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how do leaders lean into funding the vision?

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Rather than setting aside and giving up or saying,

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I don't know, you've got some experience behind this

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for more than 10 years.

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So are leaders hiding?

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Why are they hiding?

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And how do they lean into making it happen?

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Well, I think the first reason is it's just damn hard.

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For you to be able to pull this off as a leader,

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you're gonna have to change.

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You're gonna have to evolve.

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You're gonna have to grow.

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You're gonna have to get feedback.

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It's gonna be painful and it's gonna suck.

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You're gonna have to talk to customers

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and they're gonna tell you everywhere

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that your business stinks.

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And so that's hard.

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Nobody wants to do that.

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I know I didn't when we first got started.

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And the other thing I think the reason is,

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and I heard this the other day,

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I don't remember who said it was some smart entrepreneur,

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but he said, it's really easy to hide

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behind changing the world.

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And what he meant by that was,

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you have this big grand vision of this big lofty goal

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and then you kind of like put that on the shelf

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and then you just kind of hide behind that.

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And it's not easy to hide behind,

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we're gonna get 100 new customers next week.

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But I can't be held accountable for changing the world.

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Right? Exactly.

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So you're absolutely right.

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Go ahead, hit it.

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Yeah, so it's not, you can't hide behind,

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I'm going to prune out one bad person in the culture

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and replace them with one better fit.

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You can hide behind with,

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we're gonna have the best culture in our industry

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and the best team attitude.

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It's easy to hide behind that vague goal.

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Yes.

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But it's not easy to hide behind something

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that's very practical, tactical,

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that has to happen in the next 30 days.

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Absolutely.

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And so I think that's one thing

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that holds up a lot of new founders,

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not a lot of new leaders,

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is managing back to something that actually is a small goal,

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like set small goals.

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And then rinse and repeat.

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And yeah, put the big goal on the shelf,

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but fall back to the habits.

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They're huge.

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Well, that's a healthy combination

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between BHAGS and SMART goals, right?

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The big, hairy, audacious goals

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that drive us for the reason and the purpose,

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but at the same time,

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the accountability of are my actions in line

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with what I want to accomplish

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if you're refusing to address that or recognize that,

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or you're not open to feedback for it.

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You mentioned customers in the early days

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not wanting that feedback.

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It sounds like you made a transition there.

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I honestly don't know where my transition was,

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but I freaking love hard feedback.

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Like I live for it.

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That's what we already know.

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How to move everything forward.

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But it's sometimes,

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it can be a challenge to get out of people.

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And more importantly, if I'm working with entrepreneurs,

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it can be hard to inspire them to want it.

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How did you make that shift?

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Yeah, well, for us, it was like a back against the wall.

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We have 10 customers and we needed to get to 100 to survive.

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And so not only did we need this feedback

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to know if we were on the right direction

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and building the right thing,

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but we needed this feedback so we could fix whatever

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the actual problem was to keep that person as a customer

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because we knew we needed to get 100

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or else we were gonna have to hang it up.

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Because I knew if we get to 100, we get to 1,000.

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I knew if we get to 1,000-

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You didn't have to go to the goal though, right?

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You didn't have to do that.

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You have that mentality.

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You gave yourself the mentality that you had

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that you could have felt, right?

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And you could have gone and gotten a job

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and maybe family or friends could have,

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but you could have lived under a bridge.

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There's a lot of things that could have happened,

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but you have an incredible amount of tenacity.

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I can see that in that story alone.

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So you made it happen.

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Yeah, and quite frankly, the other thing was the book,

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Lean Startup by Eric Rees and then his mentor

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was a guy named Steve Blank.

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He wrote a book called The Startup Owner's Manual.

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And these two books, basically in like a thousand pages

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of text, beat into your head that if you're going to make it,

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if you're going to survive, you have to get out

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from behind the laptop and go talk to your customers.

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Go listen.

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And that's it.

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And if you don't do that, then you're gonna waste

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five years building the wrong stuff

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that nobody wants to use.

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And you're gonna beat your head against the wall

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and you're gonna be upset and you're gonna be wondering

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why things aren't working because the phone number

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is not going to your cell phone.

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The email inbox is going to a non-responder.

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You don't even have 100 customers.

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Why is the company email going to a do not respond at?

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It's like you need that feedback to pull this off.

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And so those two books were really instrumental.