commercial break. We'll come back and talk about the vision right after that. So the
good, the badly, the good, the badly, the good, the bad, and the ugly of outsourcing.
I said hiring, right? And we've got an opportunity to look at both of those entrepreneurs listening
in, visionaries listening in, you're in for an absolute treat. We are going to crush this
subject and pulverize it to get all of the or and awful stuff off to create an absolute
pile of gold for you. That's mine and Sean's goal today. Why, why outsourcing and not hiring?
Teach me Sean. Speed generally. I mean, if you've got something that needs to get done
and you don't have time to hire, you generally outsource. If you don't have the expertise
in house, right? I mean, outsourcing could be an accountant. It could be an advocate.
Let me take that up a notch. I'm going to refine already. You said generally, generally
businesses fail 96% of the time within 10 years, 4% survive, but they still have the
same problems as the 96% have failed. Most people never make it successfully in business
and at least the stats from the SBA. And another side says only 60% fail. Either way, I would
never send my kids to a school where the failure rate is that high. Hiring outsourcing. Let's
refine it further outside of general. Why outsourcing? Because you don't have the expertise
and you need it. You know, not every, you can't be good at everything. You have to know
your weaknesses, know where your gaps are. And sometimes you hire that in, but hiring
is a slow process and you need to be sure about it because you're going to keep that
person in the company for a long time. Sometimes you need a jolt of something. Maybe it's an
advertising agency that'll help you get to the right market. Maybe it's an accountant.
But in my case, my expertise is outsourcing for engineering and the do's and don'ts of
that, which is a massive issue because you're getting hit with your inbox is loaded with
engineering companies offering to build you a web application or a mobile application
or whatever. You never know who to trust. So here's what I hear you saying from my past
experience, right? And we're trying to build Zoho out with one of our companies a long
time ago. And I start consulting with all the engineers out there and they've got, not
only do I have to pay for Zoho at that point and all the complicated that it is to try
to get that in order, but now we have this fee of this engineering firm that might come
in and their quote was around $8,000. It was pretty small. It wasn't that significant for
the size of the entity we were working with. Fast forward years later and I'm building
with the same types of engineers and go high level, which is far cheaper than Zoho. And
I've got engineers around the $700 point. This was again, a couple of years ago and
this firm built some amazing, I got 50,000 square foot house for us basically. I mean,
it looks so good, but our company in hindsight needed about a 1000 square foot house. Now
we've got the maintenance problems of a 50,000 square foot house and all the costs associated
with it. We can't use any of the rooms because we're not at scale. And so they came in and
made this giant coffin for us that pretty much ate us alive. That challenge of engineering,
that's kind of one of the angles you're talking about. Am I correct?
Yeah, you're absolutely right. So you have to be set up for outsourcing before you do
it. And either through great advice from a constituent of mentoring friends who know
technology well, that can filter things for you if you're not an engineering founder or
having an in-house lead engineer at the very least. What I'm talking about outsourcing,
I'm talking about really scale up and Buddha as opposed to build out. If you're building
a proof of concept, you've got an idea and you want to get a company started. The traditional
way of doing it has been to go and get a co-founder engineering partner. And that works some of
the time, but a lot of the time it will work.
Let's look at the stats. I'm with you. It is not working. It is not the way that again,
I don't want to bet my life and my legacy on a process with odds that say 96% chance
of failure. I'm not going to follow the way that people do this. I love that you talk
about lead engineer. Those of you who are like, I don't need a lead engineer. I understand.
You may have a pool company and we're talking about a right-hand man who understands the
areas of business that you don't. So this still is applicable, these principles. I'm
going to pull the principles out, but we are going to dive deep on the engineering side
and whatever needs to happen on the backend, my friends, I'm going to pull other resources
in to translate this into universal language because Sean is right. And this is not an
engineering problem. This is an entrepreneurial visionary problem. We are not experts when
it comes to hiring, unless that happens to have been our core focus for the 10,000 hour
rule, then you should not be handling that yourself or just trying to wing it and hope
you win it. That is not a recipe for success. So thank you for being here today, Sean, and
for being willing to share your expertise. I hear it in that you keep this conversation
far simpler than most tech gurus do. I can hear the fact that you speak both languages.
So you've done a lot to get to where you are as a visionary leader for all the visionary
leaders out there. What are three resources that have helped you get to where you are
today?
Stupidity. No entrepreneur would do it if they knew what they were getting into. And
I keep seeing business problems that I think I can solve. I'm curious and I like to solve
problems.
Power of starting something stupid.
And so you get into these things and then you realize, well, it's not the real, the
problem you thought it was is not the same problem that the market really needs. So you
gain intelligence through experience if you listen. So I would say the highest value you
could get out of it is being a good listener and not taking your ideas, having strong ideas
loosely held is a really good expression. And so going in with open eyes as to what
the market really wants versus what you think is the best idea is a way better approach
than going in and building and trying to figure stuff out and then finding out that everything
is not a nail because you got a hammer.
Correct. Two of my favorite realities. One, I love that expression that it is so easy
to fall victim of once you're selling the hammer, seeing everything as a nail and then
you need people who can help you be more self-aware. Two, I hate the quote, strong opinions loosely
held, but I love my rendition of it, which is opinions delicately held.
Oh, okay.
I would never hand you my baby loosely and I am strong and I will always hold my child
with great strength, but delicately so that you do not squish it. And if I hand that child
or opinion to you, I'm also going to make sure that you're not the type of person who's
going to drop the child. And that is the strong opinions delicately held concept that again,
I hope all of you out there listening, if you have opinions, don't give them to people
who are going to tarnish them or throw them to the ground. Make sure that you are sharing
those with people who are going to honor your opinions and don't strangle your opinion to
death because that's also, it's just not good to be that arrogant in life. What's number
two?
Well, actually I'm going to challenge you a bit on that.
Challenge me on it. Let's do it.
I like the expression. I like the language of it. I have to think more about it, but
I'll tell you why one of that holds true for me at least. So my first company, I'd been
in the sponsorship business. I raised the bank. I raised the money for Vancouver's Olympic
bid. So I knew a lot of people who are chief marketing officers and pretty big brands.
And I had an idea to transform the way advertising was bought and sold in television specifically,
which is where most of the money was at the time. And the idea was pretty disruptive.
It was really to become the Expedia of that business or the E-Trade. Those two industries
were disrupted because the travel agent was the only person back in the old day, probably
a lot of your audience doesn't know what a travel agent is, but it was the person who
you'd go to to ask, where do I go and can you book my flights? Because it wasn't available
online. And all of a sudden it became available to the end user. Same thing with stock trading.
You used to pay a broker 15% for every trade because they were the only ones who knew live
trade data and they could execute for you. So those two industries, big same thing with
the advertising industry. And my idea was to give that data to the end user, the brands,
so that they knew what to buy and when instead of paying their agency 15% for all the media
buys, and we're talking $250 billion industry, so it's a lot of money. And everyone said,
great idea, Sean, great idea, great idea. And one person said, that is the stupidest
idea I've ever heard. What are you talking about? And because nine out of 10 had said,
yes, I could have said this person's an idiot, but that person was telling me the real truth,
which I really like. And his response was, look, hey, I'm the chief marketing officer
of a multi-billion dollar brand. How do you think I got here? So you're good at it. He
says, yeah, I'm pretty good, but I don't make a lot of mistakes. I don't take a lot of risks.
Okay. And so when I'm doing a campaign, I've got my creative agencies and then all that
creative content is sold through or bought through or distributed through one media buying
agency and they do the campaign. So what happens when the campaign fails? I guess, you know,
you tell them they failed. No, I fire the agency. In your scenario where I have all
the people buying the media for me, if the campaign fails, guess who gets fired? They
do. No, no, I do. So I'm not going to do that. It's not going to work. And it was true. And
so really it's, you know, great ideas, technology, technology engineers, you know, we, people
in the tech sector tend to design and build stuff and hope that it sells. And they don't
think that the truth is the friction is always people. And the friction in introducing a
product is going to be the, the, the behavior of people as opposed to the new technology.
Right. So you really have to look at that. And the line at the, so the other lesson is
follow the path of least resistance. And, and that is different from the straightest
path. So you think about, you know, mathematics and logic, the straightest path is the best
way to go. No, then you have to get to Starbucks and you realize there's U-turns that you have
to take and there's walls that you run into if you don't go the right way. So the analogy
is nature, right? You look at a river, a river doesn't, where was the juxtaposition though?
Cause I heard alignment, but where was the juxtaposition? Where was the, where was the
conflict of the strong opinions delicately held?
Oh, because I had a strong opinion and it had been reinforced by all these people. And
I had to loosen the hold on that because somebody had come up with a better idea and it actually
transformed the business I went into, which was,
I still see that as delicately held. So I like it though. I like the example and the
reality. I'm hoping too, that all you visionaries listening in, the idea behind this or both
of us is make sure that you're not suffocating your opinions. You know, that you are able
to hear and receive the opinions of others. My other end of that was a more of a Dan Martell
or Gary Vaynerchuk inspired reality that if you're in an environment and actually Taylor
Welch, here to give him credit, if you're in an environment where it is a weak environment,
people are going to tear you apart or they're going to hate your opinions and persecute
you or kill you for it. Then again, that's not necessarily the environment where you
want to share your opinions. You might want to find yourself surrounded by people who
are going to support you, challenge you, you know, they'll help you see things differently,
but they're not out to get you or hurt or harm. And some of us are blessed to have more
good people in our lives than, than, or people with appreciation for us than others. What's
the second resource you recommend?
So it's really, if you're talking about, obviously these businesses run out of cash. I mean,
you talk about that 96% and they run out of cash. Absolutely. And for a while you didn't
need to worry about that. I mean, there was so much cash floating around in the market
that- Who? Who didn't need to worry about that?
Help me understand that. Venture back companies. I mean, they would get overstocked with cash
and get lazy about business fundamentals. And you know, really a good business should
be profitable. There may be an investment period where you need to raise cash, but you
should be targeting some activity, the activity that will actually deliver some profit that
you can reinvest in the business and therefore not necessarily have to get it out. But eventually
you'll get to a point of where you've got a fantastic formula that can scale. In other
words, you know, for every dollar you're going to get in, you get $10 out. So let's get $10
now. If you don't have $10, that's a good time to go. But if you don't have that formula
and you're not, there's no path to profitability, maybe not such a good business to be in, especially
now where money's a lot tighter.
I got it. That makes sense. And there's a, you know, let's look at the stats real quick.
The Google stats, right? The real quick ones, not the, not the end all stats, no stats are
end all by the way, my friends, approximately 30% of startups with venture backing end up
failing, right? Well, you got to think about timelines on that around 75% of all FinTech
startups crash within two decades. So they have a much stronger chance of survival than
other companies that are not venture backed, right? There's important variables to look
at that. And one of those big variables is exactly what Sean said, cash. I'm a huge believer
in you've got to have a treasury in order to win the battle and in order to witness the
effect of like the benefits of the compound effect. If you have a hundred dollars in a
savings account and you're in 3% in a year, you made $3 and it doesn't feel like a victory.
You have a hundred million dollars in a savings account, you make $3 million in that savings
account. And if your expenses are lower than that, then you'll never run out of capital.
So cash is a very, very important aspect of growth. And I'm grateful that you brought
it up. Any other thoughts on cash before we move to resource three?
Even though you get, you can get lots, you know, windfall from like, you'll get money
from venture. If you've got a good idea and you've got a good market to get into and you've,
you've got the right team to execute on it. Just be careful about overburnt. Like still
be a boot, think like a bootstrapper. If you're experimenting beyond what you've experimented
to get to the cash, if you're executing on a scale up on what you've got to get to the
cash, then do that, right? $1 in $10 out. That's awesome. But if it's, if it's to go
and get distracted and other, other new initiatives and shiny objects, that's where cash starts
to burn out. But it's still important to have other adjacencies.
But it's a, it's a vehicle and the vehicles, just like if I get in the Lamborghini drunk,
you know, and, and also put beer goggles on or something too, it's like, I'm going to
crash into a wall and probably die. Right. You can use your vehicle for a lot of different
realities. We teach our entrepreneurs that they, they should forecast to where they're
going. You know, so if you're playing monopoly before you actually spend the money and you're
actually like looking at where you might be going, you can put yourself in a great position
to use it. And yes, make sure you get the cash. Also entrepreneurs, I wish more of you
would set aside a cash reserve and understand the value of having that cash reserve responsibly.
If you were going to take that and put it into a casino, then don't keep a cash reserve.
Have a business partner, keep the cash reserve who's responsible. But, and you might not
want to let your spouse know that you have a cash reserve, but when spouse is pissed
off at you for never being there and she's tired of making dinner or he's tired of,
of doing that, do a staycation, put yourself in a position to where you can be there properly
for the family while also being there, you know, for your team and moving the business
forward. So I think cash is a very important resource that gets under talked about and
we, we aren't very wise stewards in our lives. We've got to, we've got to be better about
that if we want to truly win with it. So Sean, those are great. What's number three? This
is, this is awesome.
Well, it's, it's always people, you know, people are the, I would say 80% of that failure
rate is people, either the wrong people or battles between them. You know, co-founders
battling each other when things get up and one founder thinks they're not contributing
enough typical case of failure. Not having, you know, the people that you get you to a
certain level are not necessarily the people that get to the next level and you have to
recognize and realize that you're going to, you're going to change your team as you go
along. Some of them will stay. I'm not saying that's universally true, but you know, a lot
of like, like I just said, a co-founder who's a technical expert, if you give that person
30% of the equity, instead of spending a little bit of money to get to pay them. You might
find that that person who bootstrapped your product to get it to product market fit is,
was great till there, but they're not the person who can organize an engineering team
and they're not the person who can hire and scale the product and the product needs to
be scaled and they're really good at firefighting, but they're not really good at architecting.
Those kinds of changes as the company evolves, you know, you want people who are generalists
at the beginning because you're always, you're going to be, have to be pretty agile and move
around with what you're building. And then as you get to a scale up, you need to have
people who really know what they're doing and specialize in certain categories of business.
I do love how softly you talk about the dog eat dog world, you know, of business and it
is not personal, it is business. And I think it's shit for leadership. If we don't understand
that, that it's one thing to point our fingers at one person in an equation that might not
be a fit long-term. It's another, if we're doing that over and over and over, and we
might be in a better position to look at the three fingers pointing back at us as a leader.
And so, and I see Sean, you've got the emotional intelligence to care about people and the
demeanor to say that you really do appreciate and respect people. I speak more concerned
for the bro marketers and the people out there, the boss babes that love to kind of control
environments and lead with this top-down mentality of, well, they're just not a great fit, let's
cut it and go. And it's going to lead to a very nasty feeling someday where, you know
what, maybe we could have figured out a different type of transition, you know, rather than
just being pragmatic, logical, AI-driven robots about it. One of the great leaders who does
this well, in my opinion, is Craig Hanley of ListenTrust. He wrote a book called Hired
to Quit, Inspired to Stay. And that process of creating an environment where if we create
an environment where people, one, they don't become addicted to their titles, right? And
the authority or ego associated with that, but they are more flexible. And we also honor
people's true ambitions or passions, then there may be an opportunity where it makes
sense for them to jump into a different vehicle and move on. You know, and now they move on
with our blessing while continuing to love and be happy for the time they spent in our
vehicle, or maybe there's an opportunity for them to come back too. So I think a lot of
the challenges that exist in the business world is we're so fast to stick to the vice
of expectations and set, you know, do things harsh and quick versus realize that, you know,
who can be a little bit more like Greg Popovich, a true champion, right? Multiple time champion
who, yeah, Jay Crowder didn't fit three months in, gone, I think three weeks in and gone.
I can't remember. But there's other circumstances like when he traded George Hill, who was one
of his best friends, even though he's much younger on the team, got Kawhi Leonard. Kawhi
Leonard was the key to San Antonio's next championship. That probably hurt the relationship
a little bit of George Hill and Greg Popovich. But from what I know about their relationship,
he didn't sacrifice the relationship and the process of making those moves. We as leaders,
if we dedicate ourselves to doing more to honor our relationships and those people,
we stand a much greater chance to win much more abundantly. Sean, feel free to challenge
that or feel free to double down. You've got a lot of experience in this space.
Yeah, I think I'll double down on it. It's really important to acknowledge communication
skills is really important to be trained on if you're not, you know, nonviolent communications,
getting ego out of ideas and letting best ideas win. But you're also right about expectations.
You know, we have when we build a company, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to execute
on that. And investors expect us to execute on it as well. And that can be scary. And
so that fear of failure is augmented, which can create a violent environment where if
people don't reach your expectations, you just get angry at them.
I was really, really guilty though, for a long time. I led that for years and it was,
it cost me some seriously great relationships. So I get it. Nobody's perfect in this process.
But I love what you're keep going, man. I mean,
So when you're like, and people see me when I'm on my team, they can tell I'm frustrated.
But what I'm careful to do is not get mad at them. I say, look, I'm angry right now.
I'm mad at the situation. I'm not mad at you. And there's a big difference in that
because it relieves that emotional failure feeling of personal failure. And the key there
is to learn what did I miss about the explanation of what need to be said? Because as an entrepreneur
and visionary, I'm terrible at the details. My head's over here. And the rest of the
team's trying to figure out what's in my head. And I just assume they can fill all the dots
to get to there. That's a terrible assumption. I make it all the time. That's why I always
hire somebody who's totally detailed, maniacally detailed oriented, who's an explainer and
breaks it down into chunks and lets people build what needs to be built. And that's,
that I learned over experience, not because I'm wise.
Yeah. Well, wisdom comes from everything. All of our experiences are goods or bads or
uglies or failures or successes. There's a lot to that. And you have that experience
that goes along with the expertise. Visionaries, this episode is not about giving you the miracle
cure or the magic bullet. It's about telling you, throw the magic bullet away, throw the
miracle elixir out of your mind, because this is going to take working with an expert. Sean
represents that type of expertise to me. You guys know I don't say that as boldly very
often about the experts that we do have on this program. But if you're not going to work
with us, then I hope you're working with Sean or somebody very similar to that vibes with
your values and your core that understands the value of your culture, that understands
the dynamics of leadership that you want to have. Don't approach this path alone. I see
too many solopreneurs and entrepreneurs and people who think they're going to move a vision
forward that are scared to talk to amazing leaders out there and include them in the
process of creating a win-win. So we'll come back. We're going to dive in and talk more,
not just about the good, the bad, and the ugly of outsourcing, but hopefully we'll dive
into enough tips of how to do this right to where, once again, consider this a fast forward
interview of both of our entities on this and saying, you know what, maybe these are
people we should reach out to, or maybe you can use this checklist as you evaluate whoever
else is coming across your path and learn some secrets about how to recognize who is
going to help you win and who is going to be dead weight on your ship. We'll see you
on the other side. All right. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Callum. I'm
your show host. We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders
who are building fantastic visions out there.
What's up, everybody? Welcome in to another episode of Vision Pros Live. I'm your show
host, Jackson Callum, founder and CEO of First Class Business. And I'm passionately on fire
right now about the guest that we have on the show. His name is Sean Langwoodock. That
is a hard name for me to say, just as my last name is. But Sean brings an expertise, a tenure
and energy related to outsourcing and hiring. And what we're talking about is expansion.
Those of you who've listened for a long time know that vision is where I start my focus
point with the companies who work with culture. We have to create a culture where people want
to belong. And then that attracts leaders to come look and see what we're doing. Well,
we all need leaders by our side if we're going to scale what it is we are up to. And so part
of that process of vision and culture is figuring out the job descriptions, figuring out the
types of roles that you need, reading books like Rocket Fuel or the E-Myth. All of those
help you and put you in a position to not accidentally delegate this stuff by what they
call abdication. I had to look that word up the first time I read that book. It was just
three years ago, I believe, when I read the E-Myth. And it means to basically let somebody
do something without knowing anything about that process. It puts your business or your
vision in extreme danger. I don't want to see that happen to you. So pay very close
attention to what we go through with Sean. And more importantly, be ready to reach out
to somebody after this because you did not hear this episode on accident. There's a reason
why you're here. We're going to go into some other opportunities real quick, too. These
reasons are also important. One is our sponsor, hardtokill.org with Dave Marl. We do work
with Dave on this. It inspired me when I saw he's helping a hundred thousand veterans lose
two million pounds collectively. And he's created a community called Hard to Kill the
Matches podcast. This is a award winning podcast. He's been at that podcast for five years.
Today I would like to say, look up Dave Marl, Afghanistan. Take a look and see what he was
doing in the New York Times to help people that were in desperate need. I'm not going
to ruin the story. I'm going to let you go and check that out yourself. But definitely
come and join us because he's expanded the program to civilians like myself and like
some of you out there. And if we've got military friends that are feeling a little bit lost
or haven't really been able to integrate back into society as well, I highly recommend getting
them connected to somebody like Dave so they can get the community and support that they
need in order to thrive. And there's O Protegais de Trabajo para Latinos, opportunities for
work for Latinos. This is our own homegrown program. We help Latinos learn about LinkedIn,
Canva, Upwork. Most of them have never heard of those terms before. And we help them learn
how to become digital ambassadors or as a lot of you call them VAs. I don't like the
VA process. I call it virtual abuse. I see far too many entrepreneurs out there not taking
any concern for who they're working with and treating them like a pair of shoes from Payless.
Guess what? I was guilty as charged as well when I first started hiring and trying to
move into entrepreneurship. My hope is that I can save some of you from that reality and
build amazing relationships. They have their own podcasts associated with this. If you
know a Latino leader, please definitely send them our way so we can get them interviewed
and inspire the world of people out there who we'd love to see them change their lives.
And we're striving to bridge the economic gap between North America, South America,
and the rest of world. Opportunities for Filipinos just launched and opportunities for Indians
just launched as well with respectively, Ange Castro from the Philippines and Harry Vashiste
from India. We're super happy to see that happen. So let's change the world.
And there's the water project. We have no affiliation with it. I just know that I just
for whatever reason, I couldn't let it go. When I found out about this project, I've
never been thirsty in my life. And so when I saw it, I had to really focus in on what
are they doing and how are they doing this and why. And I love that they set this program
up to where you can actually contribute to a specific project. And you can see they send
you the social media updates, they send you pictures and photos of evidence that they
actually brought this project to fruition, whether it's a borehole well or a sand dam.
And I just love everything that the water project stands for. And when I see these kids
celebrating water the way that my kids celebrate Christmas Day, it reminds me that I cannot
forget about the reality that we have this opportunity to help. So if you're not in a
financial position to give back to the project right now, my hope is that you talk about
this over a dinner with somebody or my hope is that you tag somebody that you feel inspired
to tag because you never know if the person you tagged is going to be the person who ends
up donating $50,000 to this and funding thousands of people's lives, livelihoods with water.
This is a generational impact that will allow these nations to move forward in ways that
perhaps some of us take for granted. I know with the microphone opportunity that I have,
I get to do that. So I try not to. Without further ado, Sean, thank you for joining me
on Vision Pros Live. It is absolutely an honor to have you here.
Those are great sponsors, by the way. I'm also contributed to a water project called
One Drop. What's amazing is not just the access to the water, but the distance and time it
takes to go get water when it's not localized and that risks to life, to rape, to all those
things that happen. Because in one country, it's mostly the woman who would go to the
water and they would get raped on their way to these wells. I mean, it's just what we
take for granted. Thank you for mentioning One Drop, too. It's one of the shout outs
I usually do on the show. If you guys are thinking, man, that reminds me of this or
that, share it in the comments. Let us know what projects you want to see supported and
the causes because we're happy to talk about those causes on the show. We got 80 billion
people out there to help. And so how do we do that? By joining forces. A bundle of sticks
is stronger than one. So One Drop, I'm going to take a look at that afterwards as well.
Sean, will you do me a favor and send me a link from their site that inspires you? That
would be great. Go ahead, Jackson. Sorry. What is your vision for those that you serve,
Sean? Well, in the case of the business, it is to make sure that nobody wastes time talking
to an agency that is a waste of time. And that is easy to do. And for my employees,
this is my give background. I've built five companies. So this one is really about teaching
everyone who works for me how to be an entrepreneur and the trials and tribulations you go through
and how to get on the right path when you're off the right path and get back on track when
you're off track and how to stay on track and focused, all those things. And theoretically,
in this case, they'll come out very well off as a result of this company being successful.
So that's part two. Yeah. Back to part one. I mean, there are so many ways you can go
wrong in outsourcing and everyone's heard a bad story. So there's two things I'm doing.
One is whether or not you use our service or not, I'm writing the definitive guide for
how to outsource. So all the key questions you need to ask an agency, who to talk to
at the agency first as opposed to second, because most people talk to the leadership
of an agency and guess what? Those people take your calls all day long and they will
sound like they're the perfect agency. But it's really the people who they're going to
assign to the project that are the most important to talk to. And very few people have the time
to collect that data and get there. So we do help in that. But I'll give you all the
key answers, quick questions and answers. I love that. If you didn't hear that, if you
weren't listening and rewind 20 seconds and listen to what Sean just said, go ahead, continue.
Yeah. So I mean, just as an example, you know, when you go to an agency and you say, Hey,
we're a FinTech company and we're doing where we need a payment rails and we're in, you
know, whatever tech stack you're in. Did you do that? Of course, of course we do that.
Oh yeah. They all say the same thing. Yes, man. All the way. Yeah. So why? Because you
ask them a leading question, right? Yeah, exactly. And they want the business and they'll
scramble and try and find somebody. And if you go to your friends, you know, so most
people go to their friends for an agency, because they're looking for trust. There's
no trust in the environment, right? It's water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
So you need a filter and the filter is your friend who's had a good experience with an
agency. Sure. But that friend might be in a totally different business and that agency
might know nothing about your business. So you're going to teach all that, spend all
this time teaching about the business. Yeah. Or it might be the same business, but they
don't have the right engineers when you're asking, right? Yep. Well, they had good engineers
for your friend, but all those, they're not waiting for your call. They're deploying their
engineers as soon as they can get a client. So their best engineers are gone and they're
not being necessarily truthful about who they've gotten, what they can do. So those are the
kinds of things you can avoid. And I'll give you all the secrets. I'm going to do it in
video as well as book, but that's my goal is to make sure nobody wastes time talking
to an agency that's a waste of time. That's amazing. We're going to be doubling down on
that. I've got a guide that is in rough draft form. I'll put it out there. It's called the
eight step checklist for identifying pretenders and contenders. When it comes to looking at
clients you might work with and to the hiring marketing agencies for success, 301, 10 considerations
to the right growth team. And so I'm excited to put that in your hands as well. Sean, you're
welcome to R&D, rip off and duplicate anything you want from those materials, you know, and
provide your scrutiny and feedback, right? It's iron sharpens iron. There's an opportunity
to refine and everybody who's listening right now, again, I can't stress enough how important
this is for the visions that we're striving to build. My mom, I trust her when it comes
to recipes, 100%. When it comes to legal advice, why would I? You know, that doesn't make sense.
So our friends are not usually our best source when it comes to understanding how to win
in the business world. We are running low on time today. We've had such a great banter
and we had a little bit of a late start. That was my fault. And I'm going to skip a couple
of questions that I'd love to potentially bring you back for Sean, if you do want to
come back in the future. I'd love to come back, Jackson. There's so much to explore.
And then we can look at the guide. I mean, it was well, once that comes out, that'll
be a lot of fun. I'm going to skip to our most powerful question. If this was your last
chance to speak today for the rest of your life, what powerful lesson can other visionaries
learn from your experience? Be vulnerable. Because when you're vulnerable, you're authentic.
And we put, and it creates disconnection. Whereas you're as a leader, you think you
need to be the leader and be the strong person all the time. And if that is not authentic
strength, it comes off. It's the barrier. It's the barrier that goes through you that
creates a disconnection to anyone else you're dealing with. So vulnerability is actually
much more of an attractant and much more of a connection to a device than false pretense.
My hope is that all of us, myself included, take the opportunity to just meditate on that
simple truth of what does it mean to be vulnerable and what does it mean to be authentic? Because
we could use elegance and words and try to pull it together. But at the end of the day,
you finding out what that means for you is going to be very different than what that
means for me. And I do think that's one of the greatest strengths that we can rely on.
How do we do that in a way that's safe with the relationships that we have in life and
into that strength of power? So that was awesome. We've got a little bit of time left. I mean,
we're going to make the time, but I do want to be respectful of the hour that we have
booked.
Outsourcing. What do you want to talk about, Sean? What are the questions that I haven't
asked or the things that you don't get asked in these interviews that people ideally would
be considering that you're often not prompted to dive into? Let's hit that.
Yeah. So where things go wrong tends to be similar to what we talked about earlier is
communications of people. And some people, when they think of outsourcing, they think
India, right? Outsourcing could be an agency next door. It doesn't matter where it is.
And so when you're investigating these things, a lot of people look for technology and price,
right? Do they have the technical skills and are they priced right? And we say there's
a trilemma. There's price, speed, and quality. You can only pick two. And we solve for quality
and speed because when you get quality, you're going to get speed. And that will actually
lower your total cost of development. And we try and match with quality. And some people
think you can match on country. Like, oh, here's Ukraine. Ukraine is a great place to
do engineering work. So is Brazil and so is Argentina. And so are, you know, Latin and
South America is very, very popular, especially with because of time zone. They're very different
cultures as well. And Southeast Asia is very different cultures. So as you move into different
cultures, you're going to get different cultural distances between how you work and communicate
and how others work and communicate. There's nothing wrong with the differences, but you
have to be aware of them. So Southeast Asians, cultures tend to be hierarchical. So they
will be less inclined unless they work in North American environments to challenge what
you're saying and be a sounding board. They're more doers and listeners. And they tend to
work in a waterfall kind of sequence as opposed to agile. That's a sweeping generalization,
by the way.
It is. But it's okay. I get what you're talking about. You're talking about building at scale
too. And at scale, it's hard to influence core route training. You can't force culture.
Culture is something that takes a little bit of time, finesse, understanding to develop.
So I think it's very respectful and fair the way that you're mentioning it.
Yeah. And so different cultures will bring different vibe to your environment as well,
which is phenomenal because it's diversity that brings in the best ideas. So there's
disadvantage and advantage, but just be aware of cultural distance as much as the communication
style. And if you can become aware of it, your communications can be better and you're
going to connect better. That's a really important thing that people miss. And we filter for
that when we do these filterings.
Ask a Texan and ask a New Yorker.
Exactly. Yeah. Just within your own organization, there's going to be distances in how you communicate.
Imagine across different cultures. Right?
All of you New Yorkers offended by my New York accent. You're welcome. I know I don't
have it. I don't have it. So those, even within our own cultures, our own languages, it all
exists. And that's why it's so important to understand and develop the leadership skills
and to have leaders around you that are helping you navigate these types of territories so
that you can focus on the fulfillment of the vision. If you don't have that ability to
focus because you're trying to juggle everything, you're going to run out of the ability to
juggle it all. And so why put yourself in that situation? That's like, what is the benefit
of trying to do it all? And then becoming the person who's like, look, I can do it all.
I've never understood that mindset. You said that we only get two. I'll challenge that.
But you talked about price, speed, or quality. Is that a generalization or do you believe
that it's an impossibility to, I guess, have your cake and eat it too?
It's rarely not true, actually. So if you're focused on price, you're going to get subpar
engineering generally. So our strategy is find the best engineering team and then let
geography sometimes determine because of foreign exchange or cost of living in certain countries
a better value. But don't start with the price. Start with the engineering team with the best
quality and figure out. And then you will present like 20 options so you can decide
which price and quality match. But if you're going for price only, you wouldn't want, and
you talked about your baby and holding things delicately. This is your baby. You don't want
to just give this to any old daycare. If you're having brain surgery, you don't want to go
for price. So it's the same sort of thing. You want to make sure you're getting quality
because you'll end up rewriting the code.
What I'm testing for and looking for this, by the way, all you visionaries out there
is one of the things that I check and look for checks and balances and leaders that we're
talking to like Sean is flexibility. Right? Are they addicted or stuck on what they just
said or are they willing to look at alternative paradigms that may exist? And Sean has done
that all throughout our time today. And that to me is kind of the definition of an expert.
Matt Cutts, the search director of Google taught us this when I was in a company that
was a Y Combinator. And he said that the sign of an expert is not somebody who knows it
all. It's somebody who will go get the answer, which means they also have to be vulnerable.
You have to be authentic enough to be willing to admit when you don't know. And so I love
that you led with stupidity, you know, stupidity, cash, people. And you've just been super real
throughout this interview. And so we look forward to as well engaging further with outforce.ai
as we continue to scale first class business. That will definitely be one of our goals that
we will act on immediately. And in addition to that, those of you listening in will have
below the video, the resources where you can take your next action steps. And below that
will have all the resources that we talked about in this episode so you can dive in deeper.
We're going to put together a couple of AI guides for some of the general ideas that
were talked about. And as mentioned, I'll put both of the guides that we already have
in place in the show notes, that A SIP checklist and the hiring one that I there's some things
that Sean talked about on there that, you know, that I talked about in this that are
incredible, incredibly important to me that so many entrepreneurs overlook back to one
of them. Be careful not to lead the witness with your questions and ask for detailed answers.
Don't do that. Instead, give the person the opportunity to talk about what they would
do if they were to be hired by you. But I'm oversimplifying. There's so much that we've
got to learn. And before you hire somebody on this, consider who do you know around you
that you can trust that doesn't have a bias that can also protect you from making sure
you don't hire and work with the wrong people. It's very important that you get those those
answers correct. And I'll let you close out today, Sean. Final thoughts.
Well, I just want to thank you, Jackson, for the way you do this podcast. It's you leave
a lot of space for vulnerability and it's a safe place and it's and it's an exploratory
place and I like where you go with it. So I want to thank you. That's what I want to
do at my last moment. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Vision Pros.
We'll see in the next episode. 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 going to 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 vision
and becoming a vision.