags, anything that could incite comparison, jealousy, etc – things that are not consistent with who I want to be, did I post a lot of pics of my cars when I bought them, or other flashy things, Rolexes, my 2 pack abs, expensive shoes, that pic that made me look better than I actually do, first class seats, Michelin star rated chefs, I evaluated every photo wondering … why…with a super critical eye.

    Was I ever using brands as a proxy for how “successful” I am, Or was I just trying to share my life with my friends?

    I wanna share life with my friends, who want to see me happy, right? For me that was BS!

    Maybe 2% of my followers on instagram are people I actually have called or emailed in the last year. I’m also not an artist where I wanted to share my work with the world.

    98% of my followers were not friends, but with each accepted friend request, I can get more likes on my photos — and was more likes (even if anonymous) just another way to feel better about myself? (For the record, I LOVE photography and have been into it for over 20 years, but still if I am being honest with myself).

    So why do I care about amassing likes from people I don’t know? Could it be to incite jealousy? Hmmmm.

    But I cared about how many likes something got. I wouldn’t say that, but I recognized how much more frequently I would login after I posted a photo. If I didn’t post a photo for 3 months, few logins. If I posted a photo 3 hours ago, refresh, refresh, refresh.

    The most cringeworthy post of 7+ years

    Luckily after going through 3600 photos, one by freaking one, over 8.5 hours I found only 1 that felt like, really dude, that was some whack shit to say. The photo was fine, the caption was cringeworthy.

    A hotel I was staying at had a heliport and I snapped a picture of the hotel grounds on the Bosporus in Istanbul (the shots were beautiful)

    But my caption said “This place has a heliport to bring you from the airport and the executive suite was 15k a night (I stayed in the most basic one)!!”

    Why the heck would I take a beautiful pic like this and caption it with that? The cost and heliport had nothing to do with the picture. So why add that as the caption?

    For the record this our moderately priced room where we stayed

    Luckily that was 7 years ago and it was the only 1 that I felt really shitty about posting.

    Most of my photos were beer, cityscapes, kids, and things I saw beauty in! No selfies in front of everything thank GOD.

    Why were airports my #2 most posted type?

    Airports are NOT beautiful. Especially the Philadelphia International Airport. So why did I take hundreds of photos from there?

    I took a lot of photos at airports and outside plane windows. I took a cynical view and wondered if I was trying to say “check me out, on the go, I’m successful” and I sat with that.

    Given I used to be afraid to fly, I can’t help but think a part of me with each photo was saying “hey kid, you are getting over your big fear”. I took so many photos from the Philadelphia Airport, so when I did that deep self evaluation I was thinking…it’s not impressive to be in your hometown airport hundreds of times, yet I had hundreds of pics. Maybe I am self justifying, maybe I’m not but I tried to consider all angles.

    Like most folks I took a lot of pics traveling, it just happens that I travel a LOT for work and I love taking pics of architecture / beautiful things, so I’mma give myself a pass on that. But travel seems like something everyone in my social circle does so me going to Ireland isn’t a humblebrag — esp when my photos are of the airport, or is that BS? 🙂

    Well I won’t be updating my Instagram account or logging in so what’s done is done, but at least I used the process to dig in on myself a little bit.

  • Bridge Run

    Bridge Run

  • 5 years ago I got weird response to an offer & learned a sad truth about interviewing while…

    I had been trying to recruit Lisa for 5 years and the timing never worked out.

    She’d bring her team to the “search church” for our community events to network and learn year in and year out.

    Ahhh the search church events, Lisa and her team are somewhere in this photo.

    When she couldn’t get budget to educate her people, she found our events and would bring them there! I liked that kind of leadership. But in all my attempts I wasn’t able to have her join us.

    One day I got a call … that she might be interested in interviewing at Seer. I was stoked. I had an open role, she would be great for it! But she said she wanted to see if I could hire her for a job to start in about 7 months.

    7 months? Why would you be asking me for a job now, that I have an opening for now, that you couldn’t start for 7 months?

    And that’s when I learned one of the biggest areas of naivete that I’ve ever had in my career.

    She said two words. “I’m. Pregnant.”

    I was confused, what does you being 4 months pregnant have to do with you not taking a job with us now?

    Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash

    She was confused. She said “I’m showing” — She assumed that no one would hire someone who needed to go out on leave for 3 months after only being in the company for 3 months. She wanted to take paid leave and assumed a company she just got hired at wouldn’t also give her paid leave because FMLA requires you to have been at a company for 12 months before you qualify. But we don’t follow rules here at Seer, so it was a no brainer.

    I was confused, what does you being pregnant and showing prevent you from doing the job as we’ve outlined it in the job description?

    And that is when it hit me. I was due for an education.

    Her assumption was that many companies will interview you but they don’t hire you when you are obviously pregnant, she assumed that would be the case here and that was why she wanted to start working here after her pregnancy.

    I was still confused. If you are the best applicant now, that I can get now, and I have a need now, then what’s the big deal about you coming to work with us for 3 months taking 3 months off and then coming back and working with us after that?

    She was now super confused. Was I saying that I wanted to hire her anyway knowing that she would be gone for 3 months after only being here for 3?

    100 effing percent!

    What I learned

    Two things that were insanely eye-opening for me in this exchange

    1 — It never occurred to me that anyone would ever not hire a woman who was able to help them right now for the next three or four or five months and then take some time off and come back. We’re in the talent business, I can deal with someone being out for 3 months. I know there are some “risks” here but sometimes you gotta decide the company you want to be and what you want to put out in the world.

    2 —Lisa was working at a Fortune 100 company, she had been there for four to five years and yet only being in our company for 3 months our maternity benefits (specifically the pay and some of the other support) was significantly better than her Fortune 100 companies benefits policy. She worked on an international team so it was especially difficult to see her colleagues in other countries getting very different amounts of support from the company.

    That second point also shocked me, how could it be that someone who’s been a high performer in your organization for four or five years gets pregnant wants to start a family and gets worse benefits than a company for whom she’s never proven a thing?

    How’d it work out?

    Great. Lisa now leads our fastest growing division, she has helped take it from a volunteer project to 3 million division in the matter of two and a half years.

    So for me, betting on talented people is always a GREAT bet, and if companies keep overlooking talented women because they are getting ready to start a family then they just might be losing out on someone about to do amazing things in their company.

    I hope more remote hiring makes it harder to “see someone is pregnant” but I wish it wasn’t an issue either way.

    One important thing here is she took a pay cut to come to our company, she believed in her ability to show value, she believed in what we were trying to do. She valued some things, at this time, more than maximizing the numbers in that check. The role energized her, the way the company operated energized her, and oftentimes those things come at a cost.

    In her words “I needed a job that energizes me or I would never have been able to justify being away from my baby and putting them in day care for something I hated.”

    Now she’s in our she took a bet on us, and I guess I took a bet on her, either way its working out!

    This, my friends, is why understanding different perspectives is so important. It never registered to me that a company wouldn’t hire a woman because she might be going out in 3 months or so for a job now.

    For those of us running companies, this story is also a reminder that people show up like “Yeah Right, your company is different, sure.” So don’t always expect people to just “trust you” — people are dealing with baggage that sometimes has nothing to do with you — but it effects their expectations on the way in.

  • Stop apologizing for someone in your zoom background

    Why I don’t use blurry backgrounds for Zoom

    Yesterday I has a team show and tell on some new power bi data I was visualizing and I saw someone had a TON of hiking gear in their background and when I said “woah you are a hiker” their response was “yeah I probably need a better background.” To which I was like NO WAY!!! Bring your whole self, I HATE those fake backgrounds…cause I don’t get to learn anything about you, I don’t get even a glimpse into your life, which when hiring 40–50 people during a pandemic — I’m trying to get any clues I can to help make connections and know the people I work with. I asked about the climbing because I wanted to introduce him to 2 people who are big climbers at Seer and one of our alumni. But to him it was like “oh snap the CEO might be judging me b/c of my background.” That is important to recognize managers, I thought I was being good and a connector and it could be perceived as the opposite.

    Obviously some people don’t want you to see their stuff / where they live and you gotta respect that, so blur away, but anything that makes me more human to my team (the clues around me) I would love to show.

    Basecamp Debate: Bring your whole self or leave that junk at home?

    With all that basecamp jazz going on (looks like they are doubling down) — I actually want to get to know my team better and for them to bring a bit more of themselves. Some people are into sports and beer that’s OK to chat about, but a black man losing his life and how we can be a part of the solution is not? Nah I’m not feeling that. How we support all kinds of perspectives

    Recent Interview — tight quarters, ZERO apologies = LOVE that!

    I love it when I am interviewing someone and they have someone (cat, kid, sig other) walking around in the background and DO NOT apologize for it or even flinch at it happening.

    We’re all doing the best we can with the tools we got in this pandemic.

    Set expectations is fine “hey things are a bit crazy here today”, ok that is cool.

    But “I’m sorry” is NOT fine.

    Confidence in your value to an organization sounds like this:
    “If a manager doesn’t understand that we’re all doing the best we can with what we got and I feel the need to apologize, then why would I want to work w/ them anyway?”

    Lack of confidence is “I hope this doesn’t make me look bad”.

    I need that confidence in board rooms, meetings, etc to help my clients win and succeed.

    I know its a habit for many of us, just keep working at getting better at it, you never know how it is interpreted.

    A Caveat

    With that said, I’ve interviewed people who wear backwards baseball hats and people who wear suits, typically I don’t apply the confidence rule for those kinds of things…why? B/c I don’t want people making assumptions about my clients, and if this is your best foot forward, well making assumptions is how I always get in trouble. So if you come in with your hat backwards, you just gotta be THAT much more impressive than the average. 🙂

  • My Purpose.

    One of the things I’ve been saying to our team more and more lately is… I’m here 17 years later because its still fun.

    If you sit anywhere near me, watch me on YouTube, etc you just kinda feel that I’m not out of gas, yet. Someday maybe, but as of today eff that.

    One other part of why work is fun, is that I get to be a part of some awesome people’s lives. It gives me purpose, let me give you a few examples…

    Being a part of special moments

    Last year I got to lean into one of my dreams for Seer very aggressively — start using our profits to help people at Seer get more financial value from their time here … we had a really strong year so I changed some things:

    1 — I decided to triple our student loan fund, from 12k to 36k. I quite literally have had people come to me in tears talking about how impactful it was to pay off their student loans, others have told me how our big # was the spark they needed to get paying those loans down. That 24k for me is meaningful, but I know deploying it this way is so much more meaningful.

    2 — I set aside ~130k to pay for a vacation for everyone in the company, and we forced them to at least plan it before the end of the year.

    I recently got an email from someone who had just got engaged, it was a team member of ours, her email said, between you paying for our vacation and posting cheap deals on scott’s cheap flights, I used that $$ to go to Sydney and my boyfriend proposed to me here.

    This picture gives me purpose, it reminds me that when we grow this business we have a chance to have real impact on people and we can be a small part of aiding in memories that will last a lifetime.

    This is actually the second engagement that happened on my dime 🙂 The first one was somewhere in Italy, where another team member got engaged. Viva la Seer.

    We’ve had people take their moms / dads on trips to foreign countries they haven’t been to in a decade or more. I’ve heard stories of a parent’s dream to visit their birthplace or something and Seer funded part of those trips. Helping someone pay down student loans, or take a vacation, or just be more financially comfortable gives me purpose.

    Connections:

    There are 2 moments in my career (so far) where I felt I was able to get a person connected to someone/something they were super passionate about. If we didn’t build & growth this company they might not have had those connections.

    The first one is Emily Allen getting to meet Patty McCord (She wrote Powerful, co-authored the Netflix culture deck, you know who she is!). The fact that no matter where Emily goes after her time at Seer she will have someone like Patty on speed dial if she needed to run a real problem by her makes me kinda feel like “my work here is complete”. I would say hands down Patty McCord is probably the one person that people in People Ops business wish they could send a text to when struggling with a tough decision. The value of that connection is greater than almost anything I could provide for Emily. Also pictured, Rand Fishkin, Emily is sitting between two people who had the biggest business books of last year.

    Rand, Emily, Patty

    Kati Polaski (who taught me BI tools) has been a fan of a certain brand for a LOOOOOONG time. She’s visited this brand’s campus over and over again over the last 10 years. She even made a pitch to me on why she should come with me to a certain European country because representatives from that brand were going to be at a conference I was speaking at, and this would be her opportunity to meet them. So you better believe she came along.

    She had a whole gameplan on how she was going to hunt the people from that brand down and show them some of our work.

    Well we never got anything out of that trip, but once day one of our business development people said, I’m going to go get this project Wil, can you help me? Knowing this was a brand that Kati had been wanting to work with, and the fact that she’s taught me so much about data, I was ecstatic to do everything I could to get get a chance to work on that brand. I haven’t had anyone at Seer say they want to work with a brand and try that hard to make it happen ever, so when we got a chance to present our work to that client at their HQ, I could barely present w/ her b/c I was so giddy that she was there to work on a brand she dreamed of working with well before she was at Seer. There she was showing them the way we sliced through millions of keywords to find opportunities for them.

    Knowing that Seer opens doors for people, That’s my purpose.

    Gratitude:

    For my 17th year anniversary the team got me a gift. Many of them gathered their funds and helped a teacher at a local grade school get an air conditioner for her classroom. So kids would be comfortable (and hopefully more focused). This is what my team did for me, it’s hard for me NOT to want to work my ass off for people like this!

    The amount of thank you cards I get, the kind words from so many team members keeps me going.

    I probably average 1 a week from someone on my team thanking me for something I did to support them / help them / etc. It just feels great.

    The amount of people (esp you Jamie B, Adam M, Steph, Meghan) who know I’ll work all day at my desk, never getting up for lunch that stop and say “can I get you something” means so so much.

    Helping the world express a bit more gratitude. That’s my purpose.

    Impact:

    This last week we had Seerfest, our 2nd conference. I want more than anything for Seer to be a company with an active and real impact on our community. Our most recent event we had speakers who quite literally speak all over the globe. To bring that level of talent to Seer to speak to marketers for about 200 dollars (typically seeing all of us would be $1,000 — $1,200) makes some of the best speakers accessible to folks who may never have a chance to see them, meet them, etc. Check, we’re impacting our marketing community.

    There’s also our local community, Seerfest allowed us to bring and put on stage young tech entrepreneurs via our partnership with Hopeworks in Camden. The “kids” from Hopeworks also got to meet these amazing speakers and also share their stories on a panel with a room full of marketers, many of which could use interns from Hopeworks (we have hired a couple of interns, one of which is now working with us) so when we try to bridge the digital divide, this helps us attempt to have an impact on our local communities. We raised 30,000 for the organization!

    Lastly, to see someone like Kristin Bigness from Seer get a chance to show the world her talents, seriously checks a big impact box for me too. Using our platform as a company to help grow the careers of our team is just so fulfilling.

    The ultimate dream:

    Here it is….

    My dream is someday I’m sitting around at a BBQ and there’s maybe 20–30 former co-workers joking, working the grill, chasing after kids. Laughing.

    The stress is low. The stress is low in some small part b/c I didn’t exit when “I was good”, and hit “my number”. The dream is that it’s me and the families of 20-30 people I’ve worked with who all have worked their assess off to grow Seer, so they have phantom equity in Seer and I can look at each of them, and know that they too have lower stress because they picked me up and ran shit, they took problems they used to run up to me, and said, I’mma handle this….

    As people pull up to this barbeque,
    People’s cars are paid off (lowering stress)
    No one in this group has student loans anymore (lowering stress)
    A few people paid off their houses (lowering stress)
    A few have college tuition covered for their kids already (lowering stress)

    As you can get from the above what I’m trying to do is cap my upside, but KEEP GROWING THE COMPANY, so that the people who helped us to grow the most can get a bit of a life I’ve been living for the last few years, one with low financial stress.

    Whether this comes in the form of an exit with a big payout, or me turning our phantom equity in to LARGE regular bonuses, I don’t know. I’m still working on that. This year I intend to take an extra chunk of our profit and instead of keeping it, I feel I might get more value out of expressing gratitude.

    That is one of the things that has me so excited. This is the upside of running a long term profitable business. I have profits to actually dole out to the team, no one has to work for the hope someday of a big payout, maybe we just keep being profitable and redistributing the profits back to the team. Now to get to this vision Seer needs to execute well over the years, but this is my dream, and I hope that it comes true. Whenever I have my last breaths on this planet, I want to close my eyes knowing that I didn’t go apeshit on buying 4 houses for myself, and buying expensive cars (I might buy 1 or 2 nice things), it’ll be knowing that these people who’ve had my back are able to live a life with lower financial stress. Its knowing their kids are taken care of, that is what I hope happens.

    That is my purpose.

  • Death, Data, and Decisions…

    For 3 of the last 5 years, I’ve driven cross country 6 times to work from our west coast office. Why drive? Well my wife is extremely uncomfortable with putting the dog on a 5–6 hour flight. So our agreement is I drive the dog out there, no big deal, I have come to love the challenge of the drive and the open road and ability to listen to some great books / podcasts.

    Me and the dog on the way back

    Before leaving I mentioned to Nora, you know that by asking me to drive cross country with the dog I’m more likely to die than if we flew the dog. ← Don’t say this to your wife.

    I had my data:

    Dog likelihood of death: In 2016, in the US there were 26 deaths of animals in cargo. Or .5 deaths per 10,000 flights (source).

    My likelihood of death while driving: 11 in 100,000 people die in auto fatalities. (source)

    My likelihood of death while flying: LOW AF! I’m 100x more likely to die in a car crash than a plane crash. (source)

    These are facts. Now lets talk about the things I can’t prove with data

    If I’m driving with the dog, I bet the likelihood of the dog and I dying if I die in a crash are pretty high. The odds of me dying in a crash and the dog living are slim. So if I go, we’re probably BOTH going. Also outside of the data…

    I’m more valuable to my wife than the dog. 
    I bring in an income, the dog costs money.
    I can help take care of the kids, the dog growls at the kids.
    The kids might actually like to have their dad around in 5–10–15 years from now.
    I’m still in the prime of my life, the dog has 2 maaaaaybe 3 years left.

    She got a bit upset…

    I mentioned this to my wife and she got pretty upset. Was she upset at herself for making a decision on emotional stories she’s heard that have no rooting in statistical facts? Nope. She didn’t want to deal with thinking about the implications of her decision. (Of course we could have said, just stay in Philly and don’t go to SD to lower the odds), but taking that off the table.

    I recognize both odds are low, so I drove.

    Unfortunately I thought about this for a good 4–5 hours as I drove through new mexico in a blizzard…which My likelihood of death increased a good bit…

    A DANGEROUS lesson in optimization

    Google maps kept optimizing to get me to Tuscon, it never said the local government keeps shutting down roads due to the blizzard, so find a hotel, instead it gave me smaller and smaller roads to go on, more and more of them were over mountains, where I couldn’t see, and I saw no cars for miles, it was scary.

    This is effing New Mexico Ya’ll.

    When I do these drives I invite alumni and current peeps to call me just to talk, during this part of the drive I told both Kim Jones and James Corr that I’d call them back after the weather got bad, it took me HOURS to call them back as I had to use every ounce of mental energy to stay focused.

    My likelihood of death skyrocketed for that 4–5 hours, I saw cars spin out in front of me and crash (at 15–20 Mph), I couldn’t see, it was hard to drive, my wipers kept freezing, I had no mobile signal, and I didn't know where I was. I couldn’t see any houses, just mailboxes on the road.

    The only thing that kept me hopeful was seeing a car coming in the opposite direction every 15–20 minutes. So yeah I probably spiked likelihood of death for sure, as I had to get out of my car multiple times to see where the cliffs dropped off to make sure I wasn’t close to the edge. When I finally got to a place with a traffic light after 3 hours of slooooow driving, I slid through an intersection on ice, luckily the guy coming through saw me unable to completely stop, he saw my tires locking up, luckily I went through the intersection at only about 5 MPH, so I wouldn’t have been taken out, but man that one sucked.

    Luckily it all worked out.

    A BIG lesson about data & emotions, no one is immune

    My wife is a smart woman, 2 undergrad degrees, 2 masters, and a PhD with a background working in data. So I would have thought, making a case with data doesn’t work on the “average” person, but my God, my wife no way. She’s smart gets the data parts.

    Boy was I wrong, this goes to show the power of emotions, sensational headlines (“Dog dies in cargo hull”), and a whole lot of other things at play. My wife was saying in theory: if you want to eliminate the likelihood of death, don’t go to San Diego, but if you must you are driving with the dog because it makes me uncomfortable to fly the dog in cargo, even though that means you are more likely to die, which means I lose my partner, who is in the prime of his life, and adds more value to the family than the dog.

    As I embark on MORE DATA, I’ve seen this first hand. If my big data pull says we don’t need content, or we don’t need links to win, with data, statistics, etc, and someone at the table had pitched a big link building project or their title is link builder or copywriter, they are highly likely to refute data, with their gut. Why? Because it impacts their perceived self-value to the organization, if someone came in with a bunch of data that might even hint at invalidating how I see my value in the organization, its in my best interests to fight it.

    The true test of being data driven is when you value accurate data over data that validates what you want the data to say. That’s what I’m learning. Too often we go in with a desire for what the data is going to tell us, and if it doesn’t tell us that we’ll fight it tooth and nail. Look no further than the Semmelweis effect.

    Voting against your best interests

    This got me thinking, we make fun of people when they do X thing we don’t understand, vote against their best interests, etc, and educated people like us think things like “dumbasses voting against _______ , this is going to HELP you, why would you want to get rid of it?” yet “those people” are being just as irrational as we are with all of our smarts. I don’t mean to make this political, but I sit in a lot of conversations where people “just don’t understand” how people make their decisions.

    I know I used to say that a lot, now I’ll think twice about that, thanks hun.