← The Investor With Joel Palathinkal
The Investor With Joel Palathinkal
Connor Drake: Senior Coach and Head of Content at MindMaven
01:24:34
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to the Investor, a podcast where I, Joel Palo Thinkle, your host, dives deep into the minds of the world's most influential institutional investors. In each episode, we sit down with an investor to hear about their journeys and how global markets are driving capital allocation. So join us on this journey as we explore these insights. All right, so I'm really excited today. I've got an amazing guest. This is really interesting because when you think about building culture, especially in private equity or venture capital, you need to do it the right way. A lot of people hire experts. And really proud to say today that I've got the expert of experts. I've got Connor Drake here. He's a senior executive coach at Mind Maven. They're a coaching firm that helps leaders free up 12 hours each week by changing how they work with their executive assistant. So imagine if you had 12 hours back, what would you do? How would you use up that time? Probably to do things that are more meaningful and things that are creating more high impact because you got to think about the time that you're spending to do something and what that cost is. Right. Are you spending as a CEO time doing $12 an hour tasks? Right. Are you uploading and posting content? Are you manually responding to things that could be automated? Those are things that could probably be replaced and augmented, both with a human that you train and you're building a staff and a team that has goals, but then also with a community of agents. As we're heading into the AI era, using technology to augment some of those things as well. We're going to talk about all of that, but just kind of a high level overview on Connor. He's a senior executive coach at Mind Maven. They help leaders, as I mentioned, free up this time by changing how they work with their executive assistant. And Connor is also the co author of Radical Delegation, a number one bestselling book on Amazon. So we've had some amazing authors on the investor podcast in the past. So what I'd probably like to extract from you, Connor, is a couple high level insights from that book as well. But, you know, why don't we start with you telling me a little bit about Mind Maven and maybe the origin story and, you know, just this concept of radical delegation. I'm sure a lot of that is covered in your book, but, you know, really just unpack that for us because, you know, the audience here is people that are working in private equity, venture capital. We have founders, we have corporates, we have executives. All of these people are busy people they are busy with their day job. They're busy with their families. They're busy with responsibilities and also social life. Right. So how do you organize all that? So let's have you kind of give an overview on yourself, Mind Maven, and this whole concept of radical delegation. And you gave me permission earlier to interrupt you periodically with additional questions.
- [03:00]
B
Oh, please do. Thank you, Jolie. And I've been introduced at this point probably hundreds of times over my career. That might have been one of the best intros I think I've ever gotten. You set the stage very well. So thank you. Thank you. So, quick context on myself. I'm Connor Drake, senior coach at Mind Maven, also head of automation. As we expand into a lot of the AI and automation world, and we have a very unique mandate. Now, the reason that I joined the company in the first place almost ten years ago now was because of the mission to help people reach their fullest potential through relationships. A lot of people know us as the productivity people, and they say, okay, you got to work with Karna, you got to work with Mind Maven. They're going to give you back 12 hours a week. And yes, we will. But like you said, the more important question, Joel, is why are we freeing up that time? There's no net gain if all you do is free up, say, two hours a day from your inbox. If you dump that into calendar management. Right. It's about taking this time and investing it in those things that are truly meaningful, that are truly going to move the needle for you and for your company. And the way that we see it, the single most important thing that you can invest your time and your energy into is relationships. And the reason for that is very simple. I believe very staunchly that you don't know a single person who's reached the top without help from others in some way, shape or form. We've all had people who have supported us along the way. And I appreciate you nodding along, Joel. I've made that statement thousands of times over my career at Mayan Maven. I have yet to have anyone disagree with me on relationships driving success. But the interesting thing is that if I put those same people on the spot, they'll also admit that they don't give relationships the time and the attention and the energy they deserve. They know they should be doing more for relationships, even though they also know relationships drive success. Right. So what does any of this have to do with freeing up time? The interesting thing is what we've learned over 15 plus years of doing this at Mind maven is that although everyone agrees relationships are important, the things that you need to do to invest into relationships are very rarely urgent. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you, Joel, or your audience, we're living in times that are more and more and more urgency driven. Right? And so we can give people all the relationship management tactics in the world. If they don't have the time and the resources to execute on those tactics, then we may as well be shouting into the void for all the difference we're making. We realized first, we have to help people solve this problem of time. We need to give them their time back. And we believe there's really only two ways to do that. We have two. We call them superpowers. There's a superpower of intent and the superpower of leverage. Intent is all about taking the limited time that you have right now and using it more intentionally, making sure that the time that you do have to spend is being invested in those things that are really making a difference. And a lot of people take that skill as kind of for granted. It's either a skill you have or you don't. But we believe it's truly a skill. It can be developed just like any other skill. But then what tends to attract people more is the idea of leverage. And leverage is about freeing up massive amounts of time. Not just an hour here and there, although an hour is great, but 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 hours a week. If you can free up that amount of time, the difference you can make in that time, the ways you can invest into and leverage relationships, build culture, generate opportunities, that is huge.
- [06:29]
A
Let me ask you a question. So, you know, Connor, you have the data, right? You have the stats, people. All your clients are freeing up 12 hours of time. What are the top three things that they're doing with that time? I'd assume trying to just stay in your zone of genius and obviously, you know, go out and meet people. I have a membership club with a private. I have this private venue that I have access to, and I just realized I haven't used it in the last six months, and I still pay for it. I used to use it a lot, especially with COVID I would meet people like two to three times a week, and I would host there. And, you know, where I host, it's a very centralized location in the city, so it's very convenient. But I just realized, like, couple week, couple months ago, I was like, I haven't used this private club. You know, I want to, though. So, you know, I'm assuming it's for relationship. I'm assuming it's just to focus on, you know, your zone of genius or maybe do some innovation, but you've got the data. So what are the top three to five things that people can read, you know, repurpose with those 12 hours of time? Is it. Is it just sleeping more? Is it just. Just maybe not doing anything? But what. What's kind of. What are you seeing?
- [07:40]
B
There's something to be said for that, and I am all for recharging. I'd say most of the people that we're working with and are attracted to our work aren't necessarily looking for more rest time, although I push them toward it more often than not. The single biggest thing that everyone says they want to do more of is unstructured thinking time. And when you're building a company, you're in the early stages. That really is your zone of genius as the founder, as a leader, having time to just think and problem solve. Not just, how do I get through today? What does the next month look like? The next six months, the next year, three years? So making sure that that time gets onto the calendar and is there consistently is huge. We teach something called white space time, just at its core, just calendar blocking. Make sure that you have four consecutive hours of unstructured thinking time every single week, same day and time Wednesday from 8am to noon. Whatever works best for you, but get that on the calendar and protect it at all.
- [08:34]
A
But what do you do at that time? Do you just sit and just kind of. I mean, I mean, I know Jeff Bezos talks about. He. I think he talks about puttering, where he only starts his day at 10:00am you know, not anymore. Right now he's, you know, on a yacht. But, but he would, he would allocate time to go for a walk. And that's kind of the best time for him to kind of think about innovations, think about, you know, building a rocket company, think about doing, innovate, you know, innovative opportunities. So, you know, what, you know, you talked about unstructured time, but, you know, how do you organize that? Is it just kind of freestyle where people figure it out? Or is there a playbook where you come up with objectives and key results on a whiteboard? Or is it just time to just have that time open and you just reflect? Because is there a way to organize? Is there a way to structure this unstructured, prescribed time?
- [09:28]
B
Certainly. And everyone's a little bit different. Some people thrive in just four hours to do whatever I want Let me add one caveat to that. The single biggest tip that I can give folks when it comes to calendar blocking. Don't just place an empty block on your calendar called white space or block or thinking time that ultimately doesn't tell you anything. And when someone reaches out and says, hey Joel, can I meet with you Wednesday at 10am that's in the middle of your white space block and you haven't pre designated work to that block, it's going to be really easy for you to schedule over because you don't know what you're using the time for anyway.
- [10:01]
A
Sure.
- [10:01]
B
So at the start of each week. Yes. Take the time to figure out at least one big task you're using that time for. Rename the calendar block appropriately. So it's now white space, dash whatever three to five word descriptor on the project you're working on. Maybe it's one thing that we see a lot of is, is, you know, planning for the next quarter now that that's going to come up all the time. So you know, Q1 2026 planning. And now when I reach out and say, hey Joel, can I meet with you? You can now compare, is this meeting with Connor more important than q, you know, Q1 2026 planning? And probably no. And it's much easier to now compare apples to apples than apples and oranges. Sure. But as far as adding some additional structure to that, one thing I really recommend is having what I call a white space ritual. Just breaking out of whatever you were doing, whether it's, you know, waking up and getting started on the day or back to back meetings, whatever came right before white space time, you need a ritual to transition into this time. And a walk is one of the biggest tips I have for folks some form of exercise, it can be as lightweight as a walk. I had a client who scheduled their tennis lessons right before white space time and that was their quote unquote ritual that people meditate, read, listen to a podcast, but have something that helps you transition into the time, that's, that's kind of rule number one. Rule number two, I highly recommend at least some of that time at the start be designated for relationship management, even if it's just sending one email to someone you wouldn't otherwise have reached out to. And that's a strategy I'll talk more about later. But reach out to someone, proactively invest into a relationship and then use the remainder of that time for some project that if you did not make the time for it, you wouldn't naturally Find the time for it.
- [11:44]
A
Yeah, that's really helpful. And then tell me a little bit about the pillars of radical delegation. You know, how can you delegate? Where do people screw up when it comes to delegation? Sometimes people delegate, but then they kind of. They're still micromanaging, so they're not actually delegating. They're like, hey, I want you to do this. But hey, I noticed when you did it, you got to do these things too. And they keep nitpicking and then they never delegate. So I'm assuming that's one of the challenges. But we'd love to learn, maybe the pillars of delegation, maybe kind of break it out into some of the highlights of your book. And then also, what's bad delegation.
- [12:24]
B
Yeah, certainly. So when we use the term radical delegation, when we wrote that book, our idea, our definition was that as a leader, you should try to find a way to delegate everything that needs to be done, but does not specifically need to be done by you. And that's often for a lot of folks where this role of an EA comes into play. Working with an assistant, we use the term engagement manager personally, we see this hire that you make as a cross between a really intuitive EA and an experienced chief of staff. Kind of operate in the gray area between where they're handling administrative work, but they're also making sure that you're using your time in strategic ways or helping you manage your relationships. So having someone that you can hire, that you have that level of trust with, where you can hand something off to them, you know they're going to take it, they're going to hold you accountable, they're going to push things through to the end. If you're not working with someone like that and you have the resources, making that hire is one of the most valuable investments you can make.
- [13:22]
A
Sure.
- [13:23]
B
And that, frankly, that's what. That's the first biggest mistake, if you will, when it comes to delegation is just the fact that most people don't do it. They don't. They don't take the time to think about what they need to get off their plate. They don't have the people in place to delegate to, so they just try and do everything themselves. And that works for a little while as you're building a company and you're scrappy, but as the company scales, you have to scale as a leader. And if you don't have someone you can delegate to, you are not going to scale alongside the company. That's a recipe for burnout.
- [13:54]
A
Yeah, that's one, huh?
- [13:58]
B
Another Very common mistake is, of course, not delegating. Well, be like, you know, hiring someone on their first day, giving them this, this, you know, big project and saying, you know, hey, go take care of this for me. If you hire a rock star, they may be able to take that and produce good results with it, but you want to make sure that you're setting this person up for success, whoever they are, whether it's. Whether it is an assistant or just, you know, someone on your executive team, anyone you're delegating to. And if you're delegating, say, a new task to someone, especially a new hire, there is a parenting principle. Actually, I'm blanking on the name of it, but the idea is that you're teaching your kids how to handle responsibilities or chores. And usually what that starts with is step one is, you're doing it, you're the one doing the dishes. We'll say, if we take kids here, you're the one doing the dishes. But you want them to start taking some ownership. You start with number. Step one, you're doing it, and then you do it with them. Step two, so you're still doing the dishes, but they're watching, they're learning, they're asking questions, you're explaining things as you go. And then step three is they do it with you. So now they're the one doing the dishes, but you're standing off to the side, watching, giving feedback, stopping them from making any huge mistakes. And then step four is they do it on their own.
- [15:09]
A
Sure.
- [15:09]
B
And obviously, every task doesn't need that level of granularity when it comes to delegation. But if you're delegating something big, especially to a new team member, going through those steps, you're currently doing it, now you do it with them. Maybe they join a zoom call with you and you're sharing your screen, you're walking through what you're doing, why you're doing it, hand it off to them, let them do it, and you watch and then hand it off to them to run on their own. That's setting them up for success. But at the very least, if nothing else, if you're going to delegate something and you know what you want the outcome to be, make sure you at least communicate that. That's the single biggest thing. People just hand off tasks all the time, and they have in their head what they want the result to be, but they don't communicate that result. That's step one. Figure out what you want, then hand it off and make sure you communicate that outcome. To the team member. That makes sense.
- [15:54]
A
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
- [15:57]
B
Excellent, excellent.
- [16:01]
A
So, you know, would love to kind of learn a little more about Mind Maven, you know, maybe give us a teaser on, you know, kind of the, you know, the, the business and you know, some of the main key pain points that your clients have and you know, how you can make them successful and, and then, you know, after that we can talk about like, why it matters to really, you know, get these people to where they need to be and, and just talk about, you know, just an outline of, you know, just some other insights in terms of where coaching can, can help, community can help, culture can help. But also, you know, when we talk about AI, it's really scaling yourself. How do you take one of yourself and turn yourself into like, you know, 500 clones, which, which relates to an output of like predictable revenue over time. Right. So we'd love to kind of get, you know, maybe unpack a little more about MindMaven, the people that you work with and kind of some of the solutions that you have. And then obviously we're going to go through, you know, an amazing presentation. I took a look at it and I think it's going to be really a huge learning for the community to really just see some of these frameworks because a lot of us, we're just stuck doing busy work and we're wondering why we're doing it and we may not have the budget to hire a full time person. Right. So you got to figure out ways to do this efficiently and scalably and repeatably.
- [17:26]
B
Absolutely. And our book, Radical Delegation, when we first started writing it, AI really it wasn't a thing, not in the public eye. By the time we published it, it was just kind of emerging. ChatGPT was gaining its tract popularity and now of course, AI is everywhere. And a very common question that we get from folks as well, do I even need an assistant anymore? You know, AI can do so much and it can. I personally do not believe that AI is a replacement for a good executive assistant. And I don't believe it is going to eliminate the role of an executive assistant. But I think what we're going to see is that AI that EAs, that assistants who use AI will begin to replace those who do not. Not.
- [18:07]
A
Well, what I'll say too is there's going to be a premium. Right now the new millionaire is the plumber, the H vac technician. So what do you need to do that you can't use a bot? Right. You got to actually physically go somewhere and and fix a pipe. Right. So if you have an assistant that can do that, even if it's an in person assistant that can kind of do some of that work and you can repeatedly train them how to do that very efficiently, that's one piece. But then part of the biggest businesses now need humans to develop community. You know, people can tell if it's a bot messaging people in Slack. Right. But when you got a real human being warming up the crowd in your Slack channel, you know, asking questions, you know, picking on people, you know, just, you know, AI agents aren't there and you know, never say never. Right. I mean I look, we are now sitting in cars and there's no driver. So never say never to, you know, a focus group that's all agents just talking to each other and there's no humans at all. Right. It's not too far away or not too far fetched. And I don't think it's too far away where we've got a robot doing the dishes and taking care of the kids at some point.
- [19:20]
B
And I think an important question that we're going to have to ask and continue asking as humans, frankly, is what should AI do? Just because it can do something doesn't necessarily mean that it should. Should it do the dishes? Absolutely. What is the benefit in having a human do the dishes? There probably isn't much of one when it comes to especially relationships. Not saying there aren't parts of relationship management that AI can't automate. There are some great ones and we'll talk about some of those. But I had a client come to me one time. They've come across this email tool they're really excited about because it hooked up to their inbox. It would read emails of the kids came in, it would draft a reply and you could even set it up to send the response if you trusted it enough. And they were excited about this and I had to take a step back with them and say, technologically that's really exciting. But imagine your best friend also has this app and they're using this and so they write you an AI message that you never see that then gets read and responded to by AI and then their AI bottom. So there's this whole faux relationship that's being built that you were never a part of.
- [20:27]
A
Yeah.
- [20:28]
B
So having. Just to give a very tactical example here, you can delegate the creation of an email. No one has ever valued you, Joel, for writing an email. You could write the most beautiful email in the world if it sits in your draft folder. It makes no impact, right? So leverage AI or leverage an assistant to draft a message, but the one who has final eyes on it, the one who presses send on it, has to be you, has to be the human. Because the moment you outsource the delivery of an interaction or an experience, it's no longer your relationship. And if it's not your relationship, it's not authentic. And that has to be the core.
- [21:04]
A
And I would say part of it too is, you know, humans still need to be, and I don't think this can change. Humans still need to be the conductor, right? They still need to kind of be the orchestrator. So I do believe that a virtual assistant can be a clone of you and actually be a conductor as well. You know, they have a conscience, they're human beings, they have, you know, critical reasoning and those skills are trainable with a bunch of reps. And now you don't have to do that. You don't have to do the conducting anymore. You have someone that you've trust and trained up to manage the agents, Right? But you still AI, you still need a conductor to write the prompt, to guide the prompt and where it needs to go. If you've got agents, they still need instructions and, you know, that reasoning still needs to be there, so.
- [21:51]
B
Exactly. And intuition and empathy, again, never say never. But those are going to be, I think, the hardest things to authentically replicate with AI. Having human involvement is still necessary. And that's when we talk about building automations for folks. We're kind of going very heavily into that right now and, you know, using tools like N8 and Aura Zapier and building these automations. But the idea isn't to remove humans entirely from the equation. It's to free them up from the parts of the work that don't need to be done by a human so they can spend more time on the things that have benefit from having human oversight, human intuition, human empathy. That's where you can elevate AI. I don't want to say slop, although that's a word that gets thrown around a lot. But you know, AI slop to something that feels genuine still, but it still took you as the conductor or your assistant, as the one who's coming in and looking at this draft, 20% of the time it would have taken if they had to do the entire thing from start to finish themselves.
- [22:49]
A
Sure. So we're going to jump into this amazing presentation that Connor is going to go through and this is really going to dive deeper into how private equity and venture capital investors Even investment bankers can intentionally manage their relationships, build culture within their organization. You know, the Mind Maven team was kind enough to personalize us, personalize this for our community and especially the industry. Because, I mean, it's just as you're a general partner at a venture fund, right? You're, what are you doing? You're raising money, you're dealing with, you know, institutional LPs that gave you money. You're dealing with companies that you invested in, you're dealing with other investors that you built relationships with. Now you, now you got to do the research, the due diligence, the financial modeling. You can't do all of that. You know, you'll just be a one person band. So, you know, I have talked to several fund managers that are just spread really, really thin. So I think, you know, what you guys are doing is essentially God's work. You know, helping people get to where they need to be and essentially helping people scale themselves to just free, free up time to just be better investors. Institutional allocators. But then also their founders that they're supporting. Those CEOs of those companies, those guys are spread thin too, because they've got multiple clients, right? They've got their customers, they've got their investors, they've got other strategic partners that they're depending on. So all of us have, like, if you really think about it, right, we all have like five different stakeholders and you got to make all of them happy and make everything work together. So we're going to talk about, you know, how we're going to do that and how mine Maven has been doing this time and time again for several people.
- [24:33]
B
I love it. All right, you able to see my screen all look good, Joel?
- [24:37]
A
Yep. It starts with three resources, right?
- [24:39]
B
You got it. That's one. All right, so let's, let's lay a foundation here before we get into the tactics. And we always want to make sure that we leave people with as many actionable things to try out as possible. But when we work with leaders, whether it's, you know, founders of startups or partners at firms, we like to say that at the end of the day, when it comes to scaling your company, you have three resources to work with. You have your time, which is by nature finite. And there's a lot you can do with leverage and intent to use your time more intentionally. But no matter how intentional you are, time is a finite resource.
- [25:12]
A
Yeah.
- [25:13]
B
Then you've got capital, Right. And if you're a unicorn founder, you've got a lot of capital to work with. If you're a scrappy three person company, you don't have a lot of capital. But no matter how successful you become, capital is a finite reason resource. Which brings us to our final resource that we have at our disposal. That's your network. The relationships that you have both within the company and within your greater network as a whole. And that if you leverage it properly, that is a limitless, an infinite source of opportunity to scale yourself, to scale your company, to generate opportunities. And when we're working with folks and teaching them how to better invest into these relationships as infinite resource, we like to call that the skill of building fellowship. We say that there's really two very broad categories that you need to focus on and be very good at managing. There's first off your team. When you're managing your relationship with your team, this is culture building. But at its core it's really convincing great people to join your company and stick with it through the ups and downs, through hell and back, we like to say, because whether it's, you know, a firm that you're building or a startup, there's going to be really high highs, there's going to be really low lows. And you need people who believe not just in the company because when things are low, belief in company can begin to waver. But believe in you as a leader and those, if people believe in you as a leader, believe and know that you care about not just the company's success, but them as individuals, as team members, as human beings. Those are the people who are going to follow you through anything. You know, you might start another company 10 years from now and they're going to come with you because they know that they're cared for and they will continue to be cared for. That's your team. And then you've got your tribe and your tribe is your greater network. The people who you need to actively support you, cheer you on. Whether it's just offering encouragement and advice and mentorship, which is worth its weight in gold, or more actively supporting you by sending you opportunities. Whatever opportunity looks like for you, whether it's client, a potential investor, a brilliant engineer that you could hire one day. I'll talk briefly about both of those and leave you with some tactics for those and we'll talk through some very tactical leverage ways to start freeing up time. So on the notion of team, the easiest advice I can give here for folks is make sure that you have some sort of appraise and recognition engine running and engine makes it sound more complicated than it needs to be. A lot of leaders are really, really good at recognizing team members. When they do something amazing, they land a big deal and bring in millions of dollars to the company. Of course you're going to recognize people for that, and if you aren't, please do. I don't want to downplay that, but you're losing the opportunity to recognize people just for showing up and doing their job. People bring in millions of dollars for the company. You have a rock star. Maybe they do it once a quarter, right? And those opportunities are limited. But if you can build the habit of recognizing people for showing up and just doing their job, you have dozens of opportunities a day and all you need to do is pick one of those and act on it. And if you're working with an assistant, they can help with that a lot too. You know, maybe they're monitoring the general channel in Slack and they see that someone mentioned that they accomplished something or showed up or maybe they showed up early to fix a bug or whatever. Something that normally wouldn't bubble to the surface for you as the leader of this organization to comment on. But if they get an out of the blue email or Slack message or interaction from you for the small thing that they never expected to be recognized for, the impact can be huge. We often have this example here. This is from a client. We changed some names obviously for privacy reasons, but this is an example of how simple it can be. Our Blake Matthews here hypothetical Blake was the CEO of a company working with an assistant. The assistant saw a post on a tool called Namely and just proactively drafted this email for the founder to review and send and said hey Robin, I saw Jamie's appreciation post on namely wanted to send you a note to thank you for your hard work. No small feat to gather data around Rails deployments, but your effort to make the company stronger and a better partner to our customers is great. Very much appreciated. Hope you have a great weekend. It's a three liner email really. But within an hour they got a response back that I won't read through all of it but this team member replied back and amidst other things said that they brought a friend into the company because of the experience they'd had and in the middle of their onboarding meeting and said wow, we upgraded CEOs massively. He's so human and caring. Thank you for not just showing saying that you care, but showing it through everything that you do. Thankful to be a part of the team and as a founder, as a leader, especially of a scaling company where the CEO isolation And loneliness can be a very real thing. Getting interactions like that from folks, frankly, it fills your tank as much as it fills theirs. So I recommend, even if it's one, one a day is great. But even if it's one a week, find an opportunity to recognize someone on your team for doing something. All of that makes sense.
- [30:26]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [30:27]
B
Good, good, good. All right, then. Let's shift gears and talk about the tribe side of things. Generating opportunities from your network. Now, you're probably familiar with the term serendipity. You know, most people have experienced it in some way or another. It's really just when the right person thinks of you at the right time and sends an opportunity your way. The issue is that we all love serendipity. It feels good. And we can all point to moments in our careers and our lives where serendipity probably got us to where we are today. The problem is that it's something that most people just wait for. It seems to happen, quote, unquote, randomly. But we believe that as a leader, it's your job to make serendipity happen. And you can do that if you understand the mechanics that take place behind it. When you really break it down, serendipity is really just someone sending you a referral. If we go back to some old school business language there, it's just a referral. And the fact of the matter is that every referral you've ever gotten and ever will get has a system taking place behind the scenes. And those people aren't aware of that system. If you know the system, then you can leverage it. You can drive it to generate more referrals. It's very simple. At the end of the day, every referral you've gotten is driven by two things. First is timing. And timing is just the moment in time. Someone in your network came across something that they thought you wanted to hear about and connected that and connected the dots to you and said, okay, hey, Joel, you need to meet with Patrick. He's great.
- [31:55]
A
Yeah.
- [31:57]
B
The challenge with timing is that it's something you have virtually no control over. Right. These are people in your network going about their lives. They encounter opportunities. When they encounter opportunities. You really can't do much to generate timing for folks. That's the bad news. Good news is if we were to, say, zoom out and supernaturally give you the ability to see all the potential opportunities in your network at any given point in time, there's limitless. There's more than you could possibly process even with the perfect system. And we don't need to hear about all of them, really. If we can get a 1% improvement, that's probably going to be hundreds of opportunities over the course of your career. That's the timing side of things. It's important to know, but you can set it aside because you can't do much about it. Which brings us to point number two, which is what we call mind share, is how top of mind you are with the most important people in your network. In other words, when someone in your network encounters an opportunity that you want to hear about, are they going to think of you for that opportunity, or are they going to think of one of the hundred other private equity folks, 100 other founders that they know about, and send the introduction their way? And if you're not proactively intentionally managing your mind share with folks, then it's very unlikely that they're going to be able to think of you. That brings us to a situation we've probably all been in that feels awful. Let's say you meet with someone new, you meet with them for lunch, and when you meet with them, the moment you walk out of that interaction, your mind share with them is more or less at 100%, right? So if on the walk from the restaurant to the car, they encounter the perfect opportunity for you, they're probably going to chase you down in the parking lot and say, hey, I just met this guy. You've got to talk with him. But that's not real life. That's usually not how it works. So realistically, we have that lunch meeting and nothing really happens after that. So over time, our mind share starts to decay. And eventually it's going to decay to the point where this person is physically, neurologically incapable of thinking of you, even in the face of the perfect opportunity, because their brain is constantly rewiring itself based on what is most relevant. And if you have failed to stay relevant to this person, it doesn't matter how perfect the opportunity is. If it's a year from now and they haven't heard from you, they're going to think of someone else. And so I don't know if you've ever been in the situation, Joel, where, say you, maybe you meet up with someone after a year of really no contact, and they say those words that just sting as they said, I can't believe I didn't think of you. But, you know, just last week I'd met with this amazing founder and they were looking for, you know, XYZ and I should have intro them to you. I feel, you know, I feel awful. I can't believe I didn't think of you. And it's easy to get frustrated, you know, maybe not outwardly at them, but to be frustrated and think, well, I told you that's what I was looking for. That's what I wanted. How could you not think of me? But it's not their fault. It's absolutely not their fault. Because you're the one that failed to stay top of mind with them. Right?
- [34:47]
A
Yeah. What are some ways that people can stay top of mind without obviously emailing and texting them 100 times? I mean, one thing that I, you know, creating media content, you know, so, I mean, there. There's people out there, and, you know, we've been. We've been trying to do this as well, but, like, try to kind of share some valuable information that way. Like, no matter where you go.
- [35:08]
B
Right.
- [35:09]
A
If you go on YouTube, if you go on TikTok, if you go on Instagram, you know, you're. You're at, you know, there was a piece of feedback that I heard from one of our podcast, podcast guests recently. It was stay on top of the news feed. That means, you know, you're always getting some nugget or you're getting some type of reminder that that person is there because sometimes, to your point, right, it's been a year, they don't even know that. They just forgot that you exist because there's just so much going on.
- [35:36]
B
Right. And I. Yes, for your broad network, that is a fantastic strategy. Producing content, staying on top of the newsfeed. Like you said, when it comes to your most important relationships, and we call them your legends, that, you know, maybe top 30, not 30%, 30 people in your network, those are the greatest access to the type of opportunities you want to hear about.
- [35:59]
A
And those need to be more personalized, too. Right. So, like, you got to remember, you know, I mean, just. Just remembering somebody's birthday is a huge thing. Right. And I think just you personalizing that special, you know, relevant piece of an update, you know, maybe it's not an update about yourself, but it's an update that you actually, you know, were thoughtful enough to think about what's important to that person. It's a, it's a. It's that maybe two additional levels of curation.
- [36:32]
B
Exactly. And really it. All it is is taking things you're probably already doing, like this lunch meeting with this person. You're already meeting with them.
- [36:39]
A
Yeah.
- [36:39]
B
But then doing a couple steps beyond that, you meet with someone for lunch, you're probably Going to learn something interesting about them, even if it's as simple as what they did over the weekend. And you learned that they were teaching their seven year old kite surfing because that's one of their hobbies. And their son is now finally old enough to start learning that information is relationship gold. You've learned that. Don't just keep it in your head because six months from now you will not remember. Store it in a contact management tool of some kind, even just a that spreadsheet, if nothing else. And that way, when it comes time to reach out to them, your legends, we say, should be getting something from you, some sort of personalized interaction every 45 days. When it comes time to reach out to them, if you're not sure what to say, what to send, you can go through your notes on all of your interactions with them. What are their interests? What do they do outside of work? What are they struggling with in work? What are some of their goals? Capture those things and use those as touch points. If you're already producing the content for your, you know, mass network, take one of those pieces of content that you made and you know, ask yourself, okay, who do I know specifically who would benefit from one specific part of this, you know, podcast episode? I did, and write them an email saying, hey, I just wanted to send you this clip. I thought of you because XYZ and you can even add something simple like, you know, no need to respond. I just thought that you would find this valuable because you mentioned, you know, you're struggling with XYZ last.
- [38:01]
A
I mean, I think this is huge for the investment landscape because, you know, one of the biggest pieces of feedback that I heard from emerging venture capital and private equity investors is when they, when they're meeting people, they're trying to raise money for their fund, right? So this is a common piece of feedback, I hear. You know, they're raising a $50 million fund. They go to an investor conference, right? They, you know, one of the, one of the institutional LPs spoke on stage. Now the LP comes down and it's like a, it's like an ambush, right? The entire crowd is trying to talk to that person to try to fundraise. So you meet those people. It's a surface level conversation. Hey, how you doing? Want to tell you about my fund. I'm doing an AI fund, right? Just like everybody else. But how do you go deeper? Hey, you've got this executive assistant that really understands what you want to do to personalize this multibillion dollar asset allocator. And say, look, you know what, I was looking on your Instagram and I noticed that your son is learning how to code. I found this free course for kids on how to code. What do you think about this? Or hey, I know that you mentioned on one of your podcasts that you don't think there's a really good tool to manage contacts. You know what? I actually thought about you and I've heard this from a few other people. Here's a, here's a calculator that I built using some AI tools. Just wanted to share with you because you, you know, you came to mind and that means a lot, right, to someone that's like, wow, this person actually went out of their way to number one, build something or put something together. For me, that was exactly what I was looking for. Now you're now, I think that's what you're talking about, right? Dialing this in maybe two, three levels to be really, really on the top of the mind. Because that's. That person might be shocked that you did that.
- [39:51]
B
Oh, they will be.
- [39:52]
A
And no one else is going to, no one else is going to go through the effort of doing that, right? On average.
- [39:57]
B
Exactly. Very few people will. At the end of the day, let's say that you send them an article that you came across that you thought they would appreciate. They mentioned they're struggling staying on top of things. You found an article on how to use AI to prioritize your day or your calendar, you send it over to them. Whether or not they find that article valuable, whether or not they even open it, is really beside the point. It still shows them that you care about them enough to know what you believe would be meaningful to them. You listened enough in that conversation or did your research enough. If you're meeting with someone for the first time and you check out their Instagram, their Twitter X page, whatever, and you're able to comment on that, all you're doing is you're showing that you care. And that's where 90% of the value comes from. Whether or not they act on that calculator you, you built. Whether or not they open the podcast link you sent ultimately doesn't matter. It's your name in their inbox being associated with value repeatedly over time. And that's where you get to this point where you can have a graph that looks a little bit more like this, where you have a lunch meeting and then you immediately refresh your mind, share with the follow up email, and then a couple weeks later, maybe you make an introduction to someone in your network that you think they would like because of what you learned about them, you sprinkle these interactions with folks over the course of time. And that way, whenever they do come across that opportunity, six months from now, a year from now, it is. There's no guarantees in relationship management, but it is infinitely more likely that if you maintain mind share with this person, you are going to be the first person they think of when they come across an opportunity that you would appreciate. Right. That's really all we want to empower folks to do. Whether it's using AI, if you're not in a position to be able to work with an EA, or using an AI in convenience, conjunction with an ea, making sure that you're leveraging these to identify and invest into these relationships in a strategic, consistent way, you're able to do that consistently and in a way that provides value. What we don't want to spam. It's easy enough to spam Someone's inbox every 45 days, but what we want to balance is what we call frequency. How often you interact and the experience impact. How meaningful, relevant or valuable is the perceived message you're sending. If you have high experience impact, you could email them every single day and they're going to open up every single email you send because they know it's going to be valuable versus if you're just sending, you know, spam to them, you could email them once a year and that's still going to be too often because there's no experience impact. Right. So that, that at the end of the day is what we want to encourage people to be able to do and to find, you know, use leverage, use intent to find the time to do this and then leverage the tools that you have in play. Whether it's working with an ea, whether it's leveraging AI to be able to start actually investing into these, these relationships. And I think unless you have any, any additional comments on the relationship side of this, maybe we, we shift gears, share some of these tactics on, around how people can leverage their EA or AI to help with this.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah, that'd be great.
- [42:56]
B
Awesome. And let's jump ahead a little bit in the deck. Just leave folks with one quick tip before we wrap up this. When it comes to managing mindshare, if there's one habit that you take away from it, if you can get in the habit of sending one email a day to someone you wouldn't otherwise have reached out to in your network that over the course of a year is 250ish. If you're going Monday through Friday, 250ish emails over the course of a year. Again, no guarantees, but it's about as close to a guarantee as you can get that you will get at least one opportunity from that outreach that you wouldn't otherwise have gotten that make all the other emails that you sent that maybe didn't get a response or haven't yet generated an opportunity worth it. So one email a day. Use a dictation app. If you want to dictate the email so you don't have to write it yourself, send it out. Do that once a day. It's going to take you anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes if you're doing it the old school manual way. Much shorter if you, you do some of what we're going to talk about here in a second.
- [43:58]
A
Well, ideally, if you had a virtual assistant that could write all of them up for you there, maybe they're a virtual assistant that comes from a journalism background. Right. They can actually write it better than you would. And then you just, and then what you do is you spend maybe a couple hours one time a year just reviewing that entire list of all those emails. Because, I mean, just getting it done and getting it programmed and already set up and automated is half the battle. That's the busy work that you would have to do. But if you can get someone that can kind of understand your mannerisms, understand your goals, I feel like that's one of the huge values that you guys could provide, helping people. Just train someone to do that in your editorial voice, in the voice that you normally would speak in, and then you just come in again to proofread it, you know, and you batch it all at one time and just take, just block off an afternoon, just look at all 300 of those emails and then you're done, you know?
- [44:53]
B
Sure. Or even I'd encourage people to maybe do it less often than once a year simply because a lot of these emails, to make them truly feel relevant.
- [45:02]
A
Yeah. Sometimes there's seasonality to it as well, I would say, as well. Right. I mean, there's, there's maybe something too with personalization where, you know, there's something in the news that happened that you may want to call out.
- [45:13]
B
Right.
- [45:13]
A
There's an election, there's. There's something else that happens. So I think you're right. I mean, I think just adding some type of current event or some type of relevance or something that's happening is important too.
- [45:26]
B
Exactly. So we talked about white space time earlier. One Thing I'll often recommend that clients do for their relationship management work if they have an ea, is do your five emails for the week, right. Then make sure that your EA has prepared your five emails for that week and review them and send them out. That's going to take you if it's already pre written and you're just reviewing, probably less than five minutes.
- [45:46]
A
That's huge for fundraising. I mean, especially these investors, you know, they, you know, a lot of times it just takes, it takes 18 months usually a lot of times as an investor to build relationships with lp. So you know, if you, again, if you, if you're not at the top of the mind, people forget about you. Right? So giving, giving investors updates, giving them. You just made two, three new investments in the last quarter. Hey, here's, here's how those investments are doing. Even though you don't want to invest. Here's kind of what we've done in the last, you know, 90 days just to keep you updated. And hey, by the way, we're having our holiday party next week. You know, we'd love to have you come. Right? And just after seeing all those emails, maybe there's one email finally that that person clicks on and they come to your event and that's kind of really what the, that's the event that actually made the investment happen. Right, so.
- [46:32]
B
Exactly. I think so often people obsessively try to over engineer these emails and if I can't make this perfect value bomb, I don't want to send an email. You don't need to do that. You need to be, we like to say just north of neutral. If you're neutral or below, they're probably going to mark you as spam. But if you're just north of neutral, if you can make it just relevant enough, just personalized enough, they're probably going to start opening your emails. So don't overthink, don't over engineer this. You don't need to blow them away with every single email that you just need to rise above the noise. And there's a lot of noise and a lot of people doing so little effort. Rising above the noise isn't as hard as most people think it is.
- [47:09]
A
Yeah.
- [47:10]
B
All right, let's maybe rapid fire a couple tactics here around working with, with an EA or an EM we talked about earlier. And one, one thing that I like to ask folks is, I'll just talk with you, Joel, Would you agree that if you spend say 30 minutes or more meeting with someone, that's a, it would at Least deliver a good experience if you were to send them a follow up email.
- [47:31]
A
Yeah, I mean usually what I try to do, look, there's some meetings where I just meet people for coffee and just learn about their family, learn about what's going on, but usually there's some takeaways and I think you should always, whenever you have a meeting, you should have kind of a, you know, an output of that meeting and you know, the quicker that you can respond, you know, it's, it's super important. A lot of times people wait till the next morning, they go home after like four or five drinks, they draft this long bulleted email and then they program it to go out at 8am but you know, if you can kind of like immediately respond, you know, they say money loves speed, right? So I think the same evening, right after that, you know, amazing dinner that you had, you know, this person is processing that dinner and that conversation that they had, right? So like right after dinner you send four or five bullets of like just things that are, you know, full of value. I think that's gonna be continuously on top of their mind because now they're gonna be going through those things that they got value from and just keep thinking about you.
- [48:36]
B
Exactly. And you mentioned people who get it out the next day and I would say even those people are doing infinitely better than most. The vast majority of people I talk to agree, yes, this would be a good idea. But they admit that except in special cases where it's clearly it's necessary to send a follow up email. Yeah, they don't because it's one, they.
- [48:55]
A
Just forget, it's another to do on their list. Right, exactly.
- [48:58]
B
And a good follow up email, that's not just hey, thanks for the, the time. It was great meeting you Joel. Thanks Connor. That's noise. That takes you 30 seconds to get a good follow up emails probably if you're really fast, five minutes if you're more average, 10 to 15. And 10 to 15 minutes for follow up per meeting adds up very, very quickly.
- [49:17]
A
So I met this guy at this, this private equity event. He's one of the well known investment bankers in New York City. He's raised now, I think above the billions in capital. And I had one interaction with him. We had a, you know, we grabbed a couple drinks and then he's just like, Joel, we should meet. And he spoke into his phone and literally within, I think it went to his assistant within a minute, like there was a meeting already booked. He's like, hey, when are you free tomorrow at 2, like hey, hey, we need to book time with Joel at 2:00pm and like literally the meeting was booked, you know, so money really does love speed in my opinion.
- [49:57]
B
It does. And now I'm curious about someone we've worked with because that is exactly one of the tactics. One of the things that we recommend folks roll out is have a dictation system. If you have an engagement manager or an ea, you can leverage three very important things about emails and you can use AI for this as well. Number one, like we talked about Joel, no one has ever valued you for writing an email. You are not generating value by being the one who types the words in. Number two, most people can talk four to five times faster. They can type. I am a very fast typist, I can still talk faster. And then number three, you can talk just about anywhere as you experience there where they just pulled out their phone, where you can really only type if you're in front of a computer. You could type a whole email on your phone, but why would you. So if we, we leverage those three facts then you can use a dictation tool to, you know, you walk out of a meeting, you want to send a follow up for, there's a, there's a meeting you want to schedule. You pull out your phone, you talk through a rough outline of that email. You're not dictating word for word what it should be. You talk through a rough outline that gets sent to your assistant in a task management tool like Asana. They can listen to it and then they can draft that email up for you with the with or without AI or if you're not working with an assistant. But you use tools like say Fathom or these other meeting assistants. You can go so far as to build an automation in Zapier where it detects when a new meeting has wrapped, it pulls the transcript from that and you can have it auto draft an email in your inbox that summarizes the meeting in a well written follow up email in your voice in 45 seconds. A minute after the meeting's wrapped up. You really want to blow someone away. Send them a detailed follow up email less than five minutes after the meeting wrapped up. It'll just blow people away.
- [51:36]
A
Sure.
- [51:37]
B
And it requires so little whether you're working with an AI or an assistant. You can collapse what's maybe a 10 to 15 minute activity per email down to maybe five minutes for all of your follow up emails for that day and still deliver better experiences because you're either delegating to AI or An EA who can take the time to really personalize these emails and write them better than what you would do if you were to write them yourself. Yourself. You mentioned hiring someone with a journalism background and if you have the budget for that, sure. But we see people getting amazing results with, you know, assistant who's based overseas, especially with AI now you can train AI in your voice, they can act as that editor, they can oversee the process. They don't, they don't need to have that journalism background or a master's degree to be an incredible assistant.
- [52:23]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [52:26]
B
All right, what do you think we have time for one more tactic or should we dig a little bit deeper here?
- [52:31]
A
Let's. Yeah, let's do the tactic.
- [52:34]
B
All right, then. This is a very natural extension. That's again, using this dictation system. But meeting debriefs, we talked about using meetings where you're meeting, you're learning things about people. You can't help it. You ask, you know, hey, how was your weekend? How was your Thanksgiving? You know, what did you do? Most people learn these things, comment on it in the meeting, and then the, the information leaves their mind because we've got a million things going on. Our brain isn't built to process, to store information like that long term. What we recommend is the moment you walk out of a meeting with someone, if it's an in person meeting, then perform what we call a meeting debrief. The meeting debrief. If I skip ahead on this slide here, really, it's a very structured dictation that you're sending your assistant that captures four pieces of information. All the action items, the gives and the gets, meaning the things you committed to do for them and the things that they committed do for you. You want to make sure both sides are captured so they actually get done. If you can be the one person in their network who delivers on 100% of the commitments you make. You want to talk about building mindshare and trust with folks, that's probably the single best way to do it. Be the person who does what they say they're going to do. I don't have a science to back this up, but just in the folks we've worked with, I'd say maybe 50% of the commitments people make tend to get followed through on because we just, we live in a culture of some saying, hey, yeah, I'll introduce you to so and so. But we're booked back to back for the next six hours. So by the time we get around to being able to make that Intro. We've already forgotten we promised at 8am that day. Yeah. So capture it. Be the person that does that. So capture the action items. Capture professional challenges from folks. What are their goals? What are they struggling with? What do they need to accomplish in the next three to six months? Really, what they tell you when they say what they're struggling with is, hey, Joel, here's how you can be valuable to me. Help me solve this. They may not be using those words, but that's really what they're saying.
- [54:17]
A
Sure.
- [54:18]
B
Then personal interests and passions. Who are they outside of work? What do they do on the weekends? How do they unwind, how do they recharge? And then just miscellaneous information, important names, dates and names of their kids if they're moving from older Colorado to the Bay Area. And Q2, all of that we want to be capturing, getting out of your head as quickly as possible while the information is fresh. So you or your assistant, if you're working with an assistant, can leverage it both in the short term and in the long term and can create reminders to say, check in with them in Q2 of 2026 and ask how that move to the Bay Area went, if they've settled in. Hey, here's a couple, you know, restaurant recommendations now that you're settled into the Bay Area, things like that. So capturing that via dictation. Or again, if you're using AI tools like Fathom, Quill, what have you, you can very easily build automations that'll extract this information and put it together in a structured debris for you as well.
- [55:17]
A
Sure.
- [55:17]
B
And then you or your EA just act as the editor again to look over the information, make sure it's accurate, things like that.
- [55:25]
A
Sure. That's great.
- [55:29]
B
Good. I could keep talking about all of this for hours. I've got one more I could do very briefly if we want. Otherwise, I want to be responsible, respectful of your time and I know your, your audience's time and we can put a cat here if we need to.
- [55:41]
A
We could do one more and then we could do, we could always do another session, you know, going deeper as well. You know. Happy to. I think this content is really, really valuable and I'm happy to double click on this and, and go deeper and we'll love to learn, you know, all the frameworks that, that you guys have. And I think that's all helpful to save time. So let's, let's hear the other ones.
- [56:02]
B
All right, let's do one more. Our final one here. And for what it's worth while I'm pulling this slide up the three that I'll have talked about today, which the first one, the email dictation we call E, drafting meeting, debriefs, and now inbox shadowing, which I'll just do very quickly. Those are the three core topics that we talk about in a lot of detail in Radical Delegation. When we wrote the book, we set out to not write your typical we'll say motivational professional development book, but to pack it full of tactics. So everything that we mention we teach how to roll out, even the very technical stuff. You're like here, here's how you you're going to tweak your inbox. Here's the labels you need, here's the categories you need. So any of these three resonate and you want to roll this out either for yourself or yourself and your assistant highly recommend you grab a copy of the book because we really dig into this. Or just shoot me an email because I'm happy to chat one on one about it too. But the general idea of inbox shadowing, our final example here, this is one of the biggest time saves for most of the folks that we work with simply because it's the inbox, whether it's your email Inbox, Slack teams, WhatsApp our communication platforms are some of the biggest time sinks and most people are still managing most of that in a last in first out format, meaning the last email that you got is the first one you respond to. And more often than not, the last email you got isn't the most important one in there, it's just the most recent, which makes it feel like the most urgent, the most top of mind. So inbox shadowing is about replacing that process with something, call it more intentional. And this is where I think there's a lot that AI can do that a typical EA could do. This is where having human involvement is especially vital. Inbox shadowing is really just about empowering your em to own their to own your inboxes. If they're you, they are now the.
- [58:03]
A
First point of inbox.
- [58:05]
B
When, yeah, when an email comes in, the first set of eyes on that email is not you anymore, it is them. And they are doing one of typically four things with every email that lands in your inbox. And I'll just. Yeah, I've got a screenshot here. Here's how shadowing can look in Gmail. It works in just about any tool, but Gmail is certainly my favorite and the cleanest. But when an email comes in, they're going to either draft A reply to it proactively not send anything. That's always our golden rule. AI or EA never sends anything on your behalf. But most people will be surprised that with the right training and the right context available, a great assistant can respond to a vast majority of the emails that you get. At least take a stab at it. Maybe it's not perfect, you may still have to go in there and make some tweaks, but they're going to draft replies to as many emails as they can. And if it's ready for you to send from their perspective, they'll market ready if they know it needs involvement from you. They, you know they've done all they can. But maybe you need to attach a file or whatever market is please read and then needs work is something more for you to communicate with your ea. If you gave them feedback on an email and you're saying hey, make these changes, you can market needs work and they'll come in and edit it. Yeah. So proactively draft any email that comes in that needs a reply but they just, they don't have the context to reply to it. Which is still going to happen. The hope is that is increasingly few emails over time. Yeah, but it's still going to happen and they're going to mark that as please handle. Then you've got your FYIs for any emails that they believe need your eyes. But there's no reply needed, there's no action needed. This is really just an FYI. So you can go through that once a day. It's just status update after status update. And then this everything else tab here is every other email that has not yet been shadowed by your ea. The only other thing that they may do is archive emails that they know you don't care about carrying calendar updates. So and so accepted the invite. That doesn't need to be an FYI, it'll just archive that. But the idea is that you can maybe reduce your time in the inbox to three, say three times a day. Start of the day after your EAs for shadowing, round the middle of the day and the end of the day and you just start from the top and work down. You start by reviewing and sending out your drafts. Once you've done that, you process the please handles either by doing it yourself or sending your EA a dictation and say hey, for the email from Randy, here's how I think we should handle this. Please draft a reply and then they can do a draft FYI. Personally I only go through my FYI once a day. But at the end of the day, I just read, archive, read, archive, read, archive and get through that. And then I might take a quick skim over everything else. If there is an email I'm waiting for and I just happen to be in my inbox at a time my assistant isn't, I'll skim that. But for the most part, I leave this everything else section until my EA gets a chance to shadow it and let me know what's important and what's not. And that in and of itself can be, for a lot of folks, it's revolutionary. Not just for the time that it saves, although that is huge, but for the reduction in mental load of that, you know, feeling that kind of enslavement or like being chained to the inbox, you have to be watching because there could be a bomb in there. And if you step away and don't check every 20 minutes, something important may land in there. Being free of that concern can be worth its weight in gold for a lot of folks.
- [61:23]
A
Sure. That's amazing. I mean, I have extra time too, if there's any other tips. I mean, I'm like, really nerding out on this.
- [61:30]
B
Oh, I love it.
- [61:31]
A
So if there's other tips that you got, would love to go deep on those too, if you got time.
- [61:37]
B
Sure. I can go over a little bit. Maybe what we can do is take a look at the three tactics we've talked about so far and maybe tweak it a little bit for those folks who don't have an ea and maybe talk leveraging AI for some of these, because AI can help. But I do like to tell people that EAs tend to be more affordable than you may think. So just because you assume you can't afford one, you might be surprised, especially if you're looking overseas. We do have an incredible recruiting team. But even if you don't use a recruiting service, there's so many great websites out there who can help you place amazing, amazing assistance for surprisingly affordable, even if it's only part time to start. So you might consider looking into some of those, those options. But if you're just not in a position to work with an EA right now, AI at the point of that, right now can take a lot of leverage, can create a lot of leverage for you. The inbox is arguably where it's most challenging because this is for most people, their relationship hub. And there really is only so much you should automate in here. But there are some great tools out there for folks who are really big on testing out different tools. A couple of my favorites for an AI inbox tool is Superhuman or Shortwave. Those now are at the point where they can automatically draft emails that come in for you rather than you having to prompt it and say hey, reply to this. You still can and it's really impressive frankly. I use shortwave myself and I'll have an email come in and I will just use the built in AI bot that's trained on all of my email history, all my writing style and I'll say hey, draft a reply to Joel saying yes, that time works and send them a link to our article on white space time and it'll put together a great draft that's in my voice and I can review it and send it out. So that's fantastic. Great way to save some time. What else can we dig into? We talked a little bit about AI in the world of meeting debriefs using tools like say Fathom or Otter. If you're not using an AI meeting assistant for your virtual meetings, cannot recommend that enough. Even if you're working with an ea, it's going to make their life infinitely easier which frees up their time to do more impactful work for you. By getting these AI summaries of meetings that are finally at the point where I trust them pretty intrinsically for a little while they were sketchy, important information could be missed, but there's some great options out there and I know a lot of folks, especially in the say the Bay Area still do a lot of in person meetings. Although a lot of people use virtual meeting assistants, they're not aware that there is the equivalent for in person meetings as well. I'm a big fan of a tool called Plod. Have you heard of Plod, Joel?
- [64:22]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [64:24]
B
Good, good plot is fantastic. It's basically a virtual meeting assistant that's a wearable. It creates transcript summaries of your meetings that you can then act on. You can build into automations using Zapier to again create those automatic follow up emails that can get sent out after the fact. So for you know, what is it like 200 bucks or something like that? Having something that is present in every single meeting, every single conversation you have. I have clients who have used it in personal life stuff. I've used it in personal life stuff as well. If it's an important family meeting or I'm a huge geek, I play Dungeons and Dragons and having a tool that records things like that as well and creates summaries. There's so many potential use cases for these so just making sure that every important interaction has basically has a dedicated note taker and that that dedicated note taker is not you anymore allows you to be more present and involved and deliver a better experience, folks.
- [65:21]
A
Sure.
- [65:23]
B
Let's see. Trying to think of more rapid fire tactics on the note of dictation. I think this tool is becoming more and more well known these days, which is exciting. But my probably most used AI tool these days is a tool called Whisper Flow. They just raised a huge fund, so they're all over the news right now. But long story short, it's a speech to text tool that allows you to use your voice to generate content very quickly in any app that you're a part of. I use it to write emails all the time. I'll just open up Gmail, talk through a rough outline of the email and Whisper Flow does a great job of taking it and restructuring it into an email format and getting something really close to ready to send. So in theory you don't even need a an assistant for that part of the process. If you just use a speech to text tool like Whisper Flow to generate slack messages or email messages or even long form content. Some people just are better speakers than they are writers. So having a tool that allows you to just talk through that speech that you need to put together, the slide deck you need to build for me, that's huge. I speak for a living, so it comes much more naturally to me, me to talk my ideas out loud. And Whisper Flow is a, is an amazing tool for that.
- [66:49]
A
That's awesome.
- [66:51]
B
All right. Kind of thing. I think that covers our bases on those three pretty well. Whether you have an EA or an AI, or you want to use some combination of the three, even just picking one of those strategies and box shadowing, meeting debriefs, dictations, pick one of them and commit to rolling it out over the next week, two weeks, month, and you're going to experience a huge benefit. I do recommend maybe not trying to do all three at once. That can feel overwhelming. But pick one, roll it out, tweak it, find what works for you, and once you feel like you're in a good place with that, roll out the next one, roll out the next one, and if you need help rolling any of that out, my inbox is always open. I love these conversations. Or of course there's always the book as well. But this is the work that we love doing. Not just to free up time, but to help people better invest into those relationships for their own success. But frankly also their Happiness and fulfillment because.
- [67:45]
A
Yeah, because it flows into also freeing time to be present for your family. You know, I mean, entrepreneurs, they're, you know, when you ask them what they're thinking about, they're thinking about their business, right. When they're not supposed to be thinking about their business, they're still thinking about their business. So I think, you know, trying to have time also for your health, you know, like people don't go to the gym because they just, they've got so many meetings, they've got so many things to do. But you know, budgeting time for, you know, maybe you could talk about that in terms of like the holistic life and well being of people. Because I, I saw that on your mission. You know, making sure that people are living, you know, a healthy, prosperous life with the right people in their life. You know, that takes time, Right. To be able to allocate. And you know, it's, it's, it's like being a plant. Right. I mean, if you, if you don't water your plants, they're gonna die. Same thing. If you're not present for your family, you know, that's going to be, you know, your family life is going to be impacted too. So we'd love to hear how, you know, how this work cascades people's, you know, personal lives too.
- [68:51]
B
Definitely. And you use such a great analogy with the garden or watering a flower. Yeah. Take that one step further. You can't neglect a garden for six months and then come back and dump 10 gallons of water on and hope that's going to bring it back. It is something where you have to show up each day and water a little bit. And so that's where that, that consistency, that frequency is so important. Right. So I think there's no one prescription that works for everyone. But I think the most important point I can start with and then branch out from is people like talking about, there's a new book written every month about, you know, the secret to happiness. Right. You know, what is, what does it take to finally make us happy? And a lot of people don't realize that's already been solved. There was an extensive like 90 year Harvard study they did on the impact of different things on happiness over the course of different people. A large swath of people's lives. And the definitive answer after that 90 year study was relationships that out of everything else, the people who had meaningful, connected, long term relationships with folks were happier, they were healthier, they were more plugged in, they were more successful. So if there's Anything that you want to double down on it is, it's those relationships. Because yes, of course, scaling the business is important, but even scaling the business comes down to relationships.
- [70:14]
A
Sure.
- [70:14]
B
So treating relationships as that first priority that branches out into everything else is so, so vital. And as far as how all of this does branch out into the personal stuff, it's always fun working with different clients because everyone comes up with newer, interesting ways to leverage AI or their ea. They'll say, hey, I really want to make sure that I'm spending more time with my partner. And so something very common that we'll do with folks is, is have their EA make sure that once a week, once a month, whatever, whatever cadence is right, that there is an intentional date planned. What that looks like is you communicate to your ea, hey, once a month I want to make sure that I have an intentional date planned with my wife. So, you know, a week before, could you send me, you know, three options of things going on in the city, three different events that you feel would be good for us and recommend one of them. And we teach something that we call executive communication. But really it's all that comes down to is training your EA how to communicate more effectively with you so you can make quick decisions. So it'd be something like, hey, I know your date with your partner is going to be next week. Here's three events, here's the one I recommend. Here's why do you want me to book it? Yes or no? And now rather than having to go through these three options and decide, you can just reply yes or no and then give feedback. But we have people do similar things with kids. I want to make sure that, you know, once a month we do something fun with the kids, find fun events going on. And AI is great for that now too. With ChatGPT's agent mode, I've had to do research on local events for me, especially with its its memory feature. It knows what I do, what my kids like. I probably over share with Chat GPT, but it does make it a more valuable tool for me to be able to say, hey, what are some fun things going on this month in Kalispell, Montana that I could do with my kids? And getting those just delivered to you is so much less daunting. Having to sit down and plan an entire excursion when time is already hard to find. Yeah, so just I think realizing that at the end of the day, I think work, life, balance in many ways is a myth. There's just life there, there's time when you were at home that you're thinking about work this time or you're at work that you're thinking about home. And so anywhere where you can, anywhere you can save time, find leverage, and be more intentional with relationships is a win. So if we're saving an hour at home, that's going to impact work. If it's saving an hour at work, it's going to impact home. There really is no separation between the two.
- [72:43]
A
Sure. No, I totally agree. And I think they mentioned this at Amazon. It's about work, life, harmony. It's not bad to work and it's okay to think about something creative that you could improve at your job. Maybe in between while you're waiting for appetizers at Applebee's with your family, you know, I mean, but you know, you want to be, you know, you want to integrate all of this into your life. You don't necessarily need to silo those parts of your life. I mean, parts of your personal life flow into your creativity and some of that flows into, you know, doing things better, you know, maybe because you had a conversation with your wife. And I've seen some couples actually do an off site, like, you know, a husband and wife, they, they actually go to a co working space and they have an agenda. And, you know, usually a lot of these types of meetings have some type of facilitator, right? So if there's an EA that could come in that's trained to be a facilitator, they can come in and come, you know, set the agenda, set the intended outcomes of the day, you know, and it breaks up into, hey, you know, how many vacations do we want to take this year? What are our financial goals this year? Do we want to buy a house this year? You know, should we, how do we be better parents? You know, do we need to actually tell our kids to not have screen time? Well, here's the outcome. We're gonna, we're gonna cut screen time, you know, to once a week or something. If they, if our kids have good grades, you know, those are all things you need to like, get in the room and plan those things and, and have that be part of the agenda. But if you, if you try to do all of that yourself, you know, you're coordinating, you're facilitating, you're organizing, and then you're kind of brainstorming. It's just too much for you to do because you, because both you and your wife or your partner have a day job.
- [74:33]
B
Exactly. And it just comes down to that idea of there are things that need to be done, but do not have to be done by you. If you can delegate that to a person or to AI and get something, I'll hear often as well, it's not going to be as good as if I were to do it myself. Yeah, if you try and do it yourself, you're not going to do it at all. So is 95% better than 0%? More often than not it is. You don't need a perfect agenda for that off site with your spouse. If your assistant puts together something that is 80%, that's still 80% that you wouldn't have done otherwise. And realistically that won't be the last off site you have. Give your assistant feedback and next time you do it, it's going to be 90%. Yeah. So finding those opportunities to delegate, to outsource, and then be comfortable with the fact that it may not be perfect, but it got done. And you can always give feedback, you can always iterate. There's very, there's very little in life ultimately that is static, that cannot be reversed or improved. So we'll hear that a lot with delegation too, that. Well, I don't want them to make a decision because maybe it's not the decision I would have made. Yeah, maybe it's not. But is it, Is the decision reversible? I had a client, I won't go down too much of a tangent here, but who was doing a. They were moving offices and they just, they really enjoyed the planning, the designing of the office, but they were feeling overwhelmed. So I think there was a fundraising round. I'm not sure what it was, but they didn't want to let their team member pick the chairs for the office. They wanted to do it themselves. And it just came down to that question. If they pick chairs and they get there and you hate them, it's a reversible decision. It is okay if the wrong decision gets made because you can always take a step back and make the other and it's not worth the mental anguish you're putting yourself through to be the one who carves out the time to look at the hundred different chair options amidst when you need to be fundraising and all these other things. So recognize that some decisions, most decisions are reversible and that 80% is better than 0%. And you can always improve an 80%. The secret is to get going and then to give feedback.
- [76:45]
A
Yeah. What are some. I got one more question. You know, there's high skilled tasks as well. So like my example earlier, like if you, you know, you could hire somebody that's like a journalist, that's actually professionally trained in writing things properly, probably even better and messaging things better than you. So you know, are there different tiers of virtual assistants where these, these virtual assistants have like, they manage organizations essentially. Right. So they're like pretty much like a micro CEO and they could do all that. You know, they have the emotional intelligence, they have the people, people skills. They just, you know, there's some arbitrage because they're in different geolocations and, and you know, you get a bit of a discount because they're, they're, they're virtual. Right. So they can kind of do a lot of these tasks asynchronously in their own time. Those virtual assistants can also spend time with their family and the freeing of their time maybe with other virtual assistants too. Right. But you know, how would you categorize the level of proficiencies? Is there like a level one which is like monkey tasks and then level two is kind of like, hey, you know, thinking through, you know, writing social posts. And then I would almost feel like level three or level four is the, pretty much the inbox shadow work. Because that's, that's a high stakes task. Right. I mean you're messaging clients, you're messaging investors and you're drafting it. So I don't know how many, if you guys have that concept where there's like tiers or levels of proficiency for like high, high skilled or high risk tasks as well.
- [78:20]
B
Certainly. And we, we do and we did in the past we actually had a whole slide built around the different, different tiers of, in many ways, AI has leveled that to a degree. Obviously there, there are things that even with say, say an EA that's offshores and AI, it's still, maybe that's the skill ceiling is a little bit too high or the context it's necessary is a little too high to delegate to them.
- [78:46]
A
Yeah.
- [78:47]
B
But that's becoming less and less the case. So could you go out and hire, you know, a rock star EA for 150,000 a year who supported Jeff Bezos at one point? Absolutely. And if you have the budget for it, go for it. They are probably going to be amazing. Yeah, most people don't though. And frankly most people do not need to. Typically what we say is you're much better off hiring someone for say 70 to 80, 90k and investing the extra money that you would have spent on a rock star in training them and investing into their growth because one, you're getting them much more affordably than hiring that, that rock star. You're turning them into that rock star, but you're also investing into them and their career. And that's building that culture that we about talk talked about building that team relationship. So when they get a competing offer from someone and maybe it's a price match or it's a little bit more, it's now not just, well, do I want to leave Joel for this job that pays an extra 5k a year? Well, no, because he's shown me that he cares and he invested in this relationship and in my career. So finding someone who has some background in two to three years of either as an executive assistant or something related to it, we see actually a lot of amazing EA candidates come out of nonprofit work. There's a service mindset there and taking care of others mindset and just believing in the work. Project management's another one. I don't. The closest I've gotten to journalism, I think I had a client's assistant who had a master's in English and she was a great writer. But again, for most people, you do not need someone with a master's degree writing your emails. Some people do and I won't discredit that. But most people don't. And most people could frankly do probably with shorter emails anyway. It doesn't matter if a comma was used where maybe a semicolon would have been better. No one usually is judging you for that. So if you can find someone in that 70 to 90k range and invest in training them up, they can become that rock star. If that's too much of an ask, finding someone offshores, understanding you will hit a ceiling with them typically quicker than you would with someone else with especially with AI, you can push things so much further than you ever could before and you can always hire again. The number of times you've had someone say hire or say hire a 75k EA, push that person to the point where they're almost the chief of staff now, their, their workload is too much and then say okay, hire yourself an assistant and they find someone then offshores to support them with some of the more administrative work. That's not all that uncommon. Or for someone to have two EAs who are offshores, one who does who's a little bit more worked, you know, worked with them longer, has more context, understands their language and handles the emails. Someone else who does more of the systematic administrative style work. There's so many different ways to go about solving that problem.
- [81:50]
A
Sure, absolutely. Well, hey, this was amazing. I mean, I'm blown away by just all the things that you can do to save time. So Connor, I, you know, look, you went over, I know your time is really valuable, so I really thank you for, number one, extending the time to kind of have this storytelling session with me before the presentation and then kind of going above and beyond with the presentation expanding, you know, well outside of the normal programming. So just, it's interesting and it's just feel like I could talk about this for hours. So I want to thank you for your time, you know, the whole Mind Maven team for, you know, all the impact that you guys are providing and essentially giving people back their time so they can spend time with people that matter and also just focusing on, I like to say, their zone of genius. Focusing on the most important tasks that, that is the most relevant for their expertise.
- [82:43]
B
Expertise, absolutely. Well, Joel, thank you for the platform. The more people we can share this message which, the bigger impact we can make. If we can get people just more consistently investing into relationships, it's going to make the world a better place. And maybe that sounds, you know, corny or sappy to say it, but that's, that's why I do what I do. I love the leverage side of the work, the time saving side of the work, but it's all about using that time for those things that really matter most. The zone of genius, the relationships. So really thrilled to be able to share it with your audience and with you and happy to continue the conversation anytime.
- [83:16]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And I am going to paste this recording here. This is actually going to go live on all of our channels. It's also going to be live on YouTube. And then for those people that are listening on Apple, Spotify, all of our audio podcasts, the description will have the same presentation. So you can refer to this and, and look at this as well. And then Connor, what is the best way for people to contact you?
- [83:44]
B
Just shoot me an email. I've got those AI inbox tools. That means it's not going to slip through the cracks. Just. Connor. C o N N O R.D mindmaven.com Great.
- [83:56]
A
And I am actually pasting that here as well in the chat, which should go on all the channels, so everybody should have that information. But Connor, thank you so much for your time and, and we'll do another one of these soon.
- [84:12]
B
Love it. It was my pleasure. Joel. Have a great rest of your day.
- [84:15]
A
Likewise. Take care. Goodbye, everybody.
- [84:26]
B
Sam.