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Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
What It Takes to Scale a Company Without Breaking It | Mike Seckler, Justworks CEO | E151
00:52:35
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- [00:00]
A
We felt like we were on top of the world because everyone was telling us we were on top of the world and all the numbers said so. But we couldn't see that right in front of us were these massive risks and how everything was going to get super hard. Right? So we felt best right before things were about to be at their worst.
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Mike Seckler, president and CEO of JustWorks, an all in one HR platform for small businesses. And before JustWorks, Mike Co founded two other companies and we'll drill into what it actually takes to start and scale companies.
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The world is changing super fast and I've been through some of these dislocations before. I think this one may be bigger than anything that's been in my career. You know, with AI, this is a time to like, lean into the change, be the change, manifest it, and not to like hold on tightly to the way things used to be.
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If you're sitting in front of a room of small business owners, what would you say are some of the biggest blind spots or things that they need to like, really acknowledge?
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A
Well, just two statements. I mean, one is
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welcome to the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan Show. I'm so glad you're here. In the Leap Academy podcast, I get to speak to the biggest leaders of our time about their career, how they got where they are today, the challenges, the failures, and countless lessons. So lean in. This episode is going to be amazing. I'm on a mission to help millions reinvent their career and leap into their full potential, land their dream roles, fast track to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or build portfolio careers. This is what we do in our Leap Academy programs for individuals and teams. And with this podcast, we can give this career blueprint for free to tens of millions. So please help my mission by sharing this with every single person you know, because this show has the power to change countless of lives. Dio. Okay, so let's dive in. Mike zechler, president and CEO of JustWorks, an all in one HR platform for small businesses. And before JustWorks, Mike Co founded two other companies. We'll talk more about them and we'll drill into what it actually takes to start and scale companies. The cost of isolation for founders, the leadership and hard times. And what you also will love about Mike is not only that you're going to hear about his own companies, but he brings lessons from 14,000 startups. The patterns in scaling, the hiring, the market shifts, what it separates top performers. So really get ready for an incredible episode. Let's dive in. Mike, I'm so Glad to have you here.
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A
Yeah, Alana, thanks so much for having me.
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B
You're going to have to take me back in time because I remember when I looked at what you studied in college, I was just like, I needed to read it again. Again. It's like geology and history, or theoretically, they're not connected, but maybe they are.
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A
History of the earth, history of humanity. Maybe they're connected that way. But, yeah, I wasn't going to school for, like, a vocational reason. I was in college and just taking classes that interested me. I didn't really know where it was going to take me. I thought for a while I might go to graduate school in the sciences and then had some experiences that made me think maybe that wasn't for me. And then I just got a first job and took steps, you know. But what I studied and what I ended up doing don't seem directly connected, but I think there were some connections just in terms of learning how to think about problems, learning how to analyze things, learning how to communicate.
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B
How did that shape you overall? Do you think of a situation as a child or early teens that shaped you to the person that you are today or the entrepreneur that you are today?
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A
I don't know. I mean, I grew up in kind of a wonderful way. In some ways. I never saw my parents fight. I don't know that they ever fought. And I grew up thinking I was probably like 6 foot 4 and great at everything. And so there's pluses to that and that you develop a sense of confidence when you're raised that way. But there's some downsides, too, around some of the things I'm sure we'll discuss, which is life isn't easy. And there wasn't a lot of talking about emotions and growing up and then going through hard things. I didn't necessarily have all the language to process those things as I was going through those things. But I don't know that there was anything in my growing up that made me always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur, always knew I wanted to build companies. I just was moved to wherever the energy felt real at the time. And it's hard to connect all the dots in terms of what I ended up doing, I think so.
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B
Did you know when you finished college? Did you know where this is going to take you? Or what were the first jobs and how did that become employees?
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A
Basically, there were a couple things that happened. One, I mean, I have and continue to have incredibly close friendships with a number of people I went to college with. And I was in college, from 1990 to 1994, we were using the Internet, we were using email, yet the world wasn't yet using it. It's like someone who might have been using AI over the last couple years before recent boom. So this was all pre the dot com boom. Yet we were pretty excited about what was going on. I had a friend who started a company in college, and so I saw this entrepreneurial journey up close, and that was quite inspiring, the idea of to start a company. I grew up in a family. Mom was a nurse, dad was a doctor. That led to some of the stable living that I grew up. They went to work at the same minute every day, came home the same. So the idea that someone would start a company, an entrepreneurial journey was kind of exotic. And. And then I thought I might go to grad school in the sciences. I wrote a master's level honors thesis as an undergrad and then got to present it at meetings and began to sense that there was a politics to science that I didn't really like. The idea that you might have to work really hard for a long time before you're able to do your own science wasn't as exciting. So I just got a job as a research analyst at a management consulting firm. I guess they figured because I'd crunched a lot of numbers and processed a lot of data in the sciences that that might be of value to them. But I had another friend from college who was the beautiful mind of school. He created his own major between math and computer science. And we were always talking about how the future was going to evolve and imagine business ideas. And so that conversation carried forward post graduation to. It was like a year after we graduated. We got together at a friend's house for a Fourth of July celebration. And we ended up talking all night about Netscape, was talking about going public. We had both had our first jobs for a year. All my summer jobs up to that point were working on the Appalachian Trail. So I worked in a company for a year and I was like, wow, there's a lot of things here that don't make sense to me, why they do things this way. So we started having these conversations and it led to us starting a company about a year and a half after we graduated from school. And that was that first business.
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B
Employees talk to me about those early, early days because you don't have a lot of experience with different companies, et cetera, and you're starting a company, employees. It's in 1996, I believe, right?
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A
Correct. Yeah.
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B
And eventually a Decade later, it's acquired by adp. So everybody wants to listen. But how did you maneuver, especially the early days, which there's this plateau of possibilities and nobody really knows where to go and market fit and all of that stuff?
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A
Well, you know, it's crazy because that business is now like the largest part of ADP, this $100 billion market cap company. And so it was quite successful. And yet those early days, we were naive enough to do the thing to think we could do it. But boy, we were naive on a lot of ways. And so we made a lot of mistakes. We were fortunate, though, to find some good people that were a little bit more further in their career that had come from the world of HR software, that brought some of the domain expertise we were missing and some of the patterns that had worked or not worked in the past. We weren't figuring out everything from scratch, but sure, we made mistakes.
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B
Is there one in particular that sits there that you're like, gosh, how did you do that?
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We had a couple other people around the business when we got started, almost like another founder. And we took steps and then realized there were some foundational misalignments. And so breaking up, that was hard. Lawyers and stuff. And so that was challenging. Raising money for the first time, it was hard, but it just, I don't know, we just solved that. We had all those things. But the thing that was important, I think that gave us an edge, was that John Alberg and I, as co founders, we had very shared values and shared respect, but very different skill sets. John was a technologist, and I think my skills ended up being more around just the company building, finding people, finding space, finding capital, figuring out how to go to market, although we had some failed experiments there for sure, as we eventually found things that worked.
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B
And that's incredible. And you also needed to go through the dot com bust or whatever, right? How did you maneuver around that 2000ish where a lot of companies actually lost their footing altogether?
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You know, it was really interesting because the first chapter of that business really coincided with the start of the dot com boom. And so that first chapter, those first three years really rewarded a certain kind of entrepreneurship. Bold, aggressive storytelling. Be a magnet for capital, magnet for talent. Manifest the future. Right. And that was challenging, but fun. And certainly it was easy to get full of ourselves and somewhat arrogant at that time because things were coming relatively easily. But with the dot com bust, it was a really difficult period because the message up to that point was, grow as fast as you can. Capital. I mean, Everyone wanted to invest more. It was easy to raise capital relatively so. And then it changed overnight. If capital was like oxygen, imagine the room you're in right now. All the oxygen was getting sucked out of the room. You wouldn't be thinking about anything other than how are you going to get another breath from this? The year is gone. That's what happened. At that period. It felt like that the capital was no longer available. All these businesses, including ours, were running at big deficits and burn rates. The clock was ticking and you had to get to cash generative. You had to extend your Runway and eventually generate cash. And how we decided to do this and how we need to do this is unclear, I would say in retrospect. But we were very early and aggressive at accepting reality and making decisions to change the trajectory of our business. These were hard things. We let go of a third of our team, we took a little bit of very dilutive financing and we got to the other side. And businesses that thought it would just get better or hoped it would just get better, they just ran into walls. The companies were exploding left and right. There was these websites that would track all these business failures. It was such a different time from 99 to 2001.
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B
And two, do you remember that day that you're starting to realize that this is you as a leader? Because again, I do believe that there's a difference. Number two and almost anything else in the company. Right. And or 1 and 2. Right. Like there's a big difference between being at the helm and needing to have all of this weight on your shoulders. Do you remember that, Dave?
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A
Yeah. It felt terrible going into it. It felt like, you know when you feel viscerally sick to yourself. But the day itself went a lot better than I had been playing it out in my mind because we, we're just super transparent. We just communicated all the facts. These are where the lines cross. We got a lot of customers that depend on us. We're going to have to let go of a number of people. But it's to preserve the opportunity for this business to employ the 2/3 that are going to remain and then hopefully get stronger and hire more people in the future. And we did it early enough where despite being a small company at the time, we took care of people the extent that we could. It wasn't like Ford Motor severance packages, but it wasn't like you lost your job and sorry. And that's what happened to a lot of these VC backed companies that went out of business at that time. They just ran into walls. We took care of folks. And what was interesting was the people that were let go were obviously sad and disappointed, but they understood. And the people that remained had enough information to process it and felt good enough about how their friends that had just departed were treated that they were able to get back to work. And. And that was a really interesting lesson about making a hard decision the right way and what it feels to get the other side of it. And we did get to the other side of it, and it was fascinating because we ended up proving to ourselves we could do basically everything we were doing, but with fewer people, which obviously raised some questions about how we were operating prior to that moment. And the other thing I'll say about that as a big lesson, and I think there's a generalizable message here around when you go through hard times, which is that period from 2000, end of 2000, 2001 to 2003, was brutally challenging and not fun. And there are lots of moments of thinking about quitting or why me Kind of thing. But in retrospect, this crazy thing that messes with one's mind became apparent, which was that in 99, we felt like we were on top of the world, because everyone was telling us we were on top of the world, and all the numbers said so, but we couldn't see that right in front of us were these massive risks and how everything was going to get super hard, right? So we felt best right before things are about to be at their worst. And then in 2003, when you're just walking through mud for three years, you're just trying to survive, get to the other side. Growth is slow. Is this ever going to be worth anything? All these questions. What we couldn't see at that moment was that we had all these competitors in 99, but they were all gone by 2003. It was only upside. And from 2003 to 2006, we grew super fast, had a great exit, but we felt worse at the moment when it was like the best was in front of us and we felt the best when only the worst was in front of us. And so what I took away from that is it's kind of like one often hard to predict the future, and we spend a lot of time attached to imagined futures. And so that seems like a big waste of energy. And then the second is that as bad as that period was, and I wouldn't want to go through that again. I wouldn't wish it on myself or anyone. There's a lot of good things that came from that strength and confidence around actually how to run a business and get a business to where it can live on its own. Cash generation. Right. Which is the name of the game. And I feel very fortunate I had that forced opportunity to figure that out for John and I. Yeah.
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B
And that's incredible. And eventually I do want to tie it to just works. But right before we hopped there, you had one more company. So you're selling it to adp. Theoretically. Now you can cruise, but you decide for some ungodly reason to start another company. Company. Take me there for a second. Why?
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A
So when we sold that business, I actually stayed at ADP for a little bit to get it settled there. And that was a good experience, Better than I expected and also meaningful in a set of ways. But John left with the acquisition and began working on some new ideas. And that first experience, entrepreneurial experience with John was it was everything. It was like hard and great and formative and brought us super close. And the idea of building a company with John again was all I could think about doing. And it led to us starting a company was really different than the first one. Company is named Euclidean Technologies. And starting in 08, we were applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to questions of public market investing and raised some funds and put them to work. And it was really interesting. It was interesting because after spending 10 or 12 years really trying to make one company work, it was an opportunity to think about the data footprints on how what the data can tell you about the operating models of every company and how to make assessments around why one company ought to be worth more than another and why one business might be a better business than another. And so it was a good learning opportunity, but that was a different business. When you're making investment decisions using algorithms and data science, you don't need to have big teams of people. And that can be a feature, not a bug, because you can make money and you can pocket more money as an owner. But I started to really miss, and this goes beyond your question, but just to state it, because it leads to some of the things I started to explore after. I needed a break from it. But I started to really miss the meaning that came from leading large teams. And so that was something I had to reconcile with and eventually made some
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decisions around right before that. And I don't know if that I was trying to piece it together, but it sounds like you started that before the housing crisis or right around the housing crisis. Did that impact anything?
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Well, it was a great time to be deploying capital and so we raised initial funds when there was some nervousness in the air, but before the big crisis. And so to be able to invest into that was quite fruitful and enabled Euclidean to get off to a really good start. So in some ways it ended up being a fortunate time to get started.
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B
We need to pause for a super brief break and while we do, take a moment and share this episode with every single person who may be inspired by this. Because this information can truly change your life and theirs. Now I want to check in with you. Yes, you. Are you driven? But maybe feeling stuck in your career or a fraction of who you know you could be, do you secretly feel you should have been further along in your income, influence or impact? Do you ever wonder how to create not just a paycheck, but the life you want with a paycheck? The thought leadership, the legacy, the freedom. Because that was me. And that's exactly why I created the Leap Academy program, which already changed thousands of careers and lives. Look, getting intentional and strategic with your career is now more important than ever. The skills for success have changed. Aq, adaptability, reinventing and leaping are today the most important skills for the future of work. Building portfolio careers, multiple streams of income and ventures are no longer a nice to have. It's a must have. But no one is teaching this except for us in Leap Academy. So if you want more from your career in Life, go to leapacademy.com training. Check out this completely free training about ways to fast track your career and. And you'll even be able to book a completely free strategy call with my team. That's leapacademy.com training. Okay, so take me through that journey from that moment of. But I actually kind of missed the big organization, the leading of big things. And then you actually got into justworks a little bit in a different way from a typical career standpoint. Like you got in as a board and then as a COO, and then there's a president and CEO in 2022. Take us a little bit to that journey.
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A
So John and I, I mean we remained super close and we were building Euclidean and it was a great first couple years of that. But then I started to feel a little bit, I don't know what the adjective would be, but maybe itchy. Where after like 12 years of exhaustion and learning how to lead from scratch, not having worked in company before, just having to learn it, I needed a break from it. But after I had a bit of a break and we're building Euclidean, I started to miss it and so the first step was I ended up. We had three daughters, my wife and I, and she's got big family around New York City. So we wanted to raise family here. And John Ulbricht wanted to get back to Seattle, where he was from. So we ended up building Euclidean New York and Seattle. And I wanted to get networked into the technology community here. And so I reached out to some people, and the most important person I connected with here was a guy named Fred Wilson who runs Union Square Ventures. And he was generous to introduce me around to some folks. And I had known some other venture capitalists here, and they introduced me around, and I just wanted to be around other builders for energy. I wasn't looking to do something different. And through that work, I ended up on a number of boards. I was on the board of Shopkeep, which we sold the Lightspeed, and that was a very interesting experience. And a couple other boards, but one was Just Works. I was introduced by Fred Wilson to Isaac Oates, who was a founder of Justworks, when he had like 20 employees and $300,000 in revenue. And Isaac just. I found him to be a super interesting person. He grew up military intelligence officer, Amazon Engineer, small company that Etsy bought. And then he built the payments infrastructure there. And he was innovating in this HR space. I was like, well, that's pretty different background to be innovating here. And I think he was interested in talking to me because I had built a business that.
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B
Well, I think his employees, yeah, had
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some similarities to what justworks was aspiring to do, but there was no commercial interest. I wasn't looking for angel investments. I certainly wasn't looking for board seats. I just wanted to be in the flow of things. And we got energy from each other and we probably hung out six times or so. And six months in, he said, I've gotten advice because at the time it was just Thrive Capital, a guy named Will Gabriel, who's now at Stripe. So Will was on the board, and Isaac, you know, obviously is the founder, was on the board. And they wanted a third board member, and they thought it should be an independent board member. And so they invited me. And that was, I thought, quite an honor and would be fun way to, like, stretch my skills and contribute to the community. And so joined the board. And I put a lot of effort into being a great board member and helping Isaac grow. And that was a great chapter in our relationship. And then four and a half years goes by and we're still building Euclidean. And Justworks goes from 20 people to, like, four or 500 people. And there were two things that were happening at the time. One is, I was starting to really reconcile with this set of facts that I felt like I needed to be in a leadership role again. But John loves and continues to love and run Euclidean. So the idea of building another, more traditional software company with John was not on the table. And the idea of starting something without John was, like, a little intimidating. But I also had a mental block around the idea that I could work in anyone else's company. It had been, like 20 years of working out of my own companies with John. I mean, that year, in a period I was at adp, but I still kind of viewed that as working on my own thing in a transition period. So that was going on. And then Isaac calls me again. Four and a half years, I'm on the board. And he's not enjoying leading the company as much anymore. It's getting harder. The things that he enjoyed spending time on, he's having a harder time spending time on. And he just says, I think I need to find a chief operating officer or something. And I'm like, well, Isaac, as your lead director, I'll do my best to find you the best chief operating officer. And then there's this pause, and then I'm like, if you think it might be me, we can talk about it, if that's weird. And he's like, would you? And it was this funny interaction, and we both left the call, and he called me the next day and said, hey, listen, if you would be interested, I would be very interested in talking about that. And. And then there were, like, a set of things. I was like, well, I am kind of interested, but, boy, how do I talk to John about this? How do I talk to my wife? And so there were a series of conversations that I went through that all felt a little bit scary as well as, like, a lot of people that had invested in and were involved with Euclidean. But the first call was to John, and it was a great phone call. I think he knew that I needed something a little different, and he supported that and just express some anxiety about what it was going to mean for Euclidean. And we talked through that, and we talked through a plan, and we were successful in transitioning that and getting other people to buy into Euclidean's next chapter without me there. And there were some other conversations as well with my family, but ultimately it led to me coming inside the company as chief operating officer, which led to the second chapter of my relationship with Isaac, because I went from being his board member to working for him. And then we did another.
- [24:04]
B
So let's go there for a second, just a step before we jump. Because again, a lot of our listeners are like, I want to reinvent myself. I'm trying to figure out what's next. And for you that is a big move and it's actually a really interesting hierarchy move on your end.
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A
How was was intimidating in the sense that like I essentially had never worked for anybody. I've been an entrepreneur since I before I turned 23 and I did the ADP thing. But again, that felt like a period where I was representing our company and I definitely reported into someone there. So I kind of had some experience with it. But not only was I reporting into Isaac initially, which was new, but I also have a big founder bias. I know that it's like a lot that he's carrying. I've been in his shoes. How do I manifest in a way where this is positive for everybody and how do I make this great for the team and for myself, but also for Isaac? And so that was just something I hadn't had to do before. And I thought hard about it. I think it was successful in a lot of ways. Although it became clear about a year in that Isaac had a two step transition in his mind because he would bring up things like maybe you ought to do the CEO thing. And I was like, whoa, that wasn't the initial plan. It wasn't like, hey, I'll come do this, but I need to know this route to CEO. In fact, my mind was like, companies tend to go further when their founders are in seat. I like building the company stuff. I don't need to do all that external stuff. I was kind of fine with that. But it became clear that he was really thinking of a two step thing and navigating that with him was like a year long process. And I think the board was nervous a little bit. But ultimately it all was really well handled and a beautiful transition for the company because to Isaac's credit, he put a lot of thought into making it that way.
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B
And to me that's incredible because it probably made you such a better president CEO because you've seen the different angles. But how did you see it? How do you see the different lessons? And especially in justworks, I mean everyone
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A
has their own path. And my path includes founding a couple businesses, being a board member for a couple businesses where I was like the only independent director. Well, in some cases at justworks, we actually built a nice slate of independent directors. And then to come into a company and be an executive, and then now a CEO in a company I didn't start. So those are like four different things that are all around in any given company. You might have board members and a founder and a coo and a CEO ultimately who wasn't the founder. And so for sure, they all give me different perspectives. But at the end of the day, building these things, it's about taking great care of customers and creating an environment for incredible people to do their best work. And so in each seat and in each phase of the business, you're just trying to do those two things. Obviously the way to do them and what it means in different product categories, the specifics are different. But be the best for customers and create the best environment for incredible people to come and do their best work. It is that simple.
- [27:14]
B
But it's complicated.
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A
Yeah, yeah. If you can do those two things right, you're going to have a great company. The details on how to do that, for sure, it's like there's a lot to it, but it all does come together at that level.
- [27:26]
B
So let's go deeper there. As a company just work sees. I mean, I have the number of 14,000 business owners. I'm sure there's fact vision, but I think when you see big data, like, we see a lot of, like, people in transition in their careers. So when you see big data, you start seeing patterns. And I'm sure you guys see a lot of patterns and really important lessons for small business owners. What would be some of the things, if you're sitting in front of a room of small business owners, because you have a lot of people listening to this, what would you say are some of the biggest things that either they're blind spots or things that they need to, like, really acknowledge. What are you guys seeing?
- [28:05]
A
Well, just two statements. I mean, one is there is a lot of Data on the 14,000 businesses that we're currently serving. And that business is, you can say fluctuating or it's just going up. But like a lot of, like, I think the insight here is less in the data because, like the psychological journey that people go through and getting the fundamentals right or wrong, it doesn't always show up in the data. But where I get to see that is, you know, I spend a lot of time with our customers. I spend a lot of time when invited to like founder and CEO forums. And I learned a lot in those environments because a lot of these people are our customers and a lot of them should be our customers. But because I Founded these businesses, my own before. I know that behind the surface, everyone shows up at these founder CEO gatherings with their chest puffed out and I'm killing it and I'm doing this. But once everyone settles in a little bit, realizes they're with people, there's a lot of peddling and the armor comes off and you get a little bit more like the real deal and the vulnerability, you realize everyone's on these incredible emotional roller coasters and these incredible journeys and you began to see patterns there around the folks that get the furthest with the least drama and the folks that are stuck in the washing machine of how hard these things are. And I think that what I've observed is that founders and people that start small businesses and growing businesses, whether they're technology companies or not, there's always some amount of self inflicted wounds in retrospect. And the best ones have a low self inflicted wound quotient, right?
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B
Tell me more about that.
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A
Well, these self inflicted wounds where they show up, right? Co founder relationships, good co founder relationship could be like a great marriage, bad one could be like a bad marriage and debilitating like a bad marriage. And by the way, breaking up is like a divorce, right? So the co founder relationship, the first investor that puts money in, do they bought into what you want to do or not? Did you take a little bit higher valuation but you sacrificed on alignment? If you sacrificed on alignment, you might have 10 years. Every time that you got to interact with your investors, it sucks your energy out. Whereas if you get a great aligned investor, even if you gave up a little bit more of the company to get the right investor in, every time that you talk to them, you get new energy or they're a good foil for you, you're going to go so much further, right? And building these businesses is hard. And so if you have this accumulation of self inflicted wounds, and I think it's pretty common where several years in you realize like 20, 30% of your energy is just paying down these debts all the time. Your chance of building something great is low versus someone who has mitigated those things, you got an opportunity to go a lot further, right? And so first customers, customer feedback can be great, but an early customer can also take you off your product strategy if you want it. Too bad. I think that founders that put a lot of thought into their foundational like culture, mission, vision, values, stuff. Some companies do that and it's just stuff on a wall. Other companies breathe, it just works, People breathe it. I talked to a new hire today who's been here for like two months. And he's like, yeah, everyone talked about the values in the hiring process, but now that I'm here, it's like, whoa, everyone lives this. And I believe that's true. But I loved hearing that. And I think companies that do that, it's like you have a better foundation on which to scale. Because if your values and your mission and vision are like, lived, then when someone is making a decision two levels away from you or making a hiring decision to bring someone in the company, what you would want as the founder, the CEO is more likely to be done if you were in the room. But if you don't have that shared understanding, then it's going to go all over the place, going to have a mess. And so those are just some of the areas where I feel like folks are super intentional about those things that get those early decisions right or take the time to make them right and don't optimize the transaction, but optimize to like getting the foundation right. That's what I think the pattern is for the best outcomes. And where you see a lot of people having trouble, it's because they miss those early things or rush through them.
- [32:07]
B
That's incredibly valuable. But tell me for a second, as a founder, if you're trying to run a thousand mile per hour, acquire the first clients, market fit, right. And you're trying to do everything relatively alone, and then on the other hand, you're trying to build that foundation to not make these mistakes that you mentioned, because you're right, every single one of these can take you down. What do you focus on? How do you balance? How do you do this? Right.
- [32:32]
A
I'm going to make a statement and this could be misused. Okay. But it is go slow to go fast. It's like know when you got to go slow to make certain of these decisions, right? And then other times when you just when speed's going to win. And I think there is judgment and art required to know which modality to like optimize for. But if you're thinking about teaming up with someone as a co founder or you're thinking about your first investor, or you're thinking about what product feedback to take out of the gate or to not take, maybe you go a little slow. But once you have a plan and you're like, we want to get to 1,000 customers in this market and we have a sense of what product market fit is for us and our ideal customer profile, well, then you just go as fast as you can. You're going to break down walls. And so going slow to go fast later, I think is a way to balance those two things.
- [33:25]
B
So what do you say to founders that they feel like they're carrying all their weight on their shoulders and it feels like a lonely path, or maybe it shouldn't?
- [33:34]
A
Well, I would say it is a lonely path. And for me, I think there were times that it felt lonely in that first couple years. But, boy, like in that.combus, i felt super alone. And it was tough because I was feeling all this pressure. I was making decisions that were impacting people's lives. Nothing was working the way I had envisioned it should be working. I couldn't talk to my co founder about it because he felt the same thing. I didn't want to be a burden on him. Couldn't talk to my investors because for them, I had to keep their confidence up. So they didn't just give away our company or suggest that we sell for parts, as a lot of companies did in that period of time. And so what I invested in then, that has been an essential part of my personal foundation going forward is I found a group of entrepreneurs that I started spending time with, all of whom, and these are not all technology founders, but people building serious builders that were all alone. And we found each other and we helped each other and built enough trust so that we could be truly vulnerable about the things that were on our minds. And we helped each other. And so that group, there were a couple people that came and left from like 2001 to 2005. But since 2005, the group's been the same. And so for 15 years or so, we met every month. And I could tell you the format of those meetings. And then once a year we'd go on a retreat together. And we're actually all going to be together in like, two weeks or something out in Montana. So we still get together. And it's been essential to have a bunch of entrepreneurs who all know how lonely these journeys are. But we've all been through multiple ventures together. Ups and downs, failure, successes, multiple exits. To then be able to go to this group and be like, here's what I'm thinking about. And to be able to benefit from their experience has been priceless. So I guess the takeaway is you don't need to do it alone. There are other people out there that would love to connect with you, and they also feel alone. And if you can make that connection, it can be really valuable.
- [35:29]
B
I do want to hear more about this because I think One of the things that maybe struck me in Leap Academy is, first of all, I needed my own network of founders. You're right. Otherwise, it was lonely as heck. But also what I realized, and I don't think that initially was by design, Like, I didn't mean to build a movement and a community. I thought, I'm teaching content. And what eventually was created is this community of people mentoring and peer groups and things that they call it movement. We call them leapers. And I don't think that that was a design, but, you know, I think we kind of stumbled on it. But I would love to hear a little bit about what are those meetings look like. How do you create something that is so consistent? Because 15 years is a long time. This is really consistent.
- [36:16]
A
I mean, when we all met, we didn't have that depth of understanding and trust. And so it was a little bit more professionalized. Right? You'd start off, everyone go around the room and share updates. So like, good, bad, personal and business, three minutes each timekeeper. And like, it was like rigorous. Like, if you missed more than one meeting a year, you had to get voted back in. Like, you were default hours. And if you showed up late, you know you're not in the meeting. So for a number of years, we ran it that way. And then over time, we got a little bit more flexible. But after that, someone would have prepared a presentation with a coach, and a coach would be on the team, one of the other founders in the room, and they would prepare, like, something where they might present for 20 minutes. They would get 20 minutes of questions. But then this is the essential thing. Then we'd go around the room and everyone would share something. But it wouldn't be like, alana, this is what you should do. Wouldn't be that. It'd be like, okay, Alana, you just explained that you're hiring a CFO for the first time, or you're thinking about buying a company and whatever. The closest experience I had was this. This is what I did. This is what I learned. So solely speaking from experience, not advice. And then you got to dinner after, and then you could get the advice over the drinks, right? But you had the benefit of getting 10 people's best, most analogous experience. And it would always be super helpful, but not just to know that you're not alone, because you feel so alone with these crazy business challenges, but you're not alone. People have gone through similar things over time. And once a year, we'd go on a retreat, and we all want to learn about something or we want to discover something about ourselves, we'd structure content like that. So that's how we did it.
- [37:56]
B
Ah, that's such a good, specific example. So first of all, thank you for sharing that and I want to take you to something because again, you've been through a lot of turbulent times and you shared a little bit. And right now I think we are seeing a really weird, fast accelerated time that I think a lot of leaders are trying to grasp, like what on earth. And sometimes they're founders and sometimes they're just leading big organizations, but still this is moving faster than anybody can ask that you actually grasp. And I think a lot of us don't even know what's on the menu soon. Right. So how do you navigate that in JustWorks? And then, you know, I do want to hear a little bit of like, you know about justworks and like what you guys do and how do you help people with everything that they've done because you are kind of this all encompassing solution. So take me there for a second.
- [38:49]
A
So justworks is all about helping small businesses grow with confidence. And we do that by taking over and providing solutions around everything that one needs to have a workforce and to be compliant as you employ people all over the place. So the world is changing super fast. And I've been through some of these dislocations before. I think this one may be bigger than anything that's been in my career with AI. I guess the most fundamental thing, and this is what we tell our people and our teams, is this is a time to lean into the change, be the change manifested and not to hold on tightly to the way things used to be. And that decision that you have to make yourself may well be decisive about how relevant you will be and the skills that you'll have going forward. And we're going to create a lot of opportunities and training and forums and so forth to deepen your understanding of how the world's changing. But it's up to you about how you lean into it. And so this is a time when resisting change could be really challenging for someone's career if they choose to do that, because the world I think could just pass them by. So there's kind of that general message and then that general heavy investment in enabling the company to have the opportunity individuals to learn and to adjust. But then we think about AI here in three areas. How is it going to impact the market we sell into, how's it going to impact customer expectations and how is it going to impact how we operate and we have points of view on all three. The companies that we'll be hiring in the future may well be different than the ones that we're hiring in the past. What I've seen in other periods of time of dislocation is that industries and companies and jobs that were relevant can become less relevant on the other side. But whole new industries and companies and job families get created. And so what are those new ones going to be and how are we going to make sure it just works, that we're super relevant for where the future is going to be as it relates to customer expectations. If you think about like B2B SaaS and so forth, like no one, very soon, no one is going to log into an app, click around, pick a date range, select fields to get a report. You're going to like, just talk to like.
- [41:01]
B
Right. It's going to give it to you.
- [41:03]
A
Yeah, tell me about how my workforce has evolved. No, I want to see it by tenure. No, show it to me by location. Okay. But I don't know if that zone is going to be an area of sustainable advantage. Like I think our aspiration would be to be like 18 months in front of our competitors. But everyone I think will catch up to that much like on Internet apps today, not really differentiating by your single sign on login or the way reporting works. You might be ahead of a competitor behind, but you can kind of overcome that. I think the real area of differentiation is going to be in how we operate and how other companies may operate. Because there, instead of having these tools that I think everyone will have access to, it's like your unique context, your data, your knowledge of how these processes ought to work, your company's embedded knowledge manifesting in whole new ways. And so that's what we're focused on. And we're taking processes that in our industry are done by others, largely manually that we had in the past, semi automated. We're taking them a whole new levels and looking at triple word scores where you can take a job to be done and you can make it now that you're providing even better experience to customers because something they had to wait for before they can now get instantly. Number two, we're able to increase our margins by doing things in more automated ways. And then three, we're able to focus our humans on providing concierge level care. So not managing a manual process in the background, but freed up to do concierge level care for customers when they're going through these key life cycle moments. Right. When you really want to talk to human. The first time you might be hiring in California or in Germany, or the first time, like, you're terminating someone in a protected class, how are you going to do that? Or you're thinking about your benefit strategy so you can grow in a new market, you might want to talk to someone even if, like, all the answers could be there in a chat interface. So focusing our humans there, which also then elevates their jobs. Right. And so we've got a lot of things that we've done, a lot of things in motion, big plans there. That's the zone where I think we can create real, lasting differentiation versus our industry. But for sure, we're all learning all the time. These tools are getting better all the time. There's examples in other industries emerging for us to learn from. And so you gotta be open to that and willing to be the change, embrace the change. And certainly not hope that it's gonna stop changing, because that.
- [43:23]
B
Because it's not. It's not.
- [43:24]
A
That'll create a lot of suffering for yourself. Right.
- [43:27]
B
Don't be the ostrich.
- [43:29]
A
Yeah, it's not going to happen.
- [43:29]
B
Do not be dastard. So tell me, if I'm like a business owner, if somebody's listening and they're a business owner, how do they know if it's justworks or maybe it's Gusto or other things? Like, I know there's, like, so many other options. How did they decide to get to justworks? And who is an ideal audience for you?
- [43:50]
A
Way to think about it. Like, if you had, like, two axes. One is people that focus on enterprise customers or people that focus on the people that you and I are talking about. Like the entrepreneur and small business owner that has everything on their back, but no one pays attention to them because smaller businesses, they're hard to reach. You don't make much money on. So a lot of the companies you hear about in our space are really focused on enterprise customers. Or if they serve small businesses, they're kind of trying to use them as a stepping stone to go enterprise. We don't do that. We are focused on helping the underserved. Companies often will start with us, definitely when they have under 100 employees, we have lots of customers. Start with us when they have, like, two employees. And a lot of our competitors won't even talk to companies when they're that small. So we want to be great for the people that most need it. And then we want to be there for them as they grow into the hundreds of employees that's One dimension on another dimension though, there's a lot of tools out there. There's folks that will just provide a tool for you to run payroll for your team. But you're kind of on the hook for everything, figuring it out, how to comply, what decisions to make around how to structure your workforce, how to structure your benefits. Justworks is there for you. Within our platform, we're not just providing tools, we're providing insight. We're taking over responsibility for compliance risk. We're doing everything necessary so that you can focus on what's really unique in your business. And that frees up entrepreneurs to do amazing things. It's another one of these energy questions, right? We talked about self inflicted wounds, but then also how do you structure your company so you're able to put 100% of your energy on building your own product and serving your own customers as opposed to figuring out how to terminate someone in California or how to put together a benefit plan that's going to allow you to recruit from much bigger companies. That's where justworks is the best.
- [45:33]
B
That's incredible explanation by the way. And you're like, oh, I need to check them out. So thank you, Mike.
- [45:38]
A
Please do. It'd be an honor to have you as a customer. We can talk offline.
- [45:43]
B
So tell me, how do people reach you, Mike? And thank you for this incredible conversation.
- [45:49]
A
Www.justworks.com One word in terms of reaching me. I'm Mike Seckler at CEO of Justworks. You can see me on LinkedIn. But it's been really nice talking with you and I can't wait to our next conversation about getting Leap Academy as justworks customer.
- [46:06]
B
Mike, thank you for being on the show. That was incredibly insightful and thanks for sharing all these stories and let's go, let's grow.
- [46:14]
A
Yeah, let's go.
- [46:17]
B
Well, I hope you got from this as much as I did. I learned so much, especially what to do with peer support, like how to not be alone on the journey. And yes, Leap Academy is part of that. And if you're listening to this after leapcon, just make sure to check some of our free trainings. We have free trainings all the time. We're going to have a lot of links in the show notes. So I want to read a review from you. Remember, every week I choose a review from either Apple or Spotify or whatever it is that you sent your reviews. So make sure to review us. So maybe we'll choose you next. So right now we're going to read from Ryder forever. Thank you Ryder forever. I like that name. And he basically said, I'm not sure why I get out of the habit of listening to Ilana's podcast, because every time I revisit her series, I get great information, hopeful suggestions, and positive encouragement from the interview that she does. Thank you, Ryder. I appreciate you so, so much. And seriously, these reviews mean the world. So add yours. And what I want to do now is answer a question. So every week we look at the YouTube, we look at your comments, and we choose a question to answer right here on the show. And right now it's a question from Helena, who asked, how do I become a more productive leader? And one of the ways that I like to remember it is use acronyms. Bread, B, R, E, A, D. And the way you can want to look at it is B. You want to batch. You want to start batching things together. Because as much as we think that our brain is really good about multitasking, it actually takes capacity away. So batch as many things together. Batch your emails, batch your social media. Batch things together. The next one is R. Reduce. There's a lot of things that you are busy doing that you could probably reduce. You'll answer maybe a few less comments on LinkedIn, you're going to answer a few less emails, you're going to wait a little bit between answering emails, et cetera. So what are the things? For example, as a leader, I realized that if I don't rush to answer the emails, some of these things kind of solve themselves. There's a place for urgency and there's a place to actually give your team a little bit of an opportunity to step up and actually answer themselves. So kind of find where are you actually stepping in to help your ego versus where are you stepping in? Because it's really important, and I've probably done both. So reduce and then eat is for eliminate. There are things that you are doing today that should be totally eliminated. And I want you to really think about where you're spending your cycles that probably are not serving you or they're not taking you closer to your goals. Sometimes it's about people that you need to eliminate because they're right now sucking your soul and sucking your energy. Sometimes it's about the Netflix that is taking you all the way to the middle of the night and then you're tired. So what is it that you need to eliminate altogether from your day? And then A is for automate. What are the things that you're doing again and again and again that should actually be automated? Now is AI it's so much easier, but overall, like what are the things that you can start automating and creating flows around because it's just going to make your work so much easier and so much more productive. And the last one is D is delegate. What are the things that you can actually delegate in a lot more helpful way? If you're going to send an email to infoapacademy.com tell us that you heard about delegation in the podcast. We have a really beautiful PDF or some of the tasks that I believe you can delegate and it's going to give you a lot of ideas of how to structure the days and what are the things that you can actually start delegating ASAP and why it's so much worth it. So maybe next podcast I will actually talk about how do you value your worth and how do you decide what to delegate to? So stay tuned. Make sure to always check those at the last piece of the episode because there's always going to be a really fun Q and A at the end. So share your questions in the comments on YouTube because I check every single one and I pick one and I talk about it. So I would love to name you and give you credit. So share this with everybody you know because it really, really helps us bring amazing guests and have a beautiful rest of the week. I'll see you soon. Remember, this episode is not just for you and me. You never know whose life you are meant to change by sharing this episode with them. And if you love today's episode, please click the subscribe or Download button for the show and give it a five star review. This really means the world. Join me in helping tens of millions of individuals reinvent their career and leap into their full potential. Look, getting intentional and strategic with your career is now more important than ever. The skills for success have changed. Aq, adaptability, reinventing and leaping are today the most important skills for the future of work. Building portfolio careers, multiple streams of income and ventures are no longer a nice to have. It's a must have. But no one is teaching this except for us in Leap Academy. So if you want more from your career in Life, go to leapacademy.com training check out our completely free training about ways to fast track your career. You'll even be able to book a completely free career strategy call with my team. So go to leapacademy.com training.