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- [00:00]
Ryan Dice
When I think about the concept of founder mode versus manager mode, what struck me is this is not a problem to be solved. This is a tension that needs to be managed.
- [00:13]
Roland Frazier
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Lunch podcast with your host, Ryan Dice, and myself, Roland Frazier. Ryan, how you doing today?
- [00:21]
Ryan Dice
I'm doing so great. Excited about the event coming up in a week or so. Everything's getting prepped and ready. All the, like, boots and stuff is.
- [00:30]
Unknown
Arriving, all the swag.
- [00:31]
Ryan Dice
It's fun, Good times. How about you?
- [00:34]
Roland Frazier
A tremendous amount of stuff to talk with you about on that. So maybe after the podcast and a couple of meetings today, if you've got some time, let's, let's chat about that because I had a lot of really good things I think to help so that I'm very excited about. But you sent me a some information on something that is kind of hot topic right now and you suggest it would be great to talk about. So why don't you introduce that and let's, let's chat about it.
- [01:02]
Ryan Dice
Yeah. So it was this, this article by Paul Graham that was making the rounds a couple of, I don't know, a week or so ago. Basically, while you were being lazy in Mexico, the entrepreneurial community was losing their collective minds memes, I tell you. And we weren't there to talk about it. And so I thought it would be good to talk about it right now. And so the article, the post was called Founder Mode. And just to kind of give you the gist. So Brian Chesky, who I know you know, is the founder CEO of Airbnb, he gave this talk at Y Combinator, and he was just encouraging, kind of the theme of his talk was encouraging the audience of founders to stay, make sure that they stay in founder mode, and to resist the urge to go into manager mode. And he kind of gave all these examples of how. And you know, again, Brian Chesky's actual talk wasn't in the article, so it was more, it was more a summary of it. And so this is how Paul Graham summarized the theme of Brian's talk. Was that the conversation. I'm sorry, the theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run a larger company is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far, it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley. So essentially the gist was, you know, maybe crew. We swung the pendulum too far, we let too many. We let the adults run the asylum for too long, and it's time for the inmates to step back in and run the asylum. So that was the gist of the article. And there were plenty of people kind of poking fun at like, well, what really is founder mode? Founder mode, frankly, has got us into some dark places before when you think about Uber and some of the scandals that it has. And so is this just an overreaction? So that's the setup. What do you say, Roland Fraser? Are you pro founder mode or anti founder mode?
- [03:13]
Roland Frazier
I am pro balance because I think like in terms of being able to be, you know, innovative and agile in a company, having the person who started it stick with it. I'm a big advocate for when we have portfolio companies and the CEO or the founder CEO is talking about maybe bringing in a CEO, I'm generally against it. I don't like professional CEOs as much as I like founders that have great people that are working under them because I just generally think nobody cares as much about the company as the founder that created it. Now you can easily get beyond the capabilities and competence of the founder as things change from a startup to a more advanced, you know, more mature company. And, and, and so I think that you need to balance the two. So I'm not for either manager mode or founder mode. I'm for management mode, which is kind of a combination of the two. So I think it's a hybrid thing, right? Or, or Mounder mode. I think I like Fanager better, but.
- [04:24]
Ryan Dice
Mounder Mode sounds like something we shouldn't Google.
- [04:27]
Roland Frazier
I agree, I agree. But in terms of scalability, you know how scalable is having the founder do everything? It's not very scalable. And how empowering is it for an employee to be micromanaged by a founder, you know, and this would easily be a, you know, a way for kind of over micromanage type founders to really destroy the initiative of their employees. So I think there's a balance. I do think it's great.
- [05:01]
Unknown
Hey, Ryan Deiss here, co host of Business Lunch. And before we get to the show, I have an exciting invitation for you. My business partner and Business Lunch co host Roland Fraser and I are hosting a live in person event. And if you're a bootstrap business owner who wants to build a 10 million and even $100 million business in the next three years, you need to be there. This event is called Get Scalable Live. And over the last four years, it has transformed from a small gathering of entrepreneurs into the largest bootstrapped entrepreneurship conference in North America. Now, I know what you might be thinking. You're probably thinking, Ryan, really? Another business event? Is that really what we need? But trust me, this isn't just any other event. You see, unlike most conferences, at Get Scalable Live, you'll have dedicated time to take action and actually work on your business instead of just in your business. Over three days, you'll work shoulder to shoulder with like minded entrepreneurs to implement what you're learning and get valuable feedback that you're just not gonna be able to get during the normal day to day. You're gonna be immersed in fresh ideas, strategic insights, and you're gonna get the support and guidance that you need to actually reach your business goals. So this is your opportunity. This is your chance to step out of the day to day to eliminate the noise and again on your business, not just in your business. And if you implement, I'm confident about this. If you implement just one or two key insights from any of our sessions into your business, you're bound to see a return on investment much higher than what we could ever charge for admission. And by the way, speaking of admission, right now, business lunch listeners can save an additional 10% off of our already low early bird ticket pricing. So just head over to getscalablelive.com and use promo code LUNCH at checkout. Again, that's getscalablelive.com promo code LUNCH. It is truly amazing what can happen when you step out of the day to day and spend just a little bit of time surrounded by other powerful business owners. And since this opportunity only comes around once a year, you don't want to miss it again. The link is getscalablelive.com and don't forget to use Promo Code Lunch at checkout to save up to 67% off the full ticket price. That's all I got. I'll see you in Austin. All right, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
- [07:25]
Roland Frazier
In terms of if the founder has been responsible for a good culture in the company, it's a great way to maintain that so that it doesn't get diluted through third parties. But if you're thinking about a company that has, in our scalable model, transferable value, one of the things that can be Crippling to that is an over dependence on the founder and that the founder dependency paradox is that we need the founder to make the company go and the a good founder will continue to provide great strategic vision and direction and innovation for a company to hit its full potential. But at the same time they can hold the company back because the company is limited to the vision of one founder. One, one vision, one, you know, homogenous view of the world that doesn't provide all of the diverse things that studies have shown. Having good, diverse team members can bring to something. So it's, to me it's just a balance. And, and also you can't, you know, you will have to have delegation, you will have to have managers as you grow a company. So what is the SOP for delegation? Because it could be very inconsistent if it's one person just kind of shooting from the hip and doing it. And I think it's very easy for a founder like that to either burn out or if you're thinking as the founder, to sacrifice your personal relationships because you have to spend all of your time and then some in the company. So I believe there are goods and bads to it as there are with most things. But I would be an advocate for definitely do not over delegate and go 100% manager mode, but also definitely don't hold on to the reins so tightly that you're in a 100% founder mode either because both have advantages and disadvantages. And I believe that a hybrid model could actually be the ideal that brings together the best of all those worlds. What are your thoughts?
- [09:34]
Ryan Dice
Very similar. When I think about the concept of founder mode versus manager mode, what struck me is this is not a problem to be solved. This is a tension that needs to be managed. And there are going to be seasons in the life of a business where what it really needs is that in the trenches pirate ship captain to lead it through whatever it's going through. And then there are times when really you need to be able to shift into a little bit more of a strategic management type, type role. And this happens over the lifecycle of a business. In the early days of a company, it needs that inventor person, it needs that kind of wild, crazy, harebrained scheme and inventor who's going to come up with the breakthrough ideas that a business can be built upon. And then what it needs is that hard charging driver that's going to take this idea and really run with it. But then it kind of needs somebody to pause a little bit and to build some systems, you know, and then it kind of needs somebody to step away a little bit and kind of guide it, not necessarily from afar, but guide it with the help of other capable, competent professionals. And then there's almost certainly going to be seasons when things don't go very well and you're going to have to go back into one of those other modes. And so I think the ability to.
- [10:40]
Unknown
Shift modes, and I don't think it's.
- [10:42]
Ryan Dice
Just founder and manager mode. I really do see it as being four very distinct roles. It's the inventor, it's the builder. I'm sorry, it's the inventor, it's the driver, it's the builder, and it's the guide. And I think great CEOs, great founder CEOs especially know how to shift between context, shift between those different modes. And they also know how to determine what their business needs the most right now. So, again, I think it's attention to be managed. And the best way to look at this is when you're trying to decide.
- [11:12]
Unknown
Okay, is this something?
- [11:13]
Ryan Dice
Is this a direction I need to go? Take it out to its extreme. If you flip it and you invert it, and the opposite of it is also bad, that probably means the extreme of what you're doing is really, really bad, too. And so, I mean, I think it's very easy to say, oh, bureaucracy, bureaucracies in startups and companies is a really bad thing. And everybody's nodding their head and saying, yeah, of course. Okay, then should we do the opposite? Well, what's the opposite? Well, the opposite is a pirate ship. And you know what? They're also bad, too. You and I have been a part of many pirate ship organizations that totally imploded. So I just, I love, I wrote down Niels Bohr, who's the physicist, he said, love what he says. The opposite of a fact is a falsehood. But the opposite of an absolute truth may very well be another absolute profound truth. And I think that's the case here. It's absolutely, you need to go into founder mode mode from time to time. Absolutely, you need to go into manager mode from time to time. And the magic is in balancing that tension, not. It's not just deciding that one is better than the other. And it's funny to me. Sorry, go ahead.
- [12:23]
Roland Frazier
I liked that he said, but I want to hear what's funny to you first, so go ahead and finish that.
- [12:28]
Unknown
Well, I also love when he said.
- [12:30]
Ryan Dice
In there this idea that if you hire good people and just let them do what they do. But the example he gave Is like.
- [12:39]
Unknown
Yeah, this company did that, but they.
- [12:41]
Ryan Dice
Ran it into the ground.
- [12:42]
Unknown
Well, I submit to you that maybe.
- [12:43]
Ryan Dice
Those weren't good people.
- [12:45]
Roland Frazier
Yeah, there's a lot of assumptions in that. Similarly, to say that he switched to Founders Mode and then the companies had the highest profitability ever. Well, you know, how do we know that there's a correlation between that one caused the other.
- [13:05]
Ryan Dice
In the footnote, it's. He says in here, I have another, less optimistic prediction. As soon as the concept of Founder Mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use Founder Mode as the excuse, ergo, pirate ship. And that's where the pendulum swings. So I think seeing the value in both and understanding as the founder CEO, what do I need?
- [13:31]
Unknown
But also, yeah, at scale, you have to build a team of smart people.
- [13:35]
Ryan Dice
Around you, but they're your lieutenants. Don't hand the reins over to them completely.
- [13:38]
Roland Frazier
Well, what Chesky said was not doing this with everything. It was really being more focused on being plugged into the culture and vision, the product and the marketing. And so for a founder who has those skills, that would make sense. But there's so many other areas of the business. Finance, customer service, direct operations, recruiting, human resources, all of that kind of stuff that don't fall into the things that he's talking about. So those would all be areas that you would presume could be delegated relatively harmlessly without affecting the things that cause him to say, let's stay in Founders Mode. So that's like right off the bat, you can carve out giant parts of the organization that you can delegate to and stay plugged in on. And I thought that was, that was important. And then in terms of.
- [14:39]
Ryan Dice
Can I give you an example on that one real quick?
- [14:41]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [14:42]
Ryan Dice
So this happened literally a couple of weeks ago. One of our companies, where I'm not, you know, in, in the day to day, we've got, we've got a president who's running it. And that president had a, had a sales leader, you know, working, working for them. And it was clear, like, I got a sense and this is this. You kind of get this when you start working above the business. You get a perspective that people who are in the trenches don't have. And I just got a sense that not all was well like that. There was some real grumblings. And of course the sales, like, no.
- [15:13]
Unknown
No, things are fine.
- [15:13]
Ryan Dice
We're just right over here. And, you know, numbers were looking okay, but I was like, I just got kind of Got a sense. And then there was one little piece, one of one of our kind of top salespeople was like, hey, I'm leaving. You know, I'm quitting now. I knew that that's a canary in a coal mine. And so I got with the president leader, I said, I want to dive in on this area and like, I don't want to, you know, trump what, everything that you're doing, but, like, I.
- [15:39]
Unknown
Want to take this on as a.
- [15:40]
Ryan Dice
Special project and without saying it, essentially go into founder mode. And I want to dig in and be that, that driver who have the power to kind of do whatever the heck I want to do, but I want to get to the bottom of it. We had that conversation on a Tuesday, had identified the problem by that afternoon, had begun taking massive action on Wednesday, had exited the sales leader and brought another sales leader in by Friday. And had we not and gone into, quote unquote, founder mode, we would have probably lost the entire sales team. And instead what we did is turned it around culturally and performance wise. And there are times when you absolutely need to do that. But if that becomes the rule and not the exception, then either you're micromanaging and jumping in where you shouldn't, or you just don't have a very good company with very good leaders at all. So anyway, I just want to throw that. But you're right. Like, it was in that one narrow area. I didn't decide, like, okay, I'm now in charge of everything. I want everybody direct reporting to me and I'm going to fire this whole, you know, level. Like, no, that's, that's not it.
- [16:36]
Roland Frazier
Yeah. And I think part of that is, is to me, and you and I have talked about this a lot with, with, you know, all the companies we consult with and the ones that we're involved in, is that really a good CEO is a coach. A good founder is a coach to the people that they are mentoring. And they really should look at it as a mentor relationship. And they should not dictate from on high, but should ask questions to collaborate to come up with answers. Because if you don't do that, then you're creating dependencies on you. You're stifling innovation and independent thought and initiative. And you're also creating a, you know, I think a culture of fear where there's a fear to make a decision because they're afraid it's going to get countermanded by or criticized by the micromanaging founder. So that's, that's, you know, that's important. So I kind of was trying to think about a few things to like what, what would a hybrid model look like? And so the first would be that you've got the founder led vision and then you're delegating the execution of the vision. But you are also exactly what you just did. Hit and run projects where you see an area, a good coach, when, when a coach sees an area that could be a challenge, an issue or an opportunity for improvement or underperformance, then the coach is going to go in and help turn things around. Right. And so, and to collaborate with the people that are the stakeholders in those particular things to get them on the right path. So a good hybrid model has you as the visionary, as the delegator of execution and then as the mentor monitor, which a good operating system, like our scalable operating system can help you to see. What are the areas that you need? How do we flag that? Now it might be something like you talked about where a key person that you wouldn't expect to be leaving who is having success suddenly leaves. That would be, you know, a flag for time to have communication, which would then go to the second thing which would be that bidirectional communication. And skip level meetings. And skip level meetings, which. I hadn't heard that as a term until I started diving into this. Had you?
- [18:59]
Ryan Dice
Yeah, yeah. It's something that we tried, we've implemented and it's, it's a, it's kind of that double edged sword. Like it's really, really good. But if you don't have a strong culture of trust, you really have to have that first. Because we'll explain what a skip level meeting is, I guess.
- [19:16]
Roland Frazier
Yeah. So basically, I mean, without the name, I do it, but without the name. But it is a slippery slope because if you do it too much, you can erode the authority of the organizational structure.
- [19:31]
Ryan Dice
What is it? Can you explain?
- [19:33]
Roland Frazier
Generally you want people to communicate up and down the org chart with the people that they report to directly. And, and so if you're the CEO, you would generally not go to say a salesperson directly and have a conversation. You would go to maybe operations and maybe operations would go to, you know, revenue or, or chief revenue officer or director of Sales. And then that person would go to the salesperson or to the sales team lead that was managing that group of salespeople and that person would have the conversation and you'd expect the communication to go up and down. The danger is that you play the game of telephone and the messages get mixed along the way or you never hear about critical things because there is some motivation that or unknown reasons know unknown to you that cause a suppression of bad news and you end up not getting the bad news because there people are afraid that it will reflect badly on them. So this skip level idea, or at least the name of the skip level is we're going to skip the levels of reporting effectively and have the conversations directly. So I think you're right. It's good and bad. You just have to be careful. So if it's done to gather data to me, then it's good. If it's done to coach, it's good if it's done to resolve an issue. Once the data is gathered, you've got to bring in the structure or you will destroy the structure of the company. That's kind of my thinking. What is yours?
- [21:13]
Ryan Dice
We've got a couple of rules around skip level and that is that anybody can communicate with anybody at any time. Like the hierarchy has to do with who can task somebody else out. But if you need to ask somebody a question, you don't have to talk to your manager, to talk to their manager, to talk to them. Right? Anybody can just go. If you just generally have a question, looking for some insight. But if you are communicating skip leveling up, you should have gone to your manager first to try to seek it out in your team first. Like there should be a reason that you're basically skipping that level if you're, if you're going up. And that could be because the manager's out of town because they're really busy, they've given special permission like all those things, there should be a reason. Because one of the first questions somebody's going to ask is, have you talked to your manager about this? Right now, skip leveling down where the CEO or other executives are communicating down. That should be used primarily for data gathering, for insight. And it should always be prefaced with nothing I'm asking you about should in any way be seen as a reprioritization. So I'm asking questions of you because I value your insight and opinion. You've got the in the trenches knowledge that we don't have. Please don't take this as a mandate to change. And we say it at the beginning and we say it at the end because I can't tell you how many times I've asked somebody questions and they went away from it being like, yeah, I talked to Ryan and you know, he wants me to do this now. No, I didn't. So we have that rule ahead of time. And if you're going to have a skip level and you're talking about somebody in between, you should have already talked to that person first. That is another. If it's an interpersonal matter, then really my thing is always unless it's somebody you feel threatened in a very real way. But if you're just having an interpersonal issue with a manager or something like that, you should bring that to their attention before you bring somebody else again. Have you talked to your manager about this yet? I want to bring them in. So we found that those rules help. But yeah, I think I agree with you. Every business should aspire to have open communication skip level as the default. But it does require a cultural of trust.
- [23:26]
Roland Frazier
So then a lot of people will ask, and I'll get back to our list of kind of how to do the hybrid model. But a lot of people will ask, how do I know when to have a skip level meeting? How do I do that? And so some guidelines would be if you've identified a performance gap. So if the results that are being generated are significantly different than the results that would be expected, and that could be in a team member, it could be in a department, that would be a good time to think about gathering insights. Again, not, as Ryan said, not reprioritize, not going in and say that we need to do this, this, this and this, but to actually just gather the insights so that you can talk to the people who are in the right chain of command to, to have the conversations. The other would be just generally to get a feel for the pulse of the company. Good consultants go in and ask questions. So when you pay a whole bunch of money to hire, you know, McKinsey to come in, they're going to start by talking to everybody. And most of the time they're going to have all these insights that you never got because you don't talk to your people. And so one way to save yourself the big McKinsey fees and also stay out of trouble and also kind of keep your finger on the pulse of the culture of the organization is to periodically just talk to people and say, one of the questions that Ryan and I ask when we go in and consult right off the bat is, so what are you doing right right now? What have you tried before that went well that you're not doing anymore? And what are you still doing now that you say, why the heck are we still doing that? Or why do we do that here? And those three questions are very, very powerful for unearthing big needle moving Changes. And that's all about just talking to the actual people that do it. Another third time to do that would be whenever you've got a new initiative that you have launched in your organization or a department, or if there's been a major organizational change, like you've acquired a company or are going through a process of integration or your company has been sold or you're rebranding or changing product lines or something like that, that would be another good time to do it. The fourth time would be if it's a period of very high growth, because high growth breaks companies. We know because we've consulted multiple times. And one of the first things that we ask after we ask those three questions is if you get two, five or ten times the business that you've got right now, can the business support that with the infrastructure that it's got right now? Almost always people say, oh, absolutely, because the fantasy is more business means less problems and more profit. But sometimes more business means the whole company blows up in a bad way because it just can't handle that. So it's definitely good during periods of high growth to have skip level meetings so that you can be sure, because there's a good chance, so you can be sure everything is going as you hope it is or as you expect it to. Because very often a department gets out of whack and some manager person is trying to handle things, maybe using outdated, outmoded SOPs or process, you know, or, or, or even teams and things need to be realigned with the new reality of what's going on. And then last would be the one that you brought up, which would be red flags from employee feedback. So if there's an employee feedback process or an event, like a key employee who shouldn't be leaving decides to leave, then it makes sense to talk to them, to gather the insights as to why that's happening. To see is it systemic, is it one off, is it, you know, what is that and what should we do about it? How does that sound to you for that?
- [27:12]
Ryan Dice
I love all of those. I'll tell you what not to do when it comes to skip level meetings, because what you don't want to do when it comes to skip level meetings, ask me how I know you don't want to just announce, oh, it's skip level meeting time everybody, and we're going to be scheduling these out. If you do that, a couple of things are going to happen. Number one, it's going to be a giant waste of a whole lot of people's time. And number two, your folks that are down lower in the org chart, they're going to freak out, they're going to think that something is up and they're probably right.
- [27:43]
Unknown
And so I would try to keep.
- [27:45]
Ryan Dice
This as casual and native as you can. So ideally, if it's your company, you're.
- [27:50]
Unknown
Talking to your people. This was very easy when we were.
- [27:52]
Ryan Dice
All under one roof and in person, you know, I remember I'd walk into the office, there'd be, you know, a couple dozen or so people around. I pretty much knew everybody you know by name unless they were brand new. You know, we're eating in the same area, we're getting coffee from the same coffee machine. And so I'm talking to people, how's it going? How's your day? What's up? How can I help? So it's not weird if I reach out, you know, via Slack or just walk up to and be like, hey, I want to get your feedback on something. Nobody thinks, ooh, this is a big meeting, what's going on? Ah, you know. Similarly, now that we're more remote in more of our companies, I make it a point throughout the organization of just reaching out to people. If I haven't really talked to them, if I see them, you know, make a cool comment or do something good, I'll reach out to them, direct message them in our Slack group, hey, I think this is great to have that relationship so that when I reach out to them about a specific question, they're not like, why is the boss reaching out to me? But if you make it seem like a big deal, people will treat it like a big deal. And if they treat it like a big deal, you're not going to get the feedback they want. If it's just a normal human conversation and you don't make it out to a big deal, you're just like, hey, quick question for you when you got a second. Then you find that you get a lot better information.
- [29:01]
Roland Frazier
So then if you know what to, you know when. Excuse me, to talk about the what is to gather the insights, the next would be, well, how do I know which employees to talk to? So the ones that self identify as red flags that you want to get feedback from, that's. That should be fairly obvious. But otherwise then you're going to want to think about who should I have these skip level meetings with during these times that I should have them? Right? One would be your top performers. So your top performers, the people who are doing best, can often give you the best insights as to what are they doing differently from people maybe who aren't performing as well or what insights. Given that they've been smart enough to become top performers within the existing organization, they might have insights on how things could be even better. That would be valuable and they've got the proof of their performance to do that. Similarly, what are referred to as high potentials, people that you bring in that you think have tremendous future potential, either because they had performed as a star in another organization they're coming in, or maybe they're coming in directly from a school or something and they were tops of their class or maybe they came very, very highly recommended. Or maybe you just get information that they are everywhere taking initiative and even though they're not yet up high in the organization, they're somebody that is, you know, somebody to watch. Those would all be good people to talk to. Similarly, thinking about, well, I'm trying to gather insights about the company. If you're only talking to the people in marketing or you're only talking to the people in product, then you're not going to find out what's going on in the rest of the company. So your choice of who to have skip level meetings with should be cross functional. Meaning that you should have a good representation of the different major areas, departments, teams that are present in your company and beyond that, within those teams and departments you want to have a diversity of tenure because the people that have been there long enough will, will know how things have always been done and maybe have ideas on how they could be done better. People who are brand new won't know anything about how or why things are done. So they're kind of first principles, opportunities for you because you're getting fresh insights that your people that are there might accidentally have bias against or just not be thinking of because it's completely outside the box. And somebody's like, you know, the I like the Heinz ketchup thing from the guy that came in and was working on the line. They're like how do we get people to use more ketchup? And he's like, what if you made the mouth of a make the hole bigger? Oh, you know, like simple things like that. Similarly, people who've been recently promoted, they're now moving from a level experience they had before, either within a department or across a department, into having fresh eyes on whatever they have been promoted to do. So those are good people as well. If you've got somebody that's contributing to a particular project that is a key project, like when Jobs who was Famous for Skip level meetings. Had the Mac team. Right. Well that's, that's you're going to want to talk to the people on that team, those project contributors. And then last but not least would be in terms of if there are teams that have submitted anonymous feedback and the feedback is helpful or concerning to you, the feedback is anonymous. So obviously you can't know who those people are, but you can then go and choose members from the team using some of those criteria that we talked about. So that's just some guidelines to kind of think about. Okay, now I know what skip level is. I know when I should do it and now I know kind of what are some criteria for deciding who I should talk with. Thoughts, feelings, emotions.
- [32:57]
Ryan Dice
Yeah, I think that's, I would just repeat what I said before. All of those are really good ideas.
- [33:01]
Unknown
I would just try to make it.
- [33:02]
Ryan Dice
As organic as possible. When you think you should talk to somebody, talk to them, make it organic.
- [33:08]
Roland Frazier
To the people you're talking to, but make it strategic to you. I mean.
- [33:14]
Ryan Dice
Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, thank you for that clarification. Yeah, it have a reason for having the conversation, but as far as they're concerned and just make it a habit of talking to your people. I mean I guess that's a big, a big part of this. I think at the end of the day, CEOs should live at two elevations. You're at 30,000ft and you're at three inches. And wisdom and your ability to perform as a CEO is knowing when to stay at 30,000ft and when to go down to 3 inches and making sure that you never get caught in the middle. And so yeah, like I think you're always ideally having some kind of chit chat conversation with your people. You are the carrier chief communication officer of the company, chief culture officer, whether you like it or not. And so make sure that you're talking to your folks and keeping a pulse at all times. But when it's strategic. Yeah, get, get in the weeds and.
- [34:05]
Roland Frazier
Then kind of the last key thing there, I think and obviously we could go much longer on it, but is really directly related to the challenges that we identified that caused us to create the scalable operating system, which is what are the KPIs, the key performance indicators, the metrics and the accountability for each of those metrics in your company. And are you measuring them so that you can manage them? Right. Drucker was what gets measured, gets managed. You know, you've got great people like John Doerr talking about okrs objectives and key Results, you've got to, to maintain an understanding as your company grows, you've got to have dashboards and if you have a policy of open dashboarding, so that at your executive meetings everybody can see what's going on, and in your departmental meetings everybody can see what's going on in terms of what are we doing, how are we performing against the KPIs and the benchmarks that were set, where are the challenges? Now you've got a dialogue that's going on and everybody, not just the founder mode, but I would argue that managers should also have founder mode mentality so that they are feeling like a founder owner of their department or team, and they're doing these things as well. And then you've got truly a hybridized kind of holistic founder mentality that is layered into the required management order that the manager mode brings as well. So that's kind of my thinking. What are your thoughts on all that?
- [35:46]
Ryan Dice
I think if you've been, I would say, fortunate enough to parent children at any degree, you understand that what it means to be a parent changes over the life cycle of that child. And in the earliest days, you're a micromanager, you're a micromanaging parent. You're the ultimate helicopter parent because you know that your kid literally, if left without you, they will die, right? And it's totally appropriate to be that, that helicopter micromanaging parent. And then there's certain times as they get older where you start to pull back. And then there are certain times where they're going through, you know, they get older and it's time to massively pull away. We just took our son to oldest son to college and there are parents who, some of these, like, yeah, guy down the road, he's like, parents have come up every weekend to check on him, to hang out. Like, no, that's kind of weird, right? There's time they've grown up a little bit, it's time to pull away.
- [36:43]
Unknown
But you also need to know if.
- [36:44]
Ryan Dice
You'Re a parent, that there are times when you jump right back in, you know, into their lives, because you never stop being that. Just your role changes. And so just understanding as a founder, as a CEO, you have to be.
- [36:56]
Unknown
Able to context switch.
- [36:57]
Ryan Dice
That is the game. That's why if you get it right.
- [37:00]
Unknown
You get paid the big bucks.
- [37:01]
Ryan Dice
And it's not easy. But it's never one mode. It is multi. It's a multimodal game that we're playing here. And your job is to know based on the life cycle of my business. What type of founder, what type of CEO does my business need me to be today? When you get it right, it looks really cool. When you get it wrong, you can look pretty foolish and you need to ask for everybody's forgiveness. But that's the great game that we're.
- [37:23]
Roland Frazier
All playing and you heard it here first. Fanager Mode, Founder Manager Fanager makes me very uncomfortable. That's definitely not going to catch on, but you heard it all here today. If you guys have thoughts on Founder mode, Manager mode, hybridized modes or other modes, we would love to hear your feedback. Please hit us up on social and let us know. We are everywhere at Forward slash, either Ryan Dice or Roland Fraser and also Business Lunch. Thank you guys and we'll see you next time. By the way, before we go, if you did find value here or you did like what we talked about, please share this with a friend because we are definitely always interested in reaching more people and getting more impact and more input. Talk to you guys soon.
- [38:10]
Unknown
Hey, Roland Frazier here.
- [38:12]
If you're looking for a way to.
- [38:13]
Roland Frazier
Grow your business exponentially to get more.
- [38:15]
Unknown
Customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's.
- [38:18]
Roland Frazier
No faster way to do it than.
- [38:20]
Unknown
To acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams and media that you want.
- [38:26]
Roland Frazier
If you want to double your sales.
- [38:28]
Unknown
Just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch. They acquire already successful businesses and when they do it, they instantly increase their sales, their profits. If they want market share, they increase that. They can get new products and services to offer, all instantly. Hey look, 90% of new businesses fail. 90%. Why not acquire an already successful business and increase your chances of success by 900%?
- [39:17]
Roland Frazier
What most people don't realize is you.
- [39:18]
Unknown
Can acquire highly profitable businesses with no money out of your own pocket in pretty much any country in the world, regardless of your credit and without having to go find a bunch of investors or needing any experience. Look, I've been acquiring businesses for over 30 years now and I cover the whole process in my EPIC Investing Strategy training and I want to give it to you 100% free. Just visit businesslunchpodcast.com epic to get your free access to my EPIC investing training right now. While it's available.