Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:00:20 All right. Welcome to episode two 30 of rogue startups. Mr. Craig, how are you today? I'm good, man. I'm good. I got the, I got the kids in the background here, so I apologize for any kind of craziness or unprofessional podcasting that might come out of this episode, but that's life these days. Oh, I love it. I'm looking forward to some unprofessional in this here. We've been lacking professionality professionalism, professional ness. There we go. Yep. Whatever we've been lacking that for years. So, you know, I think it's totally on brand. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but no things are, things are good, man. We, uh, we talked in the last episode about the kind of developer hiring screening recruitment process, and we wrapped that up on Friday. So we have a new developer that will be joining the team middle of October based in the U S, which was surprising and not, not our intention, but, um, yeah, very, very excited to have him on board and actually, you know, kind of looking back at the, the process and everything.
Speaker 1 00:01:18 I think, I think it went pretty well. I think, I think it was a little long, it was more than a month, which for a small company like us, I think it kinda didn't need to be, but we tried to make a bit of process to it. So I think that made it a little long, but, but overall, yeah, happy about it and excited to have someone else joining the team. Very nice. Very nice. And, uh, that basically expands your time zone footprint too, does it not? Yeah. I mean a big part of that was having someone in kind of us time zones too, to help with support and kind of more urgent things that customers need same day. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think when you, when you do it right, having a distributed team like we do, we're kind of co located where three of us are over here, the existing two developers and myself are over in these times zones and then everyone else actually is in the Northeast of the U S um, to, to where we essentially can have like a, you know, 15 hour Workday for our customers.
Speaker 1 00:02:12 Uh, I think when you, when you do it like that, and you're able to hand things off, it can be a real asset to, especially the customer facing stuff, uh, within a company. And so a big part of hiring Alec was the fact that he was there. He's also the best candidate for the job. Um, so yeah, it's good. Yeah. If you've got a small enough team that handoff can really work, cause we've done that with recapture quite a bit. There were times that I, you know, basically handed off to Mike who is in Spain and I said, you know, I need you to handle support during this window right here. And he'll take care of that. And then if there's something that comes up later in the day, I can jump on it. Um, and then, you know, I've got Omar who works sort of these weird bookend hours on either side, uh, which basically is like a flipped upside down schedule from where he's at Egypt. And
Speaker 2 00:03:00 So he's available to like do stuff on either side of that, which is really cool also, you know, how does that poor man never sleep? I have no idea. So that's, that's up to him to manage. I'm not pushing him to do that. That's that's his choice. There you go. There you go. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1 00:03:17 So, yeah, so that's, that's kind of the big, big news from us. Um, how about you? How are things?
Speaker 2 00:03:23 Things are good. We are doing some prep for black Friday. I just sent out the usual sequence of, you know, here's how you get ready for your unprecedented pandemic, black Friday emails this year. And we're also doing some channel, uh, I guess we'll call it channel massaging. So we just got an opportunity recently where, uh, one of our competitors got acquired by a major hosting company and that turned around and nullified their agreement with another hosting company. So I'm now in the process of becoming like their preferred vendor. And so I'm working out with, you know, their marketing team and trying to figure out messaging and what we want to, you know, emails we want to send out and stuff. We want to put it on the dashboard and things like that. So that's really exciting. That's super cool. It never happens fast enough. And of course, you know, the timing is always sorta like, Oh, Holy crap.
Speaker 2 00:04:18 This is like, you know, less than 90 days before black Friday. Oh my God. Right. But still just getting in there and having that opportunity is great. You know, I mean, this has taken a very long time, probably over a year of cultivating this relationship to finally get this to pop. But when it popped, it popped big, like, you know, it was me sending followup reminders every three weeks or a month saying, Hey, is that, you know, where are we at with this? Can we move forward? Are you guys ready to do this now? And you know, sometimes it was no response. Sometimes it was, Hey, check back in X weeks or whatever. And so just again and again, and again, if you know, the, you know, follow up until they say yes or fuck off, not just going to quote Steli again right there, because that followup for almost a year got me a major partnership deal where I'm going to be in a very prominent position and in a place where my plugin will be a preferred vendor for WooCommerce. So, you know, it took a long time, but we got it. So that's, that's super awesome news. Now there's more work to do of course. But
Speaker 1 00:05:25 Yeah, those integrations are crazy, man. And we're doing a big one right now that I can't talk about until it's live. But yeah. I mean, it's, it's yeah. Months of active work on our end, both marketing and coordination and messaging and product and all this stuff. And, and we're also running into the same thing that it's a few weeks away at this point in their like either it's going to be out by the middle of October or we're going to wait until January and I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. That's, that's a whole quarter, you know, of, of work time that that's just off the books. Like, I don't know how Christmas turned into basically the whole fourth quarter, but understandably for a lot of people, it has, I mean, black Friday and cyber Monday, and that whole month consumes a lot of people and leading up to it. They have a lot of shit they have to get ready. So it's, yeah, it's really a thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:13 And in fact, uh, I was just going over this with, uh, the team here the other day, since Mike's been around for a few black Fridays, and this is Omar's first black Friday, we were kind of walking over like what the expectations are and what the lockdown means and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And basically like we're going to have two months of just quiet feature development, unless, you know, shit hits the fan, but historically shit has not hit the fan because we've been very prepared for it. So, you know, we should be thinking about something that we want to do. That's kind of big, whether that's addressed some technical debt, which we did last year or add in some big features, which we did the previous two years or, you know, something in between. I don't know. But yeah, so we were kind of looking ahead thinking, all right, what happens between November 1st and January 1st here because of the, you know, aside from just random production issues, there's going to be a lot of heads down time for work on that. So
Speaker 1 00:07:09 It is kind of nice to have that expectation and know ahead of time that that's what it is. And yeah, you can make those like development cycle choices intentionally, you know, knowing what's ahead. Whereas you normally would try to push something and get a feature out and all this kind of stuff. It, it relieves that pressure a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:07:25 Yeah. And our feature development this summer has been interrupted by weird things where we had to deal with infrastructure issues and revamped some stuff that we weren't really thinking we were going to need to do, or was not that urgent to deal with, but it turned out we absolutely had to drop everything and work on that. So it was like in the middle of the SMS marketing thing. Okay. Now we're going to retool all the server stuff here. I'm glad we did. It made a huge difference, but nonetheless, you know, just, it's never the way you entered.
Speaker 1 00:07:54 Yup. Yup, absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. So what are we talking about today? Well,
Speaker 2 00:07:58 So this is kind of like a pre discussion. I I've got, I got this bug in my ear after talking with the guys in the big snow mastermind group about the entrepreneur operating system or EOS, and one of the guys is super into it and really totally swears by it up and down. And he's been mentioning this for many months at this point. I'm trying to think when it was first, it's probably been almost a year since I first started hearing him talk about it. He definitely talked about it a lot at, in February and I was kinda like, Oh listen, an interesting, yeah, maybe I'll do something like that. But it finally just clicked in this last week where I was like, I feel like I don't have the handle on things in recapture that I need to have the handle on. And I think it's hurting me at this point because I'm just sort of doing things ad hoc.
Speaker 2 00:08:57 I'm using my gut and I'm, I'm not, I'm very much a data driven guy in general, but when it comes to stuff and recapture, my data has been more sporadic and less methodical and I want to improve that. So when he started talking about, Oh yeah, I'm using the, the VTO organizer. I'm like, what? What's that? And he's like, Oh, that's part of EOS. I'm like, really? Yeah. So he gave me some keyword to Google and I'm like, Oh, okay. So I pulled it up and I was like, Oh, so this basically is just adding a lot of systems around things that I was just sort of pulling out of my ass whenever I felt like I needed to decision. And you know, so we can actually put this in our show notes here to show you where I got this, but it's all very high level at this point.
Speaker 2 00:09:49 And I just ordered the books. So if you're hoping for a discussion on EOS and VTO today and in depth, I'm afraid you're going to be a little bit disappointed on that. Cause Craig is the only one of the two of us here that knows anything about it yet, but there were definitely some things that really attracted me to it here. And I'm interested to hear Craig what your experience has been and what you've gotten out of it and what brought you to it. And then we can talk about what brought me to it here too.
Speaker 1 00:10:19 Yeah. So, so, so it was really interesting. I had a pretty long conversation with like a handful of founders at, uh, MicroComp Europe in October. Uh, one of them was Kevin McArdle from sure. Swift capital and then Kevin and I had a podcast episode about EOS here. Golly, I don't know. It was a couple of months after that. So around the end of the year, maybe, but though the one thing that I will say that a couple of things, I'll say one you're absolutely right. Systematizes. And for me kind of sets expectations both for myself and for the people on the team about how we work. And I was surprised that people like structure because I very much dolt to my detriment. I know it's, it's a big weakness I have, but come to find out everyone else likes it. And so like one thing that I think we found is as we've implemented EOS or parts of EOS and things that make sense for us in the kind of organization we are, and we can talk more about that, that, that people have really liked to and have asked for more so, so that was like really surprising the place.
Speaker 1 00:11:25 And like I had a short conversation in the MicroComp Slack channel about this, the place where I have a little problem really implementing EOS is the fact that, and I know like my team listens to this podcast, but, but it's that like, I'm the only stakeholder in the company. I'm the only person in say senior leadership. And we have a lot of people that are super responsible. Everyone on the team is super responsible, but even the most senior people who've been here, the longest that I think take ownership of the entire kind of part of the business, they take ownership of don't in the same way that like Kevin's team does where he has managers of operations and like directors, even of operations and there's managers under them. And so I think that's really where EOS comes in is where you have like the, the quarterly rocks and like that's all you're working on.
Speaker 1 00:12:21 And every Monday meeting for us, every weekly meeting is talking about how you're doing compared to those, those rocks. Like, I, we kind of don't do that and I don't think I'm spoiling this too much, but, but we kind of don't do that because I think it's unfair to ask, say like non-equity people on the team to care that much, you know, to, to take that amount of ownership. Oh, I'm going to disagree with you on that one, but go ahead. Keep going. Yeah. And so B, because it's not just like, Hey, are we, you know, showing up and working and doing the best we can. That's like obvious, I think in everyone expects everyone to do that. But for me, if you really are doing EOS that I think it takes that level of ownership to another level and one that for us, at least, and we're not a big team there, there are people on our team that don't want to, and this is maybe my, my assumption that don't want to have that level of ownership.
Speaker 1 00:13:23 They kind of want a job. Then maybe they want a job that they're really invested in because we're a small team and they get that. But, but, but maybe not to the level that like a 20 or a hundred person company would be able to, because they're kind of abstracted above the level of doing the work to the level of like, kind of managing the outcome. I don't know. And I, and when I've talked to other people that run, you know, three or five person companies, they kind of say the same thing that like in these meetings, it's just a lot of you talking to everybody else saying yes. Um, and again, it's probably my shortcoming and how we're doing it, but, but that's the only place that I see, like, like in the, in the conversation with Kevin, I know I said, like, we do the diet Coke of EOS because like, I think we take a lot of the principles of it, but, but not like by the letter,
Speaker 2 00:14:10 You know, I, I, based on what I'm seeing on EOS, it does look like it's oriented towards a larger organizations, like more than 10 people. But I disagree with you in that you are dealing with team members that are less invested than you are. Yes, that's true. But only to a point and I'll give you two counter examples. So with the plugins on my original developer hires, I would say very much that my team was really centered around Dan Pink's three principles from his book drive autonomy, mastery, and purpose. So, you know, they got their full autonomy, which was super important to them. They were able to master the art of developing and WordPress and they had purpose because they were building something that customers wanted. And that's what they craved. That's what made them show up every day. When, you know, when we had blowouts about something where I got pissed, that they, something went wrong with a customer and, you know, I unreasonably reacted and I would come down on them.
Speaker 2 00:15:19 And this didn't happen very often, but what it did, I got pushback from him. And it always surprised me because it seemed like they were more passive than I was giving them credit for. It turned out that they were just doing their thing. They were deeply invested in the customer and they were offended that I got upset with them about this customer thing instead of coming to them and saying, let's work this out as equal. So that the reason that they wanted that equals thing is because they were as invested in this as I am. So when you say that your team just wants a job and is not as invested, I challenged that notion based on what I've seen with my small teams in the past. And I would say that's still true of the recapture guys. Although I learned my lesson from the plugin guys and I don't, I don't do that anymore.
Speaker 2 00:16:06 When I have those reactions and those emotions about something, I'll say, okay, here's what happened. Here's what I think went wrong. Can you guys help me unpack this? Like, you know, I give them an opportunity to contribute in there and, and understand what happened, uh, and get past the crisis aspect of that. And then we try to figure out a way to fix it and make it better for the future and so on and so forth. So, you know, both of my guys are very invested in recapture. So here's a great example today. You know, I told them, I said, Hey, you know, we're, um, we lost some big customers back in, in the summer. Um, and it looks like some recovery metrics are down for the past couple of months because of it. And one of them came back and said, Oh man, what, what happened?
Speaker 2 00:16:51 I mean, I, I hate losing customers. Did they go to competitors? Was it something that we were missing is that, you know, how, how can I help you fix this, like that investment? Like he would not have an opening that dialogue with me if he wasn't invested in that. So I would say your team is probably invested at that level. Now they going to be making senior level decisions about strategic things in the organizations. No, they're not. And from what I'm seeing in EOS, there's a lot of that in there, but I also see that there's stuff that would help me focus better with my team. So here, this gets to the reason that I wanted to get into EOS. So you mentioned the rocks, right? So for those that don't know, and I'm just literally reading a statement off of a website here, I don't have a deep understanding of this yet, but I pretty much get the gist of what's going to this something rocks when everything is important, nothing is important organizations don't execute well when they don't prioritize well.
Speaker 2 00:17:55 And this is something we are absolutely struggling with. So it's very much what are the customers yelling about today? Oh, maybe we should fix that right away. So, you know, I try to balance those two or what I think is balancing those two to say, here's what my big goal is. And then here's the, what the customers are yelling about this week. So work on the big goal, but if the customers are yelling, stop, work on their stuff and then go back to the big goal. So the rocks process and EOS says, you're setting goals that have to get done every 90 days. And you only have three to seven of them, the most important priorities and they have to get done. And then you use those as a scorecard to find out how people are doing. Are people executing to this? Where are the struggles happening?
Speaker 2 00:18:42 You know, I don't think you have to do everything in EOS to make it successful here. It looks like, you know, there's probably like three or four things that I could adopt. That would be pretty strong improvements to where I'm at now. But some of the stuff, you know, the meeting pulse where you're, you're doing all of these meetings for a certain period of time and you have accountability charts. And I, you know, I don't know that that's necessarily going to work in a team of three. I think it's kind of overkill and process overkill sucks. So I definitely don't want to go in that direction, but those were the things that sorta made me go, huh? If I had a system for that and something that I could say, all right, am I causing chaos with the team when I switched to this? Because I think it's important or is it really part of the Rock's model to do that? What's, what's been your experience with rocks so far.
Speaker 1 00:19:36 Yeah. So I think that there's a couple of things to, to what you said for me. Um, we're a young company and one of our advantages is being able to be nimble. And so I think being super rigid about 90 day goals and sticking with them come hell or high water is, uh, is really hard for a company, our size. Uh, so your base camp. Yeah, no problem. They're planning a year out probably. Right. And that's cool for us. We, we loosely set 90 day goals. Um, and then kind of like with our development priorities and goals, they can change. Um, so we definitely have those goals, but know that they're kind of written in pencil, not ink the other. We definitely do the level 10 meetings. So we have a Monday 9:00 AM, Eastern three o'clock here meeting that's, you know, kind of all hands.
Speaker 1 00:20:24 And everybody talks about what they did in the last week as it pertains to those goals. And so we do a version of, of kind of that whole process. And I think just kind of going back to the kind of ownership thing, thing that we were talking about, and I don't want to make it sound like, I think people on our team just want a job because they definitely don't like, there are definitely people, you know, over here working until nine or 10 o'clock at night, like I am sometimes. And so that's not a regular employee. We don't have any of those people on our team. We have people who I think cared very, very deeply about not just what they do, but the outcome for the company. But I think that as you were kind of talking through that, something that came to my mind is that I think us as founders and companies, this size work at several levels of management, um, so one is like payroll and how much money is in the bank and all this like CEO level stuff. The other is like project manager kind of thing for like product or marketing or sales or whatever. And then the other is like team lead in a lot of respects. And then in some respects, like you're the only sales person, are you the only marketing person? So you're like three or four of these levels of people all in one per all-in-one body
Speaker 2 00:21:41 Or customer support person. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:21:44 Yeah. I mean, we're fortunate to, we have people on our team responsible for each of these areas, but I also am somebody that does a lot of the work in each of those. So like when we have updates to give on sales, mostly it's me, you know, Matt now give some updates cause he's doing some sales, but it's really my sales process. He helps with sales and is more and more kind of taking ownership of that. But like, and I think, you know, you're a team of like you and developers basically, you know, if you're going to have this meeting, you're just gonna be doing a lot of talking to where like having this meeting, isn't super productive, I think in some ways, because when you're talking to yourself, but, but I think that like for your developers to hear like how you're reporting about your marketing efforts and your paid spend and stuff like that is interesting.
Speaker 1 00:22:31 And I think one of the things that's been really good for us is we've seen this cross pollination of knowledge throughout the company where like the developers here, you know, Denise talk about marketing attribution and they're like, what the hell is she talking about? I don't understand anything and vice versa, but we definitely take the time to speak openly in front of the whole company on these calls so that everybody knows a little bit of what everyone is doing and kind of facing. So, yeah, but I think that the, for the most part, it's the ideas, you know, it's the idea of like, why don't we have a weekly meeting to talk about what we're doing and how it's, you know, really, I mean, how it's impacting our ability to perform, whether that's towards a quarterly rock or a objective that you said, we need to do this integration in the next three weeks. That that's what that meeting is about. No matter kind of how you frame it.
Speaker 2 00:23:24 Yeah. Yeah. And you know, some other things about EOS that I'm very interested in learning more about are like the scorecard aspect, because we always had this uneasy feeling about how our org is actually performing and having a formal scorecard gives us some KPIs. And we've talked about things like KPIs, but you know, how many people actually write them down and check them on a weekly basis and then talk to the team about them. You know, that's, that's more formalized, right. As opposed to just you, the CEO sitting there looking at these things going, Oh yeah. You know, that's up. Oh, that's down. Cause I think that's more of what's been happening with me and that's not good. So I definitely want to make sure that that is something that I'm looking at better. And you know, there's a lot of stuff in here that looks like it probably won't apply to me like the delegate and elevate or the, uh, where was the administrative one?
Speaker 2 00:24:17 There was an administrative one. Oh, the assistants track where you're doing all these administrative tasks. I mean, I don't see that I'm going to not do those administrative tasks. We're a team of three. I'm not going to hire somebody else to do that for thing there, our cashflow is very precious. So, you know, we need to be prioritizing. And if I can use that money to deal with developers or deal with the marketing budget and paid acquisition or other things like that, that's more important. So I can handle that. That's not a problem. So I don't think everything is going to apply, but I am interested in digging in and learning more to see what will be, make us more effective in recapture, because I feel like it's been a whole lot of winging it and gut feel and hoping for the best and not enough structure formality. And it seems like that structure and formality is working better for other people that are at higher levels of MRR. So
Speaker 1 00:25:13 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's a natural evolution. You know, this feeling that you're feeling is it from me, depending on how much like process and organization a person wants or needs is like a natural thing for people to say at some point, like I'm out of control. Like I don't know what the hell is going on. I need to get a better feel for things. And I mean, that's definitely what I went through talking to the folks at MicroComp, that's what they all went through. And, and yeah. I mean, I think what, so EOS might not be perfect. Right. But it's better than creating all of this shit from scratch. And so kind of pick and choose and be, you know, like pick and choose what works best for you, I guess.
Speaker 2 00:25:50 Right, right. You're going to a buffet. You don't want three items on the buffet and you really want it six. If you want it the other way around, you want six and you're only interested in three. That's fine. That take, take the three that matter. And you know, you can leave the gross shrimp cocktail there and move on. Right?
Speaker 1 00:26:06 Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to hear a, after you read the book or books, you're going to get an EOS and get a grip. Is that right?
Speaker 2 00:26:16 Yeah. Yeah. Both of them are on order. They should be here this week. Actually I went old school on this one, you know, I could have gotten the Kindle and I could have been started reading it right away, but I'm trying very hard to have like device free time in the evenings because you know, I'm sitting in front of my monitor eight to 10 hours a day and I don't want to, you know, change rooms and then switch devices and have more device time. Like I want some normal book time, which I think is healthy for me. It's, you know, I'm not a Luddite and I would certainly embrace it Kindle. I have a Kindle just don't want to do that. That's all. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I mean, I have a, I have a handful of those kind of business books and this is one of them. I actually bought it on Kindle first. Read it. No, I bought it on audible first. Then I bought it on Kindle and then I bought a paperback. So they got me, they got me three times, man. Geno's cashing in on you. He's like, man, what else can we sell him? Can we, you know, maybe get him to buy a video course.
Speaker 2 00:27:23 There is this whole like community around it and software actually, one of the MicroComp folks has this. Um, I think it's ninety.io. I'll have to look it up. We'll have to look it up for the show notes. Uh, it's a whole like organizer for how to run the whole, you know, EOS process. So I think once you, once you get to 20 people or something, man, that's, that's where you'll be. Yeah. It feels like something you can grow into very much, uh, as opposed to something you will grow out of quickly. Yep. Cause there's definitely a lot of stuff like, okay, you know, you're getting more employees now you can do the one page performance review and you know, you have more administrative stuff to deal with or you add on sales, there's a whole, there's something called the sales department checkup. Great. You can add that in there.
Speaker 2 00:28:07 You know, you have more administrative stuff going on, you can use the assistance track and the delegate and elevate and, but you know, they don't apply if you're really small. So like that, that part, I like that part. I like a lot. Yeah. Yup. Yup. Cool man. Well let me know how it goes. So hopefully, you know, we'll give you a couple of weeks to finish those up and chat through. Yeah. I think it'd be interesting to hear how you're planning on implementing. We can kind of compare notes there with, you know, what you're choosing to implement and what we're doing and kind of talk through some of those, those differences. That'd be cool. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Awesome. And if you have any experience with EOS or tips or tricks you want to offer us or questions that you have about it that you'd like us to dig into in a future episode, shoot us an email podcast@roguestartups.com and as always our one ask is if you feel like this has been valuable, please share our podcast with someone you think would benefit from it until next week.
Speaker 0 00:29:02 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
