how do leaders lean into funding the vision?
Rather than setting aside and giving up or saying,
I don't know, you've got some experience behind this
for more than 10 years.
So are leaders hiding?
Why are they hiding?
And how do they lean into making it happen?
Well, I think the first reason is it's just damn hard.
For you to be able to pull this off as a leader,
you're gonna have to change.
You're gonna have to evolve.
You're gonna have to grow.
You're gonna have to get feedback.
It's gonna be painful and it's gonna suck.
You're gonna have to talk to customers
and they're gonna tell you everywhere
that your business stinks.
And so that's hard.
Nobody wants to do that.
I know I didn't when we first got started.
And the other thing I think the reason is,
and I heard this the other day,
I don't remember who said it was some smart entrepreneur,
but he said, it's really easy to hide
behind changing the world.
And what he meant by that was,
you have this big grand vision of this big lofty goal
and then you kind of like put that on the shelf
and then you just kind of hide behind that.
And it's not easy to hide behind,
we're gonna get 100 new customers next week.
But I can't be held accountable for changing the world.
Right? Exactly.
So you're absolutely right.
Go ahead, hit it.
Yeah, so it's not, you can't hide behind,
I'm going to prune out one bad person in the culture
and replace them with one better fit.
You can hide behind with,
we're gonna have the best culture in our industry
and the best team attitude.
It's easy to hide behind that vague goal.
Yes.
But it's not easy to hide behind something
that's very practical, tactical,
that has to happen in the next 30 days.
Absolutely.
And so I think that's one thing
that holds up a lot of new founders,
not a lot of new leaders,
is managing back to something that actually is a small goal,
like set small goals.
And then rinse and repeat.
And yeah, put the big goal on the shelf,
but fall back to the habits.
They're huge.
Well, that's a healthy combination
between BHAGS and SMART goals, right?
The big, hairy, audacious goals
that drive us for the reason and the purpose,
but at the same time,
the accountability of are my actions in line
with what I want to accomplish
if you're refusing to address that or recognize that,
or you're not open to feedback for it.
You mentioned customers in the early days
not wanting that feedback.
It sounds like you made a transition there.
I honestly don't know where my transition was,
but I freaking love hard feedback.
Like I live for it.
That's what we already know.
How to move everything forward.
But it's sometimes,
it can be a challenge to get out of people.
And more importantly, if I'm working with entrepreneurs,
it can be hard to inspire them to want it.
How did you make that shift?
Yeah, well, for us, it was like a back against the wall.
We have 10 customers and we needed to get to 100 to survive.
And so not only did we need this feedback
to know if we were on the right direction
and building the right thing,
but we needed this feedback so we could fix whatever
the actual problem was to keep that person as a customer
because we knew we needed to get 100
or else we were gonna have to hang it up.
Because I knew if we get to 100, we get to 1,000.
I knew if we get to 1,000-
You didn't have to go to the goal though, right?
You didn't have to do that.
You have that mentality.
You gave yourself the mentality that you had
that you could have felt, right?
And you could have gone and gotten a job
and maybe family or friends could have,
but you could have lived under a bridge.
There's a lot of things that could have happened,
but you have an incredible amount of tenacity.
I can see that in that story alone.
So you made it happen.
Yeah, and quite frankly, the other thing was the book,
Lean Startup by Eric Rees and then his mentor
was a guy named Steve Blank.
He wrote a book called The Startup Owner's Manual.
And these two books, basically in like a thousand pages
of text, beat into your head that if you're going to make it,
if you're going to survive, you have to get out
from behind the laptop and go talk to your customers.
Go listen.
And that's it.
And if you don't do that, then you're gonna waste
five years building the wrong stuff
that nobody wants to use.
And you're gonna beat your head against the wall
and you're gonna be upset and you're gonna be wondering
why things aren't working because the phone number
is not going to your cell phone.
The email inbox is going to a non-responder.
You don't even have 100 customers.
Why is the company email going to a do not respond at?
It's like you need that feedback to pull this off.
And so those two books were really instrumental.