right now?
Well, the really most exciting one
is actually when we provided essentially a product
development team and helped a client who is not
a digital client create their first digital offering.
And it took us about 14 months.
And now it is actually beginning to gain traction.
They've signed up a bunch of customers,
and they're very excited and looking forward to us
helping with some similar projects.
So it's pretty gratifying to help someone
transform themselves.
That's awesome.
Are you able to mention what field of service?
Yeah, it's health care.
So it's a health care well-known brand,
but not well-known in the digital space.
Yeah.
You know, most successful brands, most aren't.
I will say that.
I'm not saying there aren't successful digital companies.
Obviously, some of the world's best are digital companies.
But it's often amazing how many digital people
think there's no world outside of the online space,
even though they live in it.
It's true.
You get wrapped up in your own world, and I know the feeling.
But it's wonderful to explore and see
some of these other companies that the technology isn't
in their vocabulary.
So they don't really know how to talk to people,
how to engage with people with technology.
And frankly, even how to use technology.
So it's been a great experience, and we're
grateful for the client.
And they're happy, and so are we, which is what you want.
That's awesome.
Yeah, product development and transitioning online
can be a scary path.
So that's really neat that they have enjoyed the process
and understood that it takes a timeline
to pull something like that off.
I'm sure it took some leadership to get done.
Let's dive into resources.
So what three books or resources do you
recommend for other visionaries out there?
That's an important question.
So I've been thinking about that because I get this question
occasionally.
And I'm going to give you three books, and one of which
I just finished.
So I'll go back and forth in terms of more current and ones
that are a little more, let's just say, classics, I guess.
So I'll start with a book called Emotional Intelligence.
There's a current version of it called EQ 2.0 by Daniel Goldman.
And that book to me is one of the most important books
in my career.
It starts off with a discussion about how
a couple of different people had to close large offices
of companies and fly out to a location
and tell the people there.
And it really explains how you can do that well,
which is an awful situation to be in for those people,
and how you can do it poorly.
And the contrast is remarkable.
And so I felt like that book early in my career
was really important to teaching me
how to be essentially in the bad news business
as a manager of people without creating
the kind of angst and anger at management
that often happens when you don't do it well.
Right.
Are you saying there's going to be bad news in life?
Well, it's funny.
I try to think of all the times when
I've gotten to deliver good news as a manager.
And really, it's primarily around promotions and things
of that nature.
But more often than not, unfortunately, it's
having to say, hey, we're not doing as well as we could,
or look, this is something we need to look at.
And it's how you message it.
It's how you follow through.
It's how you talk to people.
It was really a great book to help me, frankly,
not just at work, but in my personal life too.
So I feel like I've got it.
I got to get it.
Everyone.
I mean, we as human beings, we have
to learn how to say happy birthday appropriately
to people.
We've got to learn how to put energy into the good.
Therefore, we also like, if that's hard for us,
then how much harder is it to learn how to deliver the bad
news in a great way?
You're exactly right.
That book's not amazing.
Exactly.
You're trying to remember the things about people
that you know make them who they are.
And that way, when you're talking with them,
you don't obviously introduce a lot of personal information
in the workplace, but even just little things like, oh,
I remember somebody said that one of their daughters
was trying to travel to a certain country and did that.
And I just kind of think, bring them, hey,
how did that trip go?
And you don't have to make it a big conversation.
But it's really interesting.
The book is a fabulous read.
And Daniel Goldman is clearly a superstar in that area.
That's amazing.
What are your other two?
Sorry, I made you go long on that.
No problem.
The other two, the second one is a book that I just finished.
It's called Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World
That Can't Stop Talking.
And what's fascinating about it, it's written by Susan Cain.
What's fascinating about this book is, being an introvert
myself, but being coached out of it like many people have been
over the years, it was interesting looking
at the history of how we got here.
So I'll just give you one little fact.
The premise of the book is introverts
have tremendous capabilities, especially working alone,
but even in teams in an interesting way.
So one of the interesting facts in the book
was, all the presidents, with a few exceptions,
before the 1900 in the United States were introverts.
And all the presidents after 1900 in the United States,
most of them were extroverts.
And the reason for that goes back to the introduction
of the Dale Carnegie speaking tour that started around 1905.
So Teddy Roosevelt was the first real extrovert
that started the process.
There you go.
All right.
Perfect.
It's an OG, OG lead magnet right here.
This is circa 1936.
There you go.
So it's a fascinating book, a lot of interesting data.
There are stories that I just love in there.
And I'm really happy I read that one.
So that's a good one.
The one that is probably the most impactful of any book
I have ever read as a person who is in business
is called First Break All the Rules, What the World's
Greatest Managers Do.
And that book is written by Marcus Buckingham.
And in fact, Adobe's first management training courses
some years ago were based on that book.
And the premise is we spend a lot of time
trying to make ourselves and our companies
the kind of people and places where
if we're not doing something well,
we focus on how do we do that better.
When in fact, after talking to 80,000 managers
before writing this book, Marcus Buckingham
learned that we should be focusing
on the things we do well and strengthening those
because we are good at those.
And those strengths, both as companies and individuals,
really make us much better at what we do generally
than if we focused on trying to do something we'll never
be good at or we'll only get marginally better at.
Doesn't mean you should give up.
But you shouldn't be in a situation
where you're spending all your energy trying to make yourself
something you're not.
I guess that's the best way to describe it.
I love that.
That's huge.
So two things I gather from that.
One, I'm a big fan of the book Strengths Finder 2.0,
which is built upon the backbone of that book, I'm sure.
And I'm sure they studied that as they were creating it.
And it did change my life when I learned that.
And two, on the flip side for you,
visionaries listening in, the irony for first class business,
when I finally got the right design team,
but also that came from finally learning how to lead
and be a better leader to my teammates,
one of our greatest strengths and assets
is our design and production capabilities.
I have zero.
Zero skill in either of those facets.
But the team does.
That's what they're great at.
So as a visionary versus a manager,
it is worth considering, do you have the ability
to lead and guide people who are great at what they do?
And can you stay out of the way of their ability
to perform on that?
Because I call our design department
the heart and soul of our business.
I've seen it in the reaction of clients.
And I'm like, man, this copy is amazing.
People look at the page, they're like, how many pages is it?
And I'm like, oh, that sucks.
Nobody gets excited about copy.
Nobody gets excited about a bridge that's being built
long-term because you have to wait
and see if the bridge works.
But design, like with a right designer, oh my gosh.
And our clients and team members are like, that's amazing.
And I'm like, cool, that's crazy.
So I got a question for you.
So emotional intelligence, Daniel Goldman,
and then yes, I do see emotional intelligence 2.0,
but I see Travis Bradbury and Jean Greaves.
Are those different books?
They are the more current one.
Marcus Buckingham, I believe, wrote the first one.
I might have gotten help, but he was the primary author.
You said Marcus for first break all the rules, right?
Yes, first break all the rules with the great.
Daniel Goldman for emotional intelligence, right?
Correct.
OK, and so get the first one and the second one.
Is that correct?
Yes, I would suggest that.
Very good.
Both of which are excellent.
I mean, in both cases, they're just,
these are sort of tried and true ways of working and believing.
And if suddenly human beings turned
into some other animal, we might be different.
But we're sort of the same as we have been for a long time.
So that's what those books rely on.
We can count on that.
You can count on us being right back as well, Vision Pros.
We'll be back after the intro.
We'll dive right into David Hirschfield's Vision
for how he serves his audience.
All right, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm the Jackson Calame.
I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs
and guest leaders who are building
fantastic visions out there.
Hey, what's up?
And welcome in to another episode of Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO
of First Class Business.
We've got some excellent resources to put out there.
I will say that David blew my mind with three books,
one that I've heard of, two that I've never heard of.
And considering I've asked over 200 guests what resources
they recommend to visionaries out there,
that's a huge treat.
Plus the way he quantified it.
I'm just excited to dive in and talk about his vision.
But I am going to give a few more resources first.
Two of them come in the form of sponsorships.
One of them comes in the form of giving back.
And we'll see what else they come up with and beyond that.
Well, one other caveat.
David and I are going to be talking about maximizing
worldwide expertise at a fraction of the cost.
This is about doing fractional work the right way.
This is about making sure that also you don't fracture
a company as you work with fractionals.
I see that happen far too often.
There's so much discord.
There's not enough harmony amongst teams and departments.
I'll get off my soapbox.
David and I will talk about a little bit in just a minute.
But in terms of sponsors, Melissa Gray from The Lost
Bot, one of these sponsors, that's her.
She is a client of ours.
Recovery Unplugged is not.
But both are entities that are doing amazing things.
Melissa came onto this show.
I highly recommend checking her episode out.
And I've been searching for a lawyer that has a heart
and a soul for a long time.
No offense to lawyers who also have hearts and souls.
But I've found that in the business world,
you get condescended at.
You don't get instructed in a way
that you can understand it.
We went through a $20,000 trademark battle
at Restaurant Connect.
I've been in situations where we've
had to write demand letters, where we've had charge backs,
where we've had Apple patent our software.
That was, again, at Restaurant Connect.
They literally patented our software.
And when you have a legal source on retainer that you trust,
you tend to make better decisions
than when you need one at the last minute
and you haven't thought through it.
So my observation as somebody who's
been through that type of a battle many times over the years
is, why not be a wise steward and get ahead of the curve?
Find somebody that you might mesh well with
and see who your options are rather than being
stuck in a desperate situation.
So I hope that helps you.
I hope you never need it, by the way.
That would be the thing I would, of course,
wish for your business.
Then there's Recovery Unplugged with Andrew Sosin.
Andrew Sosin also came on this show.
And I was super impressed with him as a leader.
He's been to the Tony Robbins event 22 times in a row.
So if you're not a Tony Robbins fan,
you might not care much for Andrew.
But if you are a Tony Robbins fan,
the dedication he has to helping people with healing
and taking people to the next level is second to none.
In addition, Recovery Unplugged is all about helping people
overcome addictions that they're facing.
That could be drugs and alcohol, of course.
But some of us out here in the world
have also gone through addictions of things like apps
or Netflix or YouTube and binge watching series and stuff.
Too many people out there want to escape their own life.
Now again, if you're in that situation where that's hard,
I'm not a therapist.
I highly recommend calling their 24-7 hotline
to figure out if you need help.
Now the other thing that's cool about this
is some of us just have friends or family members
that suffer with addictions.
And it's helpful to be able to call a hotline like this
and ask for help for how do you intervene successfully?
How do you do so or you cushion the blow
and where you don't perhaps receive backlash
and become collateral damage yourself in the process?
I speak about that super reverently and sacred
from a position of knowing what that's like
many times in my life.
Not only for myself, but also going through that
with family members in certain aspects.
Feel free to ask me offline about any of that.
I'm a pretty open book.
And I do know that our stories are often what inspire people
to affect great change in their lives.
They have over 400 employees.
They are in several different states.
More importantly, with COVID,
they were pressured to go to an online model.
So now they're available worldwide.
And Andrew Sosin is just a phenomenal leader.
He just did a mastermind recently
on Richard Branson's Island with him
and Robert Kisaki from Rich Dad Poor Dad.
So, some people would say,
oh man, this guy likes to name drop.
I do, I do like to name drop.
I like to know who people are associated with
and who they revere and respect
and who they look up to as mentors,
who they want to associate.
Because it teaches me the principles.
I can see shared principles across the board and say,
yeah, that's the type of environment,
the type of person I want to be building my life with too.
So, without further ado,
we're gonna dive into the water project.
The water project is really,
it's just a primary focus I have on this show
is I wanna give back to the 8 billion people
who need a lot of help.
One of the best ways I can do that,
besides trying to exhaust my own resources,
is also trying to make sure that I'm a microphone
for those who haven't heard of situations
and things like this.
There are millions of people who don't have access
to clean drinking water.
I can go downstairs in a heartbeat
and get clean drinking water.
So, I feel like all of us who have a microphone,
if we wanna really maximize our life
and opportunities in the world,
then we can also look at our opportunity to give back.
What the water project does,
it allows you to select a specific community
you wanna help.
You can donate however much money you want to.
And what's really cool is they'll keep you updated
with the project status and what they're doing.
You get to see it come to fruition,
where your dollar goes and how it's spent.
I think that's super awesome.
And if you're not in a position to give back
because COVID hit hard, the economy is down
and things are just really tough on you and your family,
then I'd ask for two things.
One, I'd ask that you share this with others,
because you never know who in your network
might be the person who helps people get access to water.
And two, well, two, I'll pray for you.
Three, in addition to that,
if you have another cause that you'd like us to support,
maybe you've got a family member
who's got a crowdfunding project,
don't hesitate to drop that in the comments.
Give us a chance to see if there's an opportunity
for us to serve you as well.
And I'll be happy to dive in
and see how we can help make that happen.
So without further ado, David Hirschfeld,
thank you for joining me on Vision Pros Live.
Let's dive right in.
Sounds great.
Awesome, man.
Well, we're gonna dive in with the most pointed question
for the audience.
What's your vision for those that you serve?
Well, it actually goes back to one of the books I mentioned.
It's about focus on what's most important to you.
And as an example, that focus is only as good
as you can make it if you know how to take
the distractions out of your way.
So at a micro level, we know what that's like.
We get distracted all day long, right?
How do we focus on the things that matter the most?
At a company level or in people who we work with,
our clients, it's really the same thing.
You're not a digital company,
but you need to do digital work.
How do you focus on the, like the healthcare example,
how do you focus on the real thing that you do?
And why don't you cede that other work
to someone who's an expert
so you don't have to worry about it?
And we have this happen with information security,
we have it with product development, all kinds of things.
And that vision of focus, I think,
it's harder and harder every day now for people to focus.
It just is, and for companies to focus.
So, right.
Yeah, and that's how we help our clients, get them to focus.
That's really neat.
So it's almost, I don't wanna call it a narrowing
of the vision because it's, focus isn't about narrowing.
It's not about putting blinders on per se,
but knowing that where you're looking and where you're going
should align, the better we align those,
the easier it is to make sure that
we're not running into walls, tripping over rocks,
running into challenges.
And you mentioned something cool.
I call it the digital identity.
Not that I'm the only one who calls it that,
but the digital identity is so easy to create these days.
Yes.
Right, you can create ugly babies really fast online
that are not even close to representation of who you are.
But worse yet, you can fabricate a very nasty facade,
a very difficult to read through, see through facade
and continually deceive, decept,
and next thing you know, people aren't happy
with what you're doing, how you've done things.
You might create a much, much greater problem
for your life long-term by going about that,
the way that I see so many people on the market profess it.
So I'm grateful that you talked about
working with somebody who gets it.
And I've heard from your stories already,
as well as our pre-show, how much you really get that.
We're gonna put a pin in that and come back to it.
We're gonna talk about the fraction,
how you do that at a fraction of the cost,
how we work with people worldwide.
First, I wanna know, what's your personal vision?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I've used, I've worked on this for a long time.
It just goes back to how do you know who you really are
and what really gets you excited?
My vision is very simply summarized in this phrase.
I love helping people how learn how to help themselves.
That's basically what I do.
And I do that in my personal life too.
In fact, my daughter, my youngest daughter
told me not too long ago,
she was talking to someone about having me
having shown her how to do something.
She's a sophomore in college.
And her friend said, well, you know, that's how your dad,
one way your dad expresses love
is by showing you how to do something
so that you can do it yourself.
And that's infused in everything, business, personal,
all of it.
It just gives me a lot of joy to see someone
do something that they couldn't have done before
or perhaps they didn't know how to do it
or perhaps they were scared or not confident.
And when I'm able to contribute to that somehow,
that leap, that vision of getting to a place
where you haven't been before
is really something important to me.
I love that.
I'm gonna build on that
because visionary is listening in.
If you haven't ever felt that before,
that ability to teach somebody to do something
and then watch them do it,
that is a level of happiness, a level of joy,
a level of peace and like confidence.
So it's self assuring too of your own value.
There's so much value you can get out of helping people.
Now, if you have felt that and you want more of that,
one of my secrets for that
is to stop saying that things are common sense.
It's one of the greatest things that you can do
is to learn that the curse of knowledge tells us
what we know is something everybody knows.
What we've learned is something everybody else
already knows and that's not true.
So when we say like, obviously it works this way
or well, that's common sense.
We're robbing people of the opportunity to learn
what we have learned through years of experience
that we may take for granted.
So that's one trick I would give to people
who want to experience that same thing.
And I hope you do,
because again, there's tremendous joy and happiness in that.
Great advice, Jackson.
And you're right.
I can't think of too many things at least in my life
that give me as much joy as helping others do something.
Just really is great.
Yeah, I would agree.
There's nothing out there for me beyond that
that does that level of like, woo, it's life, let's live.
All right, diving into the exact opposite.
Let's dive into a super dark subject.
So on the dark side,
what is the worst leadership experience you've ever had?
Well, it was early in my career, I'm happy to say.
So it's a bit of a faint memory at the moment,
but the good news is that I learned a lot from it.
So my worst leadership experience
was when I watched a colleague,
we were both mid-level managers in a large company,
basically take on a conversation in a large form,
essentially like a town hall forum.
My team and his team and a couple of other teams
had participated in building a really terrific product
and had some ideas about how that was done.
And this particular person had a habit
of basically saying that it was all him and his team.
And this happened in front of my team.
And I was just absolutely challenged with, what do I do?
We're here in front of close to a thousand people worldwide,
you know, meetings being streamed all over.
Do I say something?
Do I just go along with it?
How do I deal with it?
Now and after, and it's one of those dilemmas
where I didn't have anything to base it on.
I'd never experienced anything like that before in my career.
So I couldn't draw from anything that was even close to that.
And I opted to say nothing at that time
and in front of everybody.
And I could just see the deflated look
on the members of my team.
And so I went back to my office
and I thought about it a little bit.
And the next day, you know, I slept on it the next day
after talking with a few people I trusted,
I confronted this person privately.
And I explained the fact that this wasn't the right thing
to do and that I had actually failed as a leader
by not standing up for my team in a way
that could have been professional.
And so it was a very, it was one of those moments
where you realize that if you don't do certain things
in the moment, you lose the opportunity to get things right.
And I didn't need to humiliate him or do anything like that,
but I could have done something that I just didn't do.
And that was tough, that was tough.
And now I had the opposite effect.
I was a person, I'm one, I'm a healer.
Like principally I'm a healer, but I'm also a protector.
And I grew up with a lot of mama bears.
And so I know how to torch somebody
to the worst degree possible.
And it's a skill set and a weapon that should be used
with extreme caution and care.
I did not know how to use extreme caution
and care on that in my day.
So I was a lifetime fitness and my boss,
I destroyed the lifetime fitness sales team that I was on,
like in a matter of a week.
And my boss had locked us in the club on January,
on December 31st, because we were the first club
close to finishing, to hitting goal
since the club had opened.
And so I had to turn my keys in.
I walked across the street in the rain to a bar
and held up like a duffel bag and was like,
who wants a gym membership?
I wanna go home.
We broke the records for calls that day,
me and Cody both, 200 plus calls in the day
trying to get it done.
And instead of handling that whole situation
the right way, I was done.
And I started the burn bridges between my manager
and the team a little bit.
And that wasn't the goal, that wasn't the intent.
But that's part of why it's so important
to read books like EQ2.
That's why it's so important to learn,
like if you wanna foster relationships
and cultivate long-term growth and success,
there's shifts you can make.
I ran into Wally years later, my boss,
and I let him know what an amazing manager he was
and how awesome things were and completely shocked him.
I'm blew his mind on that.
But I could sense there was still a little bit of hurt
from what happened.
And we, again, when we learn from leaders like David
how to not do that, that there's alternative paths
to going about this.
You don't have to walk away from the fight
and you also don't have to crush the enemy.
That's where visionaries need to be playing
in order to really build their visions out with their teams.
So let's dive into that.
Appreciate sharing that.
Oh yeah, of course.
Well, you sparked the memory.
I was like, man, I've never talked about this before.
Not from this angle.
So what is your best leadership experience look like?
Well, actually in this case,
I can actually tell the company,
it can tell you what happened
and I can tell you what was so gratifying about it.
So it was PayPal.
I'm gonna say like 2009 or 10.
So what happened at PayPal then was,
there was this horrible financial crisis
that resulted in a bunch of layoffs in 2008
across all industries and sort of bled over into 2009.
And then as a result of that, what started to happen
as things started to pick up over the course of a year or two
is that PayPal was losing a lot of people to competitors.
So people were job hopping
and teams were just getting decimated.
And my boss basically challenged me and said,
I need you to come up with some type of retention goal.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
And so I did a lot of research,
talked to some people I trusted,
had a good group of people who I could ask about it.
And I learned that actually people who manage others
have a substantial amount of control
in making sure that people don't leave.
And I couldn't believe it.
I was literally like, really?
I thought people left for reasons
that were beyond a manager's control.
Turns out the number one reason people leave companies
is because it's been like this for 30 years
is because they hated their boss.
And, and or they weren't given an opportunity
or weren't appreciated for the work that they did.
Money and other things are down the list.
Those are important, but for the most part,
people cannot tolerate working for somebody they can't,
can't really respect.
So what did I do?
I came up with a goal.
This was really audacious.
And I said, okay, we're gonna retain 90% of our staff
in a year and a hundred percent of the people
who are the most important people to the work that we do.
And everybody thought I was just nuts.
But what I did was I backed it up with training the managers
and leaders who worked on my team,
putting them working with them and learning myself
how to make sure that we created an environment
where people didn't wanna leave.
And sure enough, one year later,
we blew those numbers out of the water.
Wow.
That's best lesson I've ever had.
You blew those numbers out of the water.
We did better than that?
Yep.
So we had a 90% target.
We are, I think we're 95% at the end of the year
of retention and a hundred percent of the people
who we had identified that we didn't wanna lose.
So it was pretty cool.
Yeah.
And a very competitive job market,
less than a year and a half after we'd had massive layoffs.
How many employees, team members?
45 on my team, extended was another 20 or so
in other countries that had dotted, you know,
matrixed into us.
So we had influence over their roles.
And it was pretty darn good.
And we had lost people up to that point.
I mean, I'd lost them.
What year was this in, more or less?
I wanna say it was 2010, 2009-ish, 10-ish.
Okay.
I think it started in 2001.
So you've been working on this fractional stuff
for a long time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Long before they called it fractional.
Absolutely.
No question about it.
And today our ability to retain the fractional resources
we use in large part are based on those principles
that I learned way back then.
Okay.
So maybe you know something about the internal gossip here.
Oh my God, I gotta ask.
So PayPal, right?
If I look up PayPal founder,
cause I was like, I'm pretty sure Elon Musk was the founder
or part of, right?
But Google, man, they're hating on Elon or PayPal is.
I'm not sure which.
Look at this.
You got Peter Thiel, right?
Max Lepchen.
Peter Thiel, Max Lepchen, yeah.
And then Ken Howery, Luke.
Where the heck is Elon?
You know, it's interesting.
I think they've-
Google Elon, and it's like,
it gives him full credit here.
And it's like, what?
What's going on?
It's a good question.
I think it's a part of their past.
They'd rather not talk about,
but you know, there are a lot of other people-
That's what we were talking about.
Yeah, it's funny.
You know, there were people like Reid Hoffman
who founded LinkedIn.
He came from PayPal.
Last name, Jordan, I can't remember, never met him.
He founded OpenTable.
So there were lots of really well-known PayPal leaders.
And you're right, they don't mention some of them.
But I think Elon is the one that's most of a,
more of a lightning rod for a lot of people.
You're saying Chuck Templeton?
No, no.
I said, I can't remember his-
You said from OpenTable.
So that's, I mean, Chuck Templeton's-
I was the director.
Jordan, his last name was Jordan.
He was doing, that was, when I joined PayPal in 2006,
there were a thousand people
who had downloaded the mobile app, right?
That's how early those early days were.
And he was one, I think it was Jim Jordan,
but I can't remember.
I never met him.
I just know that he was one of the found,
he was one of the people who moved on
from PayPal to Found OpenTable.
But some of those early people who worked there,
the founder of, co-founder of YouTube
also had worked at PayPal.
There are a lot of examples of people who were there.
By the way, that was not in that wave, just to be clear.
I was in the second wave.
Sure, we were in that wave.
Yeah.
Guilty by association, David.
I know.
But we were, I always have to tell people,
those were, people were brilliant
and they set PayPal up for the future,
but they, the company was bleeding cash when I joined.
It was just not doing well.
And thanks to a lot of people and teams
that I had the great fortune to manage,
we turned that around and the company became
wildly successful.
So we're very happy about that.
That's really neat.
It is wildly successful.
I mean, it's, you know, it's,
I've got a terrible, terrible analogies in mind,
whether it's the relay race, you know,
and people doing different things,
or, you know, the fact that sometimes it's important
to walk, sometimes it's important to run,
sometimes it's important to swim.
You know, there's, there's a, even a collaborative effort
amongst those who don't necessarily get along
or have the same view of how things should be built.
So it's, yeah, that would be a very fun story
to learn more about.
That's also why I'm really interested in this Adobe book
that you mentioned the one about, you know,
first break all the rules and how much to learn.
Cause Adobe, I'm honestly not a big fan of their brand
these days and their product suite.
But I've met a number of founders who came
from the Adobe network, who've gone on to build
some really cool things.
And I know they have some enterprise stuff that's amazing.
So there's so much to learn from the history
of a company like that.
There is, and I'm grateful for the experiences,
but you're right.
Those companies like PayPal and Joe,
you have a long arc of growth
and sometimes they've done things
that you just leave you scratching your head.
And then other times they've done some really great things
and, but there are some-
They're human.
That's exactly right.
Their cultures, their cultures,
both of them were fabulous places to work when I worked there.
I mean, it was just great.
Nothing but good things to say about having worked there.
So.
That's amazing.
Put you on the spot in a big way,
most important way in my opinion.
And that would be if this is your last opportunity, right?
This is the last one, last piece of wisdom,
advice you can give us what powerful lesson
and other visionaries learned from your experience.
Just do not stop learning new things.
Don't be afraid to learn something new.
Doesn't matter if you've been doing the same thing
for years or you've just started out in an area.
I cannot tell you how many times a conversation,
something I've learned just in this conversation with you.
Some of the things that you have expressed.
There's just something about that continuous learning
that keeps you fresh, keeps you aware of changes.
And then what's great as in my case, as I get older,
I start to be able to tie things together
from my experiences.
And you can see all these interesting connecting points
that you don't always, always see upfront.
So yeah, just keep learning.
That's all you can do to make yourself
and your teams better at what they do.
I love that.
There are always new perspectives.
I have a very childlike demeanor.
I can be childish too, I won't lie.
But, and part of that is cause I've got little kids,
but it's really that curiosity,
that appreciation for knowing that, okay,
like as a child, you can hide something
on the other side of the table.
And if the child's young enough, they'll be like,
and you bring it back up, they're like,
how did that happen?
You know?
And then you learn to go around the table like, oh cool.
I can access that now.
And we are no different as human beings.
So I really like this quote.
I'm gonna pull it up here while we talk about it.
One of my favorite quotes is anonymous.
Please don't give me credit for it.
You'll be listening in.
It is the more you learn, the more you can learn.
Ah, I love that.
And that process of like, wow,
every time we learn something new,
it opens a door to so many more things that we can learn.
And Strengths Finder 2.0 did give me the,
at least when I took the assessment,
my number one strength is as a learner.
Right?
So I love exactly that.
That's what, and I learned through people,
interactions with people.
Right?
So it's a wonderful thing for me.
And if visionaries, you're listening in,
this would be an interesting audience
to see somebody say like, I'm done learning.
You know, I think that's kind of the nature
of being a visionary,
is you are trying to learn and improve what you're doing
and continuing to move.
So let's move this conversation into the actual,
you know, the title of what we're gonna talk about,
Maximizing Worldwide Expertise at the Fraction of the Cost.
I know I coined the title
without really directly talking to you about it,
but so I'll give a little frame of reference.
To me, maximizing worldwide expertise
is about learning to work with others who are out there.
You know, and that takes so many shapes and forms.
I'm gonna plant some seeds.
That could be VAs in a foreign country.
That could be strategic partners, vendors.
That could be people that you want to consider
your competitor when in reality,
they could be your best ally.
That could be business partnerships and growth.
There's so many ways to go about that.
And at a fraction of the cost.
So I'm gonna put you on a huge spot here.
How do you maximize worldwide expertise
and those relationships while limiting costs
without going about in a way where you strangle hold
the individuals you're working with
or oppress the people who are supporting your vision?
Where's the harmony and healthy balance of that?
How does-
A really important question, Jackson.
Thanks, and thanks for the lead into it,
because I believe that sets us up really nicely.
So we are the beneficiaries at Fedisio, my company,
and our team of two trends that are occurring in the world
and have for a while, but really accelerated with COVID.
On the one hand, you had people who were,
once COVID hit, all of a sudden,
a large number of tech workers had to work
in their homes remotely, right?
And well, what did that do?
So it did a few things.
It made people realize, well, gosh, this isn't so bad.
Some people got isolated and they struggled,
and we know that it didn't help necessarily
everyone's mental health.
However, what happened over time
was people started to realize,
gosh, I could live in another place,
and I don't need to make this much money and work this hard.
And yet I could still have a good life,
and life is really important to me.
And so this dynamic of people wanting to work part-time
or fractionally sort of plays into our hands.
We don't have to convince anybody to do it.
There are a lot of people who have situations
where they've got a spouse who works,
or they have a situation
where maybe they're taking care of a parent,
whatever it is, they don't wind up in a situation
where that's good as this because COVID accelerated it.
So we've got this wonderful pool of resources
we didn't have before.
Match that up with this demographic reality,
not just in the United States,
but in many Western countries,
and even more in Asia at this point, other than India,
where the birth rates have been so low
that now over the course of the last 30 years,
now there are these huge number of open jobs
that cannot be filled.
So I'll pick one as an example.
Information security.
Try to get a cybersecurity analyst in a company
as an employee or full-time
or a leader of information security.
You may not think it's important until you've been hacked.
And it's almost impossible to find these.
And they're so expensive.
But there are many people out there
who have this expertise,
who only wanna work a few hours a week
or a few hours a month.
And they can accomplish a lot
because they're focused on this particular task.
They're not distracted by everything you'd get
working full-time.
And many people like to have the flexibility of,
hey, I'm gonna do a little bit.
I'm gonna work this month and next month this much,
and then I'm gonna take off a few weeks.
So these dynamics have helped us.
So we find ourselves just really the beneficiaries
of a couple of trends.
And now how do we make it work
where we, because we could be in a situation
where we didn't retain these people.
They just worked with us in our network
and then they went off
because they didn't like working with us.
That's the prior conversation.
How do we create an environment where people wanna work,
treat them very well,
talk to them all the time, support them,
make sure the clients are happy.
Don't let them just sit out there
and blow in the wind when something goes wrong,
go in there and help them.
It's just been a very interesting convergence of events.
So we're very lucky in many ways.
It is.
Lucky, blessed, prepared.
I think there's a couple of formulas that exist there.
One, again, you've worked in these companies
where you have remote teams.
People that you know what that's like.
You know what, I've been working from home since 2010.
And so way before COVID hit,
we were running startups using Zoom calls,
getting comfortable with video, video power as well.
And when COVID hit, we got crushed for one company
and my eyes lit up like fireworks for another.
So we were competing against Open Table,
the restaurant Kinect.
Wow, look at that.
And next thing you know,
all the restaurants on the East Coast get shut down.
$15,000 in monthly recurring revenues gone in one day.
Two weeks later, a week and a half later,
all the Pacific Coast gets shut down.
Another $20,000 gone overnight.
We didn't have the ability to take that hit as a startup.
And so that startup of 15 years.
And at the same time, running my digital agency,
there's a part of me going like, oh my gosh, finally.
The world's finally going to get it
that you can work remotely.
The world's finally gonna start moving towards that.
And you and I through years of experience with that,
where others had kind of shunned it,
they're going through some repercussions right now
that are still mounting in terms of how we're gonna do it.
How do you build a virtual culture?
And how do you make sure that people wanna belong to that?
They're not just trying it for now,
or catching the best of the flavor
and then moving on to the next one
because companies don't know how to sustain
that type of environment.
We went through serious growing pains
for how to figure that out as startups.
And every year taught us new lessons in terms of,
oh, this is what happens after four years
of people working remotely together.
When the emotions people feel in,
we better start fixing that and changing it.
So you've been through that on a scale
that's far, far larger
and with far more people than I ever have.
So I see that as a massive benefit.
And again, the reality that,
I don't think it was just luck.
I think you were far more prepared
than maybe you even realize.
I think you're, you know,
I'm grateful to the people who I learned from.
I had wonderful leaders I worked for for years,
not just at PayPal and Adobe, but in other places.
And you know, you have good leaders and bad leaders,
but you learn things from each one of them.
And I just feel as though I'm just,
and you said it blessed,
I'm very grateful for those experiences.
I'm really grateful for the people who gave me a chance
at doing things when I didn't necessarily look like
or sound like the right person
because I grew into things also.
I wasn't, you know, we're not all born.
Well, you're not, you weren't born, you know,
at five years old to do this today.
Maybe you were, but I certainly wasn't.
And so, you know, that's all about the learning piece.
And I think you said it very, very appropriately.
We just have great people and we work hard to keep them
as excited and engaged as we can and supported.
And that seems to be enough to have them keep coming back
to us and saying, you know,
I didn't work last month with you guys,
but I really like working with you.
And can't tell many people we've gotten
who have had bad experiences working for not great leaders.
And that saddens me.
Yeah.
That really does.
Let's dive in hard, fast and heavy too, if we can.
Sure, go for it.
Into this topic of fraction of the cost.
Yes.
How?
How does that work?
Yeah, so here's what we do.
So first of all, we know that if you wanted to,
let's use an example.
Let's say you wanted to go hire
an information security analyst
or a chief information security officer.
And I'll use both of them.
They're well into the six digits,
obviously the chief information security officer,
salary wise, right?
They're off the charts.
So just by virtue, and now they can't find people.
So this is the other problem, right?
You might get somebody, they won't stay around very long
because then someone else will just offer them more money
or whatever, at a certain point they'll go.
The other part of this is information security
is not considered, it's not as though you were brought in
to grow the company, right?
You were brought in to protect the company.
And it's not a, I wouldn't say it's a thankless job,
but it's a very different kind of job
from say someone in marketing or someone in product.
It's not a revenue producing.
Yeah, you're not building anything exactly.
So it's challenging.
So how do you do that?
Well, what you do is you talk to clients
and they say things like,
I just can't get anybody to fill this role,
or can you help me find somebody?
And that usually leads to, well, you have zero.
So now if you have 20%, you're gonna be better off.
By the way, it could probably get you to 40% of work
because these people who are fractional
are highly dedicated and experts.
So they don't need a whole lot of ramp up time.
So just by virtue of that cost differential,
they're saving a substantial amount of money
and they're still getting the core things done
and this goes back, Jackson, to the focus piece
because someone might say to us,
oh, our information security environment is a disaster.
Okay, what are the three things that you can do
to make that better right now?
You don't need someone full time to do that.
And so that's the part where we start to make the case.
I'll give you the example I started with real quickly,
that that healthcare company could not get a new product
out the door digitally
because they had no idea what they were doing.
So what did we say?
Well, you never got anything out the door successfully.
We're gonna give you a team of five people,
let them work for a year, we'll get something out the door.
We did on time.
And by the way, I'm not taking anything away
from the employees because you had said something earlier.
They were thrilled because they knew that the success
of their company was contingent upon some digital offerings
that were successful.
So what we did was we tied that together to,
hey, we're gonna show you the statements of work
inside the company that these people are,
we're gonna show you what they're doing.
Because that's the other thing is if you outsource something,
it's kind of a mystery as to what they're doing
to the rest of the people in the company.
And my belief is if you're more transparent,
we're in a situation where people go,
oh, okay, well, yeah, no one here can do that.
That's great, let's have them do it.
And that starts to create a dynamic
that's more of a partnership and less of a,
and I'm looking at them skeptically,
like are they gonna take my job or what's gonna happen?
So it's a delicate dance, but we're really-
David, this is so important.
This is so important for business owners
and visionaries to get, I wanna break this down.
I know we're actually, we're over time.
Do you, and I don't wanna pressure you
if you have a meeting coming up.
So you know, be respectful of this.
But it's not a problem, we can keep going.
Just keep going.
We got extra five minutes?
Yep, yep, be sure to.
We're gonna take five minutes after to recap.
So are you having a- Yep, that's fine.
I have till the quarter of the hour, so we're good.
This is so big for entrepreneurs.
So one, you talked about Pareto's principle, right?
The 80-20 rule, whether you're meant to or not.
That's exactly right.
You can go from zero to, instead of trying to do
the 100% that we want to do, and we always imagine,
oh my gosh, we have to get all of this done.
When in reality, if we just skip to,
we don't have to let go of the 80% now.
We're hitting the 20% that's there.
But because you're working with an expert in that craft,
again, they can usually surprise you
and build more than what was requested
because we also didn't just shove
all of this dirty laundry workload on them
that didn't make sense, isn't planned out,
isn't actually something that,
it's more of a scary boogie man monster
than it is an actual problem.
So that's a brilliant way to preemptively
put the Pareto's principle into effect.
I hadn't thought about it that way.
Now I'm gonna give you one more,
and those for the visionaries that are out there too.
It has come to my attention recently,
the analogy that as business owners,
I guess I'll throw myself under the boat,
but I feel so removed
because I've been doing this for 14 years,
but we are awful at shopping responsibly.
What I mean by that is you can go into a store
and you know exactly how much you're supposed
to pay for toilet paper.
You know how much you're supposed to pay for an avocado.
You know how much you're supposed to pay for gasoline.
I don't know anybody who doesn't know
what their gas prices are.
Very few people don't see that gas price.
And you know how to shop and compare
even when you buy a house and something as big as that.
But in the business world, we don't know how to shop.
And we don't know how to compare values
and look at things from an open perspective.
I see too many business owners
that are going about that blind
and I'm saying like, stop, like shop what I do.
You know, shop what David does.
Go out there and do your competitor research
and see what's out there with a healthy mindset,
not saying, oh, I see somebody who claims to do this for free
you know, or do this on Fiverr.
Like you can't compare the apples and the oranges
and get the same types of results either.
You know, there's so much that could be learned about
in that regard.
And here's what I mean by that in terms of
how can you apply this for yourself
as making sure that you are getting services
at a fraction of the cost.
I'll give you an example at First Glass Business.
We believe in a pay what you can model.
That terrifies business owners.
Yeah.
They think, oh my gosh, like, well, what if I'm overpaying?
Well, if you're worried about overpaying
go to your market research.
You know, just go look and see, or ask us directly.
Like how much does the design, you know, how much does a,
oh, what do they call that?
The branding guide cost.
Right.
It doesn't actually have a cost to it.
Yeah, exactly.
The high costs on my branding guides,
maybe a grand total of $60 to get a brand,
to get a branding guide done.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so I've had clients who've come on board,
they go and buy that without telling us,
even though they know the full scope of work
for what we do is insane.
And they spend $3,500 on a branding guide.
And I'm like, if you just talk to us, like,
one, you'd be happy with it and you're not happy with it.
Two, you wouldn't have even had to pay for it
because we're working on profitability for your company.
And that's how we drive the success of our clients
and how we drive the reinvestments with us
is what we're doing leading to profits
because we happen to play in that ballpark and mechanism.
So if you're trying to assess who you should work with
as a brand out there, visionaries,
and again, it goes back to your quote,
let me go back to your quote here
because your quote set up really, really well.
You said, don't be afraid to learn, right?
Don't be afraid to learn the new things.
Ask the tough questions.
Ask the uncomfortable questions
of the leaders you wanna work with
because if they can't handle that,
they're not a great leader for one.
Go ahead, you got a thought on that.
No, that's awesome, Jackson.
You actually hit the nail on the head.
I'm gonna go back to that town hall bad leadership experience
because one of the things I learned from that experience
was it's not something that might be obvious.
And that was that I also wished that people on my team
had asked questions of the person
who was taking credit for stuff.
And that got me to a place where when I conduct meetings
or I have conversations with people,
I will tell them upfront,
I wanna know exactly what you're thinking.
The most controversial question you have
that you might be afraid to ask
because either you don't think I can answer it
or you are very skeptical of the entire discussion.
And I love that.
And I like that in town hall settings too.
I even say that.
Look, you're all thinking the same thing.
If you don't ask the question, I'm gonna ask it
and then I'll answer it
and we'll have a discussion about it.
Because we have a tendency I believe to hold back.
Business owners do this all the time, right?
Can be a lot of reasons for that,
but you have articulated it really well.
Ask those tough questions.
Don't let people get away
without asking the difficult questions.
And I like being put on the spot
and if I can't deliver something, I will tell you.
Yeah, and that's the definition of an expert.
That's what Matt Cutts,
the search director of Google taught us
when I was at El Local.
And it was that an expert is a person who,
they don't know everything.
They're the person who will go get the answer though.
And they know their limitations.
They're not the God of all wisdom.
So David, this has been awesome.
It's hard not to call you the God of all wisdom
with how much you've taught us.
So I'm sure you have your flaws and shortcomings too,
but we saw a lot of wisdom in depth today.
Those of you who are listening in on the Lanny page,
we will have a section below that says action steps.
And you can of course click on those links down there
to see how to connect with David
based on the different offerings that he has available.
In addition, there's one more call to action
I wanna draw to your attention.
It's in the top right corner.
It says, be our guest.
If you have a vision that matters,
you wanna get on stage and talk to people
about what you're up to in the world
and what you're building,
then don't hesitate to apply and meet with us.
We would love to see your vision as long as it's holistic,
as long as you're striving to be a great leader to others.
And it doesn't matter if you are Peter Thiel,
or Elon Musk battling out over the past PayPal story,
or you're Peter Jones and nobody knows who you are.
I still want you on the stage.
And Peter Thiel, we'd love to have you too.
So David, thanks for being here today
and everybody have an excellent rest of your day.
Thanks for allowing us to go over
and we'll see you on the next episode.
Thank you, Jackson.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your.