← Mondays with Matt
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- [00:02]
Chris Reynolds
You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear.
- [00:09]
Matt Reynolds
I'm Matt Reynolds.
- [00:10]
Chris Reynolds
And I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:12]
Matt Reynolds
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening to another episode of the Build you'd business podcast where your co hosts, Matt and Chris Reynolds. I'm Matt, he's Chris. What's up, man? How are you doing?
- [00:36]
Chris Reynolds
Hey, doing good.
- [00:37]
Matt Reynolds
We take our listeners from fear to freedom. Last week was a tough week. We talked about being overworked and isolated, but I thought it would be good to talk about one of the things that I think makes founders so great. Great founders. Great, great founders. Greater. And that is taking the time, blocking off the time to just think. Because when we are in overworked mode and we are constantly head down, fingers on the keyboard, we are solving problems still. But it's in the trenches. And I have found over my nearly 20 years of business ownership. You have more than 20 years of business ownership, that some of the most valuable time I ever get as a founder is undistracted. Time to think with no agenda, where I'm thinking about business, like I'm going into it and sometimes I'm not. Like, sometimes some of my best thinking moments have occurred on the beach in Mexico, like when I'm actually on vacation and I'm not drowning in work. But it's this concept of giving yourself time to think and not just constantly being in the trenches solving problems.
- [01:49]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [01:50]
Matt Reynolds
Have you discovered the same thing or for sure, experience the same thing?
- [01:54]
Chris Reynolds
Early Saturday mornings for me are my favorite time for this because that's when I do it. Nobody's about to get on usually and start, you know, pinging me on slack or whatever. It's just sort of this quiet time that, you know, my family's asleep and.
- [02:08]
Matt Reynolds
It'S four in the morning. It's.
- [02:09]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [02:10]
Matt Reynolds
There's nothing else.
- [02:10]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [02:11]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [02:11]
Chris Reynolds
And I've got time. I think the, the great thing about that one is, you know, even on a Saturday morning at like by 9am I'm probably taking a kid to a baseball game game or something. So there's something coming up. But I've got times 4am, I'm drinking coffee, I'm ready to go for the day. I've got all my stuff done. Nothing is sitting, you know, and so you. There's just less pressure to the day.
- [02:31]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [02:31]
Chris Reynolds
And what I do usually with that time, this has changed a little over time. I Used to, I would sit down and read books. This is time almost to get. I like to get a little input from the outside world, outside of my world, basically. And. But what I've started doing is pulling up YouTube and I will actually start watching just sort of some recaps of what's gone on with in the AI space. And that triggers new ideas for me almost immediately. Like, I can go back, oh, this is possible now. Oh, this is possible now. And I start thinking and, and once the wheels start turning, I'll typically take something and do some really, really small, scaled down project. Just I want to play with something for an hour, you know, something really small. The payoff on that for me has been so many orders of magnitude, I think it would be hard to describe. I've built businesses off of this. Like, sure, it, it doesn't take much, but you are absolutely right that when you're in the trenches and things are busy and you know, I can always tell when I wake up on a Saturday morning and do regular work, work stuff, like something's out of balance because I am not getting the time that I need. That is truthfully, is kind of refreshing time for me. I love it. It's like my way of relaxing thinking time, relaxing time for me. And, and so I, I totally agree with you. I think that's, that's a, a very important thing for all founders to, to make time for, in their, in their life.
- [03:56]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, this is, it's interesting. You and I have actually never talked about this. I don't think as close as we are, so there are times where when I can't shut my brain off, I will read. But I typically read. I started reading fiction again about 15 years ago. I hadn't read any fiction for most of my life. And I would read Lonesome Dove or something that would take my mind completely out of work and put it in a sort of fantasy scenario. And I'm not a super fantasy guy, so it's about as hardcore as I get, as cowboys or maybe dystopian future. As long as it doesn't include aliens and monsters, then both those I like. But when I need to think or solve problems. And was it Einstein, that is that rolled the heavy metal balls in his hands? Sounds so childish. Maybe it was Benjamin Franklin. I think somebody's going to correct me. Just correct me in the comments. And so they would sit in a chair and they would have the big heavy steel weights and they would wait. They would start to doze off and nap. And so they're not in deep sleep. They're just falling asleep. They're getting into REM sleep, which by the way, REM is your mind's going nuts and your eyes are fluttering and all this stuff. And they would drop the balls and it would hit the floor and it would wake them up and then they would write down what they were thinking about. And so this was their way. I will often listen to an episode of a Founders the Founders podcast.
- [05:30]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, that's another one for me.
- [05:31]
Matt Reynolds
David would love to have you on the show. By the way. I also often will listen to all in podcasts. It's become a little more political and a little less founder mode oriented. So really what I'm doing is I'm not listening to those or watching those on YouTube to just learn. I am watching those until an idea pops into my head that is congruent. Right. There's pattern recognition there. And so whether I'm listening to a podcast, a founder's podcast on the guy that started Costco, which is nothing like Barbalogic, there are tons of things that all of a sudden I'm like, whoop, hold on. And I pause it and I just stop listening to the podcast.
- [06:15]
Chris Reynolds
Me too.
- [06:16]
Matt Reynolds
And I just start thinking. And I don't even take notes in the beginning. I just. Because I'm obsessive about taking notes on my notepad, on my iPhone. But I don't want to get there yet. I just want to sit and think and chew on the thing because it will often bring up like if you're a founder that has a pulse on your business, you already know the problems or the challenges that you're trying to overcome or find product market fit or whatever the thing is. And so often maybe it's that even sometimes if that is on my mind, let's say for example, like product market fit is on my mind, then I'll pull up Andy Jassy or Mark Andreessen or you know, somebody who's has done a great talk on Paul Graham, who's done a great talk on product market fit. And I'll just listen. And I often don't get through six or seven minutes of their talk before I hit pause and start thinking. By the way, this is another great thing to do on a road trip. Road trip is another great time, especially by yourself.
- [07:14]
Chris Reynolds
It's incredible. There were actually times where many years ago where I would drive, I would like be presenting for a large group in Wisconsin and at the time lived in Springfield, Missouri, where you are now now. And I would get in my car and drive to the middle of Wisconsin, right, instead of taking a plane. Because I loved the thinking time so much. It was so effective for me to be able to work through stuff. There's nothing else you can do. Your hands are, you know, on a.
- [07:42]
Matt Reynolds
Steering wheel and listening and.
- [07:43]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, you're thinking, yeah, I'd listen maybe to an audible book or something. But it would be the same thing that happens with David Sinra for me now, which is that I. I'm listening, but then my brain starts to wander off of a topic he talked about, right?
- [07:54]
Matt Reynolds
And all of a sudden you realize you're not listening to him anymore. You're think. And then I hit pause and I go, hold on. This is a good podcast. I do want to listen to this, but that's it. So the point of this whole podcast is if you don't actually give yourself time to think and have a time every week or so. So I think for both of us, Saturday mornings are. That's when I think and it's when you think. And it's the best time to think because I don't have. My company has, as has, I think, probably yours, but definitely mine over the last 10 years has transitioned to. It used to be seven days a week, they all look the same. And then as the company grows and you get real employees and you have state regulations and whatnot, and you're like, oh, you can't work everyone seven days a week. And head of hr, which is not Toby from the office. So Nikki Sims does an incredible job of this. She protects our weekends so that I don't have emails and basecamp notifications coming in on Saturday and Sunday. For me, Sunday is church day. Saturday is what would be traditionally called the Sabbath. It's the rest day. And so we may do stuff like we may go to softball games or mow the lawn or something, but honestly, at this point, some of that stuff is actually sort of rest. Mowing the lawn is another great time to think. Whether you are setting that time, say a Saturday morning or whatever time during the week, that your brain is creative and that distractions are low or don't exist, or whether you identify that, oh, fairly often I'm in a car on a five hour drive or on an airplane or whatever the thing is. And so I have the opportunity to think. I think it's incredibly important to carve out that time to think. Now, here's the thing. We can get into, like what those thoughts look like. But here's what I've noticed as the business has grown. I still really like brainstorm sessions with my C suite, specifically with my like top of the top crew. But I want everyone to have gone through a think session individually before we get there.
- [10:02]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [10:02]
Matt Reynolds
Because I don't like thinking through things together as a team. From zero.
- [10:09]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [10:10]
Matt Reynolds
From Ex Nihilo. We're not creating from nothing. We are thinking through things. And everybody comes to the table with thoughts that then we talk through rather than trying to. Because I can't think through a room with five other people standing in there. Like it's very difficult.
- [10:28]
Chris Reynolds
I can't either. I actually don't have that ability at all. And one of the things I think is a really good page to take from Bezos is that whole idea of writing. It doesn't have to be a six pager.
- [10:38]
Matt Reynolds
Sure.
- [10:38]
Chris Reynolds
You know, it could be a one or two pager.
- [10:40]
Matt Reynolds
Wait, hold on. Explain it real quick what they do, how they have operated at Amazon with this sort of process.
- [10:46]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. So Amazon. One of the things Jeff Bezos said that he hated. Or slide decks, which there's a part of me that really agrees with that there's a. You know, I have to make them a lot. I figured out how to do this with AI, which has made my life a lot better. But part of the reason is because you convey information in such a almost dumbed down way whenever you do this, that people get the gist. Which is great for, let's say an investor slide deck, right?
- [11:10]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [11:11]
Chris Reynolds
But not so good for a thinking through the details of and maybe even sort of the shades of gray, you know, all of the complexity of a problem.
- [11:21]
Matt Reynolds
And so your operations team doesn't do great with a slide deck, Right?
- [11:25]
Chris Reynolds
That's right.
- [11:26]
Matt Reynolds
They need something a little more well thought out.
- [11:29]
Chris Reynolds
The gist is so good that the more you think about it, it. It'll. It'll sink in. He forces them to create a some number of pages. And if you watch videos on this, the number of pages keeps shifting. But six is what I.
- [11:43]
Matt Reynolds
Typical.
- [11:43]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, six is typical. But a six page prose form, like it literally is. There are words written on page paragraphs. They've got charts and graphs in them. They're not super heavy on the charts and graphs because the goal of this is to get the rest of the executive team, in this case on the same page. Like get them in somebody else's head, Right?
- [12:06]
Matt Reynolds
Yep.
- [12:06]
Chris Reynolds
And that person. It's actually two things. It's not just that that's great. Now you've got these really super smart people who have done a Lot of things before and maybe have different perspectives because they're from different parts of the organization that are in this one person's head, in this one person space. That's great. But what it also does is it is hugely beneficial to the writer. The writer is actually sitting down and has to bring something up that isn't just random, but maybe the thing that is like really causing them to lose sleep at night. Right. It's like a really hard.
- [12:39]
Matt Reynolds
Why they have to distill it down to a. Essentially what would be like if you were in speech and debate in high school or college to create an argument in defense of this idea. It's six pages long. The vast majority of that is in written copy, not in graphs. And it's not made to be published. It's almost in spoken word. It's a little more formal than that. And you put that out as like, I'm trying to defend this idea. I think we should do this thing. And here's the next six pages as to why I believe that is to be true and what I think that will lead to and occur. By the way, that book is called. I'll look it up real quick. I think it's Working Backwards.
- [13:27]
Chris Reynolds
The Everything Store is. Yeah, it's the first time I read it.
- [13:31]
Matt Reynolds
Yes. So the Everything Store is the history of Amazon. It is wonderful. It's one of my favorite business books of all time. You will see Jeff Bezos as a stone cold killer in that book. But the book specifically about the six page memoir that's being done is called Working Backwards.
- [13:50]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [13:51]
Matt Reynolds
And it came out a few years ago and I have not read that book.
- [13:54]
Chris Reynolds
And I'm going to. While we're talking, I'm going to go buy it.
- [13:58]
Matt Reynolds
It's excellent and you should. It's another good audible one that will work fine. We do a lot of this stuff. So, okay, so they go in, somebody writes a six page memo, they go into the room. Now here's the thing. Even at Amazon, even when Jeff Bezos is in the room, can you trust that everyone at the table has read the six page memo ahead of time?
- [14:21]
Chris Reynolds
No.
- [14:22]
Matt Reynolds
So what they do is they start the meeting and it takes the first 20 to 30 minutes of the meeting is total silence, phones off, reading the memo, making notes. And at the end of the memo, at the end of everyone reading and they put the memo down, they turn it like face down and they all start looking around. Then you go, all right, we doing this?
- [14:49]
Chris Reynolds
What do we think?
- [14:50]
Matt Reynolds
Let's discuss this thing. We don't have to brainstorm through the idea. We just read about the thing. Now we just have to brainstorm where are the Mrs. Here, where are the challenges? And that's a way that they, that honestly that a big business like an Amazon. So we've gone from thinking very personal on a Saturday morning on a road trip to essentially forcing your top level brass staff to taking 20, 30 minutes with their phones off, no emails, nothing. And literally reading through a six page memo and marking it up and doing everything and then discussing. Right. And by the way, we do the same thing at this point with our board meetings like this is, you know, we use zec. We use Zec Z E C K, not sponsored, not matter of fact, I pay a lot of money for that. It's a super simple software, it's like a slide deck. But the idea is you put that out to your board and you give them all the information they need. And in the, and you do that two weeks before the board meeting, week before the board meeting, something like that. And then your board gets to read through all of the stuff and they get to ask the questions on the Zec directly on the Zec, and you can answer the questions directly on the Zec. So that when you meet in person, you're just literally solving the biggest of problems.
- [16:11]
Chris Reynolds
That's right. That's what you should be doing.
- [16:13]
Matt Reynolds
The problem with slide decks, and like you said, you make them all the time, I made a million of them when we raised our series A, is that you're trying to give somebody a really quick overview of the thing. So you make a slide deck and then you go through all of the slides. A board doesn't need all the slides. No, your management team doesn't need all the slides. That's way, way, way 30,000 foot view. Like we're in the trenches. And so maybe you start with the slides and then you, and then you get to a memo. But ultimately what you're trying to do is create space both for you and I think, for your employees to actually think through problems, solve problems. By writing that six page memo, it forces them to distill that concept down, to think through what are the objections going to be? Who are the people in the business who are going to fight me on this and what is my answer? Like all of that is there and then they read it and then they discuss it at the meeting. And these are like the most important meetings they have. So, okay, turn it over, back, back to you.
- [17:13]
Chris Reynolds
And so there's, there's a couple of things that we should take from this. Right. One of them is complete sidebar that those documents in many ways can tell the history of your company.
- [17:25]
Matt Reynolds
So that's exactly right.
- [17:26]
Chris Reynolds
I think it's fantastic to do, by the way. Great context for AI if you're want to go back to the AI conversations that we had in previous podcasts. But part of our job, maybe even most of our job as founders, CEOs, as the company grows, is communication and alignment. And those two things are very hard to do well. Whenever you're not giving people enough information for them to understand what's going on, we forget, especially with the different tools that we use today like Slack and Basecamp and all these where we just talk in these sort of little, sort of little ongoing conversations all over the place. People are busy. You switch, you know, you know, if you're, if you're, if you consume these, you switch gears for about a second and a half and you make a snap judgment about a one line and you sort of move on. Your people are doing that to the things that you're, that you're sending them, your emails, your memos, all of those things. So I think the sizing actually drives the effectiveness of your communication. So when you're thinking about the time that you get to spend thinking, the first part is almost just creative. It's just whatever the thing is, it triggers the first. Knocks the first domino over in your mind, and then you sort of, you're, you start going down this path. But at the end of the day, you need to create something to communicate this out to the broader team. Whether or not this is just, you know, your individual business or some bigger idea, it's not a useful thing until it makes it into someone else's brain.
- [18:59]
Matt Reynolds
Correct.
- [19:00]
Chris Reynolds
So how you get that from your head and your idea to an actionable item that. Let's go back to last week's episode. You are not executing on, ideally that the team is executing on. That is about the way that you communicate to the team so that they have enough information to be able to do the thing that needs to get done.
- [19:20]
Matt Reynolds
Yep, agreed. Okay. Let me tell you the two problems I've had with this up to this point and see if you've had the same problems, because I bet you have and we've never talked about it. Problem number one, I go on vacation and the first three or four days I'm stressed to the max and I'm thinking about work and I'm doing work, and then, you know, I stopped doing work. And then eventually I Relax. This is why we tend to take more two week vacations. I know play the violin and be sad for me, but I own an online business so I can leave as long as I want to. It takes a while for me to calm down and relax. I'm very high strung. Then I start to think about the problems and I think through the solutions and I think, oh my God, I've just had a breakthrough. Then I start to put it in bullet point format in my notepad and I haven't done this on AI yet because I haven't gone on vacation since AI has exploded. And then I do a write up to my mission control team which again is my top level C suite of. So I'll give you two examples. One example was I came back and said we need to implement the game plan or okrs and that's going to completely change the way we identify our goals, actions and metrics.
- [20:34]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [20:35]
Matt Reynolds
And that was a three page document and it freaked the out of everybody.
- [20:40]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [20:40]
Matt Reynolds
Because it was a massive change. Right. And the other one was when I said I don't think that B2C is going to be our flagship product long term. I think B2B is our flagship product and here's how I think we should pursue B2B and it freaked everybody the out. So you got to be real careful with that stuff.
- [21:02]
Chris Reynolds
So here's what I would say. I do have the same experience at my current company that is less of an event because it is more of what I get paid for to bring to other companies. They want me to sort of shake the boat. Certainly at Bright Core it was this way where I would have an idea and by the nature of the fact that it was a breakthrough idea, it's, it's shocking to everyone system. Like that's why they're good. Right. Like, like no good idea has ever occurred where you go to a team of people that actually that it influences.
- [21:31]
Matt Reynolds
Sure.
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Chris Reynolds
And everybody's just like, yeah, no, that's great. Like that's, that's a, that's a docile.
- [21:35]
Matt Reynolds
We're going to rocket standing up.
- [21:38]
Chris Reynolds
Like, yeah. People.
- [21:38]
Matt Reynolds
I can only imagine. God, can you imagine how awesome that conversation would have been had it been recorded? It probably is recorded somewhere.
- [21:47]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [21:47]
Matt Reynolds
Where you're like, no, no, no, I know. But it's not going to fall in the ocean anymore.
- [21:51]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [21:51]
Matt Reynolds
The rocket is going to land standing up and we're going to reuse the rocket and then it freaks out everybody.
- [21:58]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. You should have dissenters like just to be clear. Like, sure. Like, your best ideas aren't as good as you think they are. If you don't have dissenters, it should divide people a bit and it should push hard enough that it freaks people out.
- [22:13]
Matt Reynolds
Yes. Scares them a little bit.
- [22:15]
Chris Reynolds
And so I think it's the right thing. I think it does a thing, though, that's important. And I think all founders need to recognize this. Or eventually you have. You have to recognize this. No matter how fast you have these, there's only so much throughput for change within your company.
- [22:29]
Matt Reynolds
Oh, yeah, yeah. They have to. Right?
- [22:31]
Chris Reynolds
There's.
- [22:32]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, that's a great point. Like, you expand on that just a little bit. Like, we can't do four of these at. Over the next four months.
- [22:39]
Chris Reynolds
No, not only that. Like, you probably need a resting period between them. So, like, yeah, of course. Here's what all of this means. And in some ways, I do think this goes back to last week's episode. As a founder, you're almost built for speed. You have this idea that you can do. I've heard people talk about how arrogant of a thing it is that you can look at the world and say, I can do it better than everybody else or well enough that I can. You know, this doesn't exist, and I'm going to go make it exist from nothing. Right. And that's true. Like, we definitely have some of that in us as founders, but I think part of that personality is also the speed at which you will, like, you're massively impatient to get this stuff done, never satisfied with the speed that things.
- [23:22]
Matt Reynolds
Get done, especially once you're convinced of the idea. The idea is going to work. Let's. Let's go. Let's.
- [23:27]
Chris Reynolds
We just got to execute. Let's move this thing.
- [23:29]
Matt Reynolds
Right. Yeah, that's right.
- [23:29]
Chris Reynolds
So what happens is if your company had, you know, 50 to 100 versions of you, not exactly you, but you in terms of the drive and the energy and the, you know, convinced that this thing is going to work, then you could do things very, very quickly. But no company is built that way. So instead, what you have.
- [23:52]
Matt Reynolds
Unless you're a company of one or two or three.
- [23:54]
Chris Reynolds
Oh, sure, sure.
- [23:55]
Matt Reynolds
When you're in that early startup mode, that is, you can move that fast, you can pivot fast, you can do that.
- [24:00]
Chris Reynolds
But as soon as you get to.
- [24:02]
Matt Reynolds
The point where you are. I am. Like, it just moves painfully slow.
- [24:07]
Chris Reynolds
Slower than you want it to go. Yeah, always.
- [24:10]
Matt Reynolds
Right.
- [24:10]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. So. So when you make a change, there is two sides to this. I think if we had a CEO on right now with us, they would say, well, here's the other side. And they'd be right. The other side is because great founders are super optimistic. You're gonna miss all the hard, nasty stuff that's in it. All the stuff that you're like. Yeah, those are details that we don't necessarily need to be concerned about.
- [24:36]
Matt Reynolds
Figured out on the moment.
- [24:38]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [24:38]
Matt Reynolds
Move fast and break things. Zuckerberg.
- [24:40]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, yeah. And the COO is going to go, this is going to hurt a lot more than you think it's going to hurt. It's going to take longer than you think it's going to take and it's going to cost more than you think it's going to cost.
- [24:51]
Matt Reynolds
That's.
- [24:52]
Chris Reynolds
And when the day is done, they might be on the pessimistic side of that, but something between you is probably about right.
- [24:58]
Matt Reynolds
Correct.
- [24:58]
Chris Reynolds
And the team is exhausted from it. Cause founders are built different, man. People don't. Most people don't like change at all. I love change. Change is my favorite thing. And so I'll implement change all over the place just because I like the change and I like to shake things up. I like it when things are shaken up. Not everybody's that way. And so we're not that way. Enormous amount of energy out of most people to do this.
- [25:21]
Matt Reynolds
Change management is huge. And we'll do a podcast on it and we'll probably bring on Andrew, my coo, who had to. Had to work at a massive manufacturing plant as a upper level manager to like, change management is huge.
- [25:34]
Chris Reynolds
It's huge. So that's just my way of saying all the ideas you have, those things are great. But there's one other aspect to it that I think I would always keep in mind, which is you should write this stuff down. Writing it down will clarify it for you too.
- [25:48]
Matt Reynolds
Like, you know, this is a Paul Graham memo. Even if it doesn't go out to the world.
- [25:52]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [25:53]
Matt Reynolds
And that still forces you to distill. This is what I do on airplanes.
- [25:56]
Chris Reynolds
Yes.
- [25:57]
Matt Reynolds
I take the ideas I get on vacation. I distill it down to. And I don't be like, it's gotta be six pages. But I distill it down to whatever that is. Two, three, four pages. So it forces me to distill my thoughts down so that I can think through where the potential speed bumps are or whatnot. That's a valuable tool.
- [26:17]
Chris Reynolds
You should do it under any circumstance. And then just know, like, this is a, this is a grown up founder thing to keep in mind. And that is you don't have to send all of those and you definitely don't have to send them all simultaneously. You should be cautious about how about the speed at which you release this stuff to your team because they can only like it's and not. I'm not even saying the kind of thing where you're sending it to them to execute on. I'm saying sometimes don't send it yet at all.
- [26:50]
Matt Reynolds
Even brainstorm on. Because when they had this idea. Let's brainstorm. This is, by the way, this is why you should, as the business grows, have tiers in your business like we have. We have executives that are not part of mission control. Like they're mission control. There's four of us. It's me and three other people. They know when I come back from Mexico, I'm going to have some insane ideas.
- [27:13]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [27:14]
Matt Reynolds
Most of which I can go back now and say we put into practice, but no one was ready for it yet. And then you've got your next level of executives and you've got your upper level managers and your mid level managers. But man, if you come to the. And I'm not trying to say this in a put down, degradating way or degrading way to your normal employee, it will freak them out.
- [27:36]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [27:37]
Matt Reynolds
Right. Now here's my other question for you and then let's wrap this up on the other side of the equation. I have a great relationship with my mission control that I can pitch any idea I want to them. And they know, especially post vacation or post deep thinking time, that that's where it's coming from. It's coming from a place of Matt's not busy and Matt's not super like overworked and isolated and stressed out and all the things. Like he actually has some time to think and his brain works really well. And so there has to be some truth in here. But also he's not telling us that this is where the business is going because he trusts us more than anybody else in the business. He's going to send it to us first to think through the brainstorm. However, the downside of this is that what often happens is they take that memo that I write and they crowdsource it and they whitewash it to something that doesn't sound like me and doesn't have the passion and doesn't have the emotion. And so I've also noticed that there are times that I'm putting out. I've put out memos to the company or emails to the company or state of the Union addresses, what we call State of the Union addresses for the business that just feel. Just whitewashed. So you just. Can I say that word? That's an okay word to say, right?
- [29:00]
Chris Reynolds
So that's literally. That's like a paint. Yeah.
- [29:02]
Matt Reynolds
Like polish. Like what. Like what Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn did on the fence. It's just been cleaned to the point that it doesn't really even it one. It doesn't sound human, but it definitely doesn't sound like me. And this is the same problem I have with, with AI. And AI is getting better and better and better at it, especially as it develops. It understands your own tone and your voice. But one of the problems I've had is like, there are times I do want to be like raw and authentic, but not to the point of scaring people. But when I put it through all of the layers of copy editing, what spits back out says the same thing, but just feels like ultimately what I'm trying to do is again, I'm trying to rally the troops. Yeah, there is no rallying the troops in that copy edit. Maybe what I put out was too much and it was like, oh, dear God, this is like a big deal and we need to meet in the middle and find somewhere. I don't know if you found a solution for that, but it's like that's the other end of the spectrum. I either scare people to death with giant ideas or I put out this whitewashed document that people are like, that's not really who we are or what we do. Or it's just like nobody's going to get behind it. It's just so pale and pale.
- [30:17]
Chris Reynolds
I think the thing to keep in mind here is that it's not what we said earlier is still true. It's not a good document that doesn't shake the Apple cart. Like you have, like part of what you're doing is you're trying to find a balance between scaring people to the point of. Of. Of being rigid where they can't move. Like, literally they're like, ah, I can't do anything now. Right. You don't want to go that far. And simultaneously you don't want it to be like, oh yeah, that's. We already do this stuff this way or whatever. Right. So like nothing, nothing gets done on that memo. It should shake people a bit. And I think one of the things that is just a really useful guide for most founders, especially if you're a new founder and you're not used to this, is a big part of your job is to move the direction of the inertia in your company. And that is to say that things are in motion, they're moving a particular way, and your job is to go in and nudge it to go a completely different way. And that is uncomfortable. It is gonna be uncomfortable for some people. You will lose people on some of these things from time to time. And that is okay too. Don't scare your good people to the point that they like literally can't get stuff done, but be totally okay with sending something out when it's time. Right. That shakes them to their core enough to change behavior within the organization. Organizational behavior is hard to shift and it requires the, it requires founders to push pretty hard. That's just a whole part of the game that you have to get good at. And, and I, I think striking the right balance is the right thing. But do it. Be cautious about how frequently you do it. Right. Because sure, when you're moving the direction that the company is going, too many times people get to the point where they are just numb to it and they either will stop listening to what you're saying completely or they will be so disoriented that the direction they end up going is not the direction you wanted them to go. You will naturally have more drive for change and more excitement about that change. I think that's one of the things that shocks a lot of people is they're hearing excitement from a founder. It's also really good. Like they can be like, oh, I can get on board. He's excited in a positive way and I'm going to get excited in a positive way. And what you're saying is when it gets translated sometimes by your execs or whoever, it's either just change without the excitement or it's been watered down to the point of not even being change.
- [32:48]
Matt Reynolds
Right, Right.
- [32:49]
Chris Reynolds
Both those two are bad.
- [32:51]
Matt Reynolds
If you have to make a major change in the company, you have to change 120 degrees. You have to make a decision of like, are we changing a hundred. Like, is the whole executive team everybody on board? We are. As of this date, we are totally pivoting. 120 degrees or often a mature enough company, the executive team sees the 120 degree change and it's released in 1210 degree changes.
- [33:17]
Chris Reynolds
That's right.
- [33:18]
Matt Reynolds
Over the next 12 quarters or whatever. So, okay, little change and then a little change so that nothing feels so dramatic to anybody that it destroys them. Okay, let's wrap this up. That all came from. There was a lot of in the trenches there. But it came from making sure that you schedule time to think. You need to have scheduled thinking time where you're not actually working on something, you're actually thinking in total silence, no distraction. This cannot be done. Being surrounded by other people, even your family, your wife, your kids, whoever. TV can't be on in the background unless you're actually watching the thing that's trying to. Right. Evoke the ideas. Driving is a great time to do it, like all those sorts of things. But you must schedule time to think because the thinking time, what you end up doing is otherwise you spend it comes back to the it's almost full circle of what often happens in big businesses is the same problem just on a larger scale that happens in small businesses with the E myth, which if you spend all your time working in your business and not on your business, then your business owns you. You don't own your business. And so the thinking is the part where you get to own your business and you get to change the ideas and the concepts of where it goes and the direction it flows and the changes it makes. And then based on the size of your business, you figure out how often to roll that out, who to roll that out to first. If you've got an executive team or you've got a trusted, you know, two or three, you roll that out to them and you turn that into a brainstorming session. Then figure out how to start rolling it out to the employees and implementing it and putting it to work in the trenches or killing it and say, not right now. I've done that too before. Like, hey, this is a good idea. When we decided to go B2B, I did that like five years ago. And we didn't go B2B till like two years ago. Yeah, we were like, yes, but not yet.
- [35:10]
Chris Reynolds
That's right. That's right. That's exactly how you sometimes that.
- [35:13]
Matt Reynolds
Sometimes that's the answer.
- [35:14]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [35:15]
Matt Reynolds
And so that's it. So just make sure you're actually scheduling time or breaking off time in your week to actually think with no agenda to just chew on things and let your brain think about, like, where are the problems? Where are the challenges? Why are we not having product market fit, like whatever those things are. If you have to listen to something to get those juices flowing, do it. Coffee and nicotine should always be involved. That's a joke.
- [35:41]
Chris Reynolds
Doesn't have to go on a walk. Go on a walk while you listen to a thing.
- [35:44]
Matt Reynolds
By the way, a walk is great. I actually meant to mention that. So not a walk for fitness. Just go on a leisurely walk. Especially this time of year where the weather's great. Like I'm not trying to get my heart rate up to X or whatever. Has that put your mind on the fitness of the thing? Just walk. Turn the notifications off on your phone, keep the phone in your pocket, it's fine. And just walk and then just see what you come up with and start to flesh out those ideas. So there you go. There's another episode of the Build your Business podcast. I always ask for a five star review on Apple Podcasts. I would love to get that, but if you're not watching this on YouTube you should be. So you should go to the build you'd business YouTube channel. Subscribe and we would love to read your comments. Sometimes YouTube is just a cesspool of 12 year old comments. I'd love to not have those. But if you do have legitimate comments for us, we will respond to those personally. We will read those and they will also give us ideas for future episodes. Problems that we can solve, anxiety that we can take away to take you from fear to freedom on the Build your Business podcast. Thank you so much for listening. We'll catch you guys next Friday.
- [37:11]
Chris Reynolds
Sat.