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01 Starting from Zero with Dave Meyer and Trygve Olsen
175 Plays2 years ago
It's our first episode so we're starting with the man! El Jefe! The boss - Dave Meyer. Join Trygve as he asks Dave all sorts of good questions about running an agency and starting a team.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue - through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dave1meyer
Connect with Trygve on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/trygveo
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Dial It In' Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
Meet Dave Meyer of BusyWeb
00:00:24
Speaker
Our first guest is the founder of BusyWeb, Dave Meyer. So what made you want to start a business?
00:00:32
Speaker
Well, I think the big thing that I had growing up was I was in an entrepreneurial family. And so my dad had his own remodeling business. We did doors, windows, roofs, decks, all of those things. So I was very comfortable working with the world, but I also saw what it took to keep a business going. And I kind of knew
00:01:01
Speaker
just by osmosis that I probably wasn't going to be all that fantastic as an employee because it was always ground into me that my father was never going to be a great employee. And so that's kind of how we got into the business. So what about you makes you think you're not a good employee?
The Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
00:01:23
Speaker
I think it's less a bad employee and more overly inclined to lead.
00:01:29
Speaker
because I always like to add value to things. And so like when I was an employee at large banks or other internships or a famous one where I worked for a state agency, I couldn't leave well enough alone. And if you're set on the status quo, that's not something that winds up being all that good. So my very first internship was at a state agency and I was not asked back.
00:01:53
Speaker
because I kept asking questions like why and why don't we do it this way? And it seems like this might be a better idea. So not very easy to probably have me as an employee then.
00:02:07
Speaker
but you were an employee, how long did it take before you went full time after you founded BusyWeb? So it took nine years and I was quite happy actually at the bank that I was at, one of the top five banks in the country. I was in charge of internal communications for the retail network. So the nice part about that was it was entrepreneurial.
00:02:35
Speaker
And I got to kind of set my own stuff, do my own thing. But at the end of it all, we had had a project I think that I had worked on for a year and a half. And then based on some whim, the entire project got canceled. And I had stepped up to lead a personal and professional development nonprofit that was built into the company.
00:03:00
Speaker
It was a non-paid volunteer thing. I remember telling my wife, I was like, I think as soon as this development network thing is done, I'm probably going to look for a different job or maybe take BusyWeb full-time. She stopped and in her typical Gen way, if anybody knows Gen, she's the integrator at BusyWeb, the chief operating officer. But she looked at me in her Gen way and she said, well, let me see this. The only thing that you're staying at your job for is the one thing you're not getting paid for.
00:03:29
Speaker
I was like, ah, true point, good call. And so I sent a Dear John letter to the bank that very day.
Founding BusyWeb in the Internet Era
00:03:37
Speaker
What about marketing and the internet made you want to get into that and spend more time there? What year was this when you started BusyWeb? So all the way back, what made me want to get started with a internet slash web company was if you remember back in the late nineties, it was all about the internet and there was all kinds of news and exciting stuff. This was the beginning of the big first.com bubble.
00:04:06
Speaker
And everything was building up to the year 2000. It was March of 1999. And in addition to simply wanting to save my soul and set up something as a safety net in case I didn't like this massive corporate job.
00:04:22
Speaker
I knew that I really liked working on the web because, as I alluded to before with my state agency job, one of the annoying pesky things that I did was I created a website for the agency that I worked for, which was a subsidiary of the Pollution Control Agency. And I did it because nobody else wanted to. So they said, well, let the new kid do it.
00:04:44
Speaker
and worked on, I think it was Dreamweaver at the time. Dreamweaver. Yeah, it was super, super fun and anything was possible. I created this website, but then I also wound up going on one of our first vacations as a married couple with my wife. We went on a cruise and just as a fun thing to do, I created a web log of the cruise.
00:05:14
Speaker
and took a bunch of pictures, wrote up what the experience was like. So back in the 90s, there were, back in time in our lives, we liked dark ages of the internet, we liked to call college. Right. Right. This was early, early Google. Google was a year old in 99.
00:05:31
Speaker
And so there wasn't really a search thing and I knew that I really liked doing like web related things and it was fun and it was a good creative outlet. I was trained as a communicator and in PR and print journalism. So it kind of gave me an outlet to do some of the things that I hadn't really had a chance to do in my corporate life.
00:05:54
Speaker
which is share things direct to the public. So that was really the inkling of that beginning thing. And really, as I was getting started in 99, there were a lot of websites that were still unbooked. And so I was looking for something business and web related. I wanted business, web is busy. Busy web was open, busyweb.com, boom, booked it. And the rest is history. Who was your first employee hire?
Scaling and Growing BusyWeb
00:06:21
Speaker
So my first employee hire was a classmate of mine from high school. So brought him on because he had reached out to me about a year and a half
00:06:32
Speaker
after I had gone busy web full time and was trying to do the same thing. And so we got to talking, I gave him a ton of advice and here's what's working for me, here's what I did, here's what I think we should do. And then we both kind of came back and said, you know, why don't we just work together? And so I hired him on and then I think he stayed with us for like eight years.
00:06:54
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. And what was back in those days as you were just starting to transform, because that's kind of the purpose of what we don't want to talk about on this podcast is how do you take an idea from its infancy into a full blown company? So take us through some of the steps that had to happen to go from I'm going to do this full time to now we're a real business.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, so the decision to grow and scale came after a few different things. The first big thing was I had done my MBA through St. Thomas and one of the top five schools in the country for what it was in entrepreneurship and still is, but the biggest thing that St. Thomas always did was in their entrepreneurship MBA program, they made sure that you got your hands dirty.
00:07:49
Speaker
And so a big part of the classwork and the coursework was building out all of the business plan for how I was going to grow this thing. And so it took a few additional years. The bank paid for my MBA and so I owed them five years and so I actually lasted six. But it was built from square one to grow into a business.
00:08:16
Speaker
And one of the things that I'm famous for saying, or internally at least I'm famous for saying, is you need to know five things about me. Dave doesn't do detail. And that's only four things. That's right. That's four things. Right. So bad on the detail, right? So it's incredibly important to find people to round out your weaknesses. I needed people that did detail. I needed people that were more creative than I am.
00:08:43
Speaker
I dabbled in design, but I'm a writer, not a designer. And so it was much better to have someone that could do those things. And then I also went full on and hired a business coach and hired consultants and people that I knew were really smart in ways that I wanted to get smart.
00:09:07
Speaker
And so I had a few folks and actually one of my coaches made me several hundred thousand dollars in just a split second decision on figuring out what my pricing was for a specific product. And it was right before we went into something, she asked me a couple of really pointed questions and boom, we were up and I had much more revenue than I would have and it paid for itself 10 times over.
00:09:32
Speaker
And then I've always been, what was that point that she gave you? Really charged more. I was, I was thinking, well, in order to redo all of these things, it was going to take like maybe four or $5,000.
00:09:46
Speaker
and looking at the, well, if you work the math backwards from our is like, no, no, you need to also charge for the value that you bring and you've been in business for more than a dozen years and you know how to do all of these specific things and they're paying for the value as much as they are your time. And so we just made it a hundred thousand, not 5,000.
00:10:08
Speaker
And it still felt like about a buck an hour after the entire thing was done. But you need to charge for your value. And if you don't, two things happen. First, you don't make any money and you wind up going out of business. But second, your clients devalues your input.
00:10:28
Speaker
because if they pay more for something, it must be better. And that's always the truth from my perspective. Not to say that we're a premium pricing model at BusyWeb, we believe in charging fairly for our business. And I think there are a lot of businesses out there that charge way too much, especially some of the traditional agencies in the world where they're talking about branding or a lot of the more esoteric things and just trusting a secret sauce.
00:10:59
Speaker
Instead, you just charge fairly for the knowledge that you bring in as well as the time that you devote. And so that was my biggest learning from that particular engagement. It's like, well, you know what, you bring value in and people perceive value for what your pricing is. So make sure that you match what people expect from you.
00:11:21
Speaker
So I think one of the questions that I get asked all the time about what it's like to work for Busy Web is I get an arched eyebrow when they find out that you and Jen are married. Yeah. And they say to me, well, how does that work?
Family and Business: A Balancing Act
00:11:41
Speaker
Yep. So let's start with how did you go about hiring your own wife and why? Yeah.
00:11:49
Speaker
And I'll say, first, especially to all the skeptics, best decision I ever made, bar none, full stop. Jen and I are very complimentary as people. She's very detail oriented, and I'm very not. She's very good at process.
00:12:05
Speaker
And I'm good at rallying the troops and getting people excited about things. I like to joke that I'm kind of the dancing monkey, and she's the guy working the grinder and making me do the dance. So it's important to have people with complementary disciplines. And again, I need to fill out people that I don't have the talent for.
00:12:31
Speaker
and Jen fit both of those. But also, I think it's important to have someone that's not afraid of you in the organization. And I hope almost nobody's afraid of me in our organization, but Jen for sure is not afraid to say if an idea seems harebrained.
00:12:50
Speaker
or if it maybe isn't time to do something because as a, if you're familiar with EOS and traction, there's two big personalities that every organization needs. One is the visionary, which is what I feel as the role, the cheerleader, the person driving forward, the person looking at the horizon and planning, skating where the puck is going. And then there's the person that has to cash the checks that my mouth writes.
00:13:17
Speaker
the person that makes things happen based on a sound and inspiring direction. Jen is very good at that. A big part of that is being able to say, well, here's a better way to do that. Or Dave, you say that you wanted to do this, but two weeks ago you said you wanted to do something that's 45 degrees off from that.
00:13:38
Speaker
So let's figure out what the difference is and maybe let's go in a direction that the entire team can follow or that we'll be able to get to in maybe three or five years instead of trying to jump all over the place. Squirreling or traditional marketers tend to be shiny object syndrome averse where if something's new and exciting and interesting, we tend to gravitate towards that at the expense of all else. Having a partner that is
00:14:06
Speaker
built toward the process and understands everything that needs to go into changing anything in an organization is incredibly helpful. So I was lucky enough that I was married to that person, but every organization needs the yin to the yang, the person to make it happen to the person who's out cheerleading. What year did we hire Jen on? Do you remember?
00:14:30
Speaker
2014. And again, best decision, best day, best everything. It was a little dramatic at first. And yeah, it's a significant investment to say, okay, well, we're putting all of our eggs in this basket. Jen left a very lucrative corporate job in order to come over, as did I into this. But this was an investment that we were going to make in our future freedom and in the ability to really do what we loved in the world. So it makes sense.
00:14:58
Speaker
Hiring your wife as she tells the story is there was one very major condition that came along with that. At the time, where was Busy Web located? We were home-based, baby. We were home-based before it's cool. We were the original hipsters of work from home. I had worked from home in my bank job for seven years.
00:15:19
Speaker
And so I was used to that. And then as we started hiring people, the second hire I think we brought on was a local salesperson. And that person was a little erratic. And having two young kids, they were very active. They were either in elementary school or just out of elementary school and so very, very busy. And we needed to have an office or we were going to kill each other.
00:15:48
Speaker
So the ability to separate church and state, to walk away from work and go be a family and not to have to worry about people coming into your home in the middle of things and or working out and having meetings with clients while we're trying to get dinner done or whatever was a huge difference in the business. And the ancillary thing that happened with that and why I am
00:16:15
Speaker
very pro work from home, but also very much see the value in having an office is as soon as people, as soon as I had an actual office and we walked into that office together with a client, their entire tone changed as soon as they saw that there were actual bricks behind the building or behind the business. And that there was some sustenance that we were going to remain there and we were going to be around
00:16:42
Speaker
So 2014 Busy Web, as we know it today, was launched. And how many people were as part of the organization? We're probably in 2014, we were at five or six. And so Jen was number five. And we came on and that was right around the time you joined us, Mr. Olson. Yes, I was number six. Yes.
00:17:07
Speaker
And speaking of that erratic salesperson, I'm thankful that your bar was so happily low.
00:17:15
Speaker
that I was able to do that. So since that point, there's been a couple of things, notable points that I think you've forced the organization to do. And I mean, forced in a way I'll come back to in a way that nobody really wanted to, but we've sort of grudgingly accepted over the years.
Implementing EOS for Success
00:17:32
Speaker
One of which was EOS. So why did you want to go with EOS as an operating system for the company?
00:17:42
Speaker
Yeah, and for folks that don't know, EOS is traction and it's a book by Geno Wickman and it's kind of a movement, especially in the Midwest. And it's simply the idea of having an operating system, an entrepreneurial operating system or EOS to guide your business. I said before, Dave doesn't do detail. That's one of my things. I'm not built to organize and operationalize a business. So one of my weaknesses was that
00:18:10
Speaker
People kind of came in and out and they worked when they wanted to and we did our best job and everybody was super excited and super motivated and super happy. But we had a tendency to kind of squirrel all over the place. And so EOS has magical things called scorecards.
00:18:29
Speaker
and tracks wherein you can actually see if you're moving in the direction you said you were going to. And everyone comes to an agreement on here's what the important things are that we're going to accomplish this year and this quarter and this month. If you're familiar with Stephen Covey, he did the rocks thing. So you have rocks inside of your organization. Those are the things that go in the jug first.
00:18:54
Speaker
And then you fill in the sand and then you fill in the pebbles and then you fill in the water. And you can fit much more in if you focus on what's most important. And so what EOS did for us was it helped us to operationalize and identify the areas where we were either lagging,
00:19:12
Speaker
or hyper performing and take advantage of or adjust based on what we saw so we're crushing our sales that means that in three weeks we're going to be absolutely buried in production so we need to start thinking about production right now in order to be ready.
00:19:30
Speaker
or we've been super busy and super successful in building websites, but that's taken our eye off the ball a little bit. And so now we need to buckle down and focus on sales so that we've got a continuum of business coming in. And so it's simply the act or the method by which my organization, our organization, and many others, especially in the Midwest, are holding themselves accountable and just putting it all in to
00:20:00
Speaker
a framework that helps you operationalize your business so that you're not just shooting from the hip nonstop.
00:20:08
Speaker
So what are some of the things on the scorecard? We don't have to go through numbers, but what are some of the accountability points? Some of them are capacities. So our team has so many hours for development or for marketing or for inbound slash hub spot-ish work. And if we go above like 85, 90%, we need to start thinking about either how we can scale that back
00:20:34
Speaker
or how we can hire for more if you need that. There's sales production. There's no magic inside of sales. You make a certain amount of research, you make a certain amount of contacts, you place a certain amount of calls, and that's going to result in a certain amount of closed leads. Stepping back one more level,
00:20:54
Speaker
you need a certain amount of marketing to get a certain amount of leads to make sure that you're actually reaching the right people. And so is our marketing hitting the right spots? So you look at all of the most important inputs of your business and this scales very well across manufacturing, across B2B services, et cetera. And that's why we're very successful in working with those areas. But you need to focus on like operations,
00:21:24
Speaker
HR, revenue, and making sure that you're moving forward on your goals. So those are the big buckets that we tend to put our work into to make sure that we're staying on the ball and moving in the direction we said we were going to.
00:21:38
Speaker
The second one, which I was absolutely 100% against and I fought you tooth and nail on was what? HubSpot, baby. What is HubSpot?
Leveraging HubSpot for Marketing
00:21:50
Speaker
So especially at the time, and Trigview, this was seven years ago now. So a little bit into your tenure, but also in the kind of the infancy of this whole thing. HubSpot is a software that was used primarily at the time for marketing automation.
00:22:09
Speaker
And if you're familiar with constant contacts or mail chimp or other things it was like a fancier version of that. And i had known a bunch of folks and to be completely fair i had been approached like two and a half years before that before i decided to go all in on hub spot.
00:22:29
Speaker
And I blew them off as well because I was like, well, we have tools and why would I want to pay more for something that I can get essentially for free for whatever, right? MailChimp was still giving away stuff at that time. And so through the years, PubSpot started adding additional tools like sales software, sales enablement and automation software.
00:22:52
Speaker
And then a couple years ago, they added service software and then website software. So it's really become the one place that you can trust and run your entire business development and in some cases, customer service out of.
00:23:08
Speaker
And so the big thing that HubSpot gave us that we didn't have before was easy to use connections and contacts. And the sales software in particular, the CRM is miles ahead, light years ahead of the tools that we were using at the time. We were using Zoho. And before that we had used spreadsheets or a fancy version of spreadsheets called Smartsheet to manage our business development and our sales. But it never got used because it was always a pain in the ass to work on.
00:23:38
Speaker
And so all of a sudden we started using HubSpot and our marketing was easier to get out and much more easy to create custom and beautiful and automated campaigns. But also the sales team, all we had to do is connect our email account and every email that we sent.
00:23:56
Speaker
And then every phone call that we made was tracked and put into the same system that we're using for marketing. So we didn't have to download two different kinds of reports and thereby waste a lot of time and miss a lot of opportunities. So it's the idea of coming in with one cohesive piece of software that can do most things for your business and being able to trust that system. So the biggest impacts that HubSpot has given us is more clarity
00:24:26
Speaker
to all of the different things that we're tracking anyway in EOS. So creating reports, running automations, knowing how many leads, how many sales, or how much money we've got in our pipeline is much, much easier inside of HubSpot's tools. But also, all of the marketing
00:24:47
Speaker
output that we do as an organization, not only for ourselves, but for many of our clients, is completely and seamlessly integrated with everything else that we do. So we don't have to do separate reports. We don't have to automate or click send.
00:25:03
Speaker
on specific things when we were doing constant contact by and large. We had to create completely separate campaigns and then we had to run a separate report against every single email we sent. Now it's all just built into one system where we can just look at it from a dashboard.
00:25:20
Speaker
Got it.
Business Development and Community Engagement
00:25:21
Speaker
So where does business generally come from for BusyWeb? There's a mix of business development. A big part of it is trading on our personalities. So Trigvi, you're the head of our business development and a recognized personality.
00:25:37
Speaker
We get out in front of as many people as we can. We also give back to the community in a big way. We're in front of people delivering talks and trainings. I'm a speaker and trainer for Google and both of us are speakers and trainers for HubSpot. We get out and we just put good things out in the universe. That's a big part of it.
00:25:59
Speaker
But then also, and as important, we eat our own dog food. We're a marketing agency and we have, as our premier client, BusyWeb. So we're doing our own marketing. We do growth-driven design for ourselves. And well, the leads aren't always exactly what we want.
00:26:21
Speaker
That's a fantastic way to skunk works it out for our clients and for ourselves because if we're struggling with it, our clients are struggling with it.
00:26:30
Speaker
And it was probably one of the smartest things we did was to take all of this very seriously and go through the same processes that we do for our clients because it's resulted in a lot of trial by fire and dramatic improvements because we can be even more honest than our clients are. Minnesota nice is a real thing and most of our clients are from Minnesota. So if we get, yeah, okay, that's good. We like the results. We're much clearer with ourselves to say, these suck. We need more leads.
00:26:59
Speaker
And we only got three things that are even remotely close to what we're looking for so we can be much clearer with ourselves.
00:27:06
Speaker
I think one of the things that I talk about with people on that subject is there's an opportunity cost lost when leads are bad. And so if you look at leads as just a way of clicking the dial and saying, I got somebody so many leads, if 80% of them are bad, well, then our client then has to go through and discover that 80% of them are bad. And so if we can get ahead of that and focus more on what makes a good lead,
00:27:36
Speaker
and what makes a good partnership opportunity for the clients. And that's a difference maker. Right. And there's a great example that I use quite a bit when I'm talking with prospects and with customers as we're going through this process.
00:27:51
Speaker
We had a client that we were crushing in marketing for. We had built them a website and we were doing marketing and we agreed that we needed so many leads a month and we were delivering easily twice the amount of leads that they asked for and that we all agreed to. Three months into the engagement, the client called us, was incredibly frustrated and said, I'm not getting a single penny of value out of this. I hate this. It sucks. I need to quit.
00:28:18
Speaker
And we said, well, wait a minute, you told us you wanted 30 leads a month and we're giving you 60. So where's the disconnect? Like, no, I'm getting those leads, but they're just not doing anything. And we said, well, wait a minute, what are you doing with those leads? And he said, well, I, I, uh, mail them a brochure and nobody has called me back out of that brochure. And we all kind of,
00:28:46
Speaker
stared at each other in shock. And that was the major light bulb that went off that we need to tie its sales and productivity behind sales and what we're actually doing to the marketing that we're doing. And I think sometimes that tends to bite us because sometimes clients who have
00:29:07
Speaker
really long lead times. Yes. Start getting frustrated because none of these things, opportunities that we're bringing to them are coming to fruition. But part of investing in marketing means you're going to have to invest not only time and effort. Right.
00:29:28
Speaker
All right, so a couple more questions before we wrap up. I think one of the things that everybody who works at Busy Web is proud of is the company culture, which is, I think a weird thing to be proud of considering that most of us don't see each other on a regular basis.
Maintaining Culture in a Remote Workforce
00:29:45
Speaker
Because, you know, you talked earlier about the office. There are seven offices in the office. I think I had at points in time and had four of them because I got moved around so much. But so seven offices, you're in one, Jen is one. So there's five offices for other big people. How many people are working at Busy Web at the time of this recording? Including contractors, I believe we're at 22 right now.
00:30:12
Speaker
Wow. So there really is, there's no room at the end really for everybody. Correct. So how do you facilitate and how do you lead a company culture where people feel good about the people they work with who they don't see on a regular basis? There's a number of ways. And I think this is one of those things that we were lucky enough to always have virtual people. I think the third person I hired,
00:30:39
Speaker
as a contractor and then as an employee was a developer out of Wisconsin. We've had people that have been virtual the entire time. It's as simple as making sure that you're having conversations with people.
00:30:54
Speaker
And sometimes it can be more complex, but we try very hard to have at least quarterly get-togethers for the entire organization in person when possible. You need to go the extra mile in order to forge connections and in order to build a sense of community.
00:31:15
Speaker
So we have monthly meetings, of course, where we don't start with the operations and the things that are important to the business. We start with what's important to the people. What are your monthly wins? What happened this past month? That was awesome in your professional life. Sure. But also personally, did you go on vacation somewhere? Did you experience something really cool? Do you have,
00:31:41
Speaker
You know, major milestones in your family, big birthdays or whatever. So we talk about that. And then we get into the operations and we always round out. We have quarterly gatherings where we get as many people as possible together in person, whether that means driving or whatever to get you in there for the folks that are remote.
00:32:01
Speaker
and we try to make those fun times as well as work times. So yeah, it's usually around our quarterly EOS gathering where we work on our VTO, our Vision Traction Organizer, and the content and the quarterly goals and rocks that we're building toward. But then we also set aside, tomorrow happens to be one of those days, we're recording this in the end of July,
00:32:28
Speaker
And so our Q3 strategy session is happening tomorrow. And as part of that, we're going to go do Whirly Ball. And we've had times where we've done off-site trivia. Can you explain Whirly Ball for those people who don't know what it is? You're going to have to explain it to us because I've never done it before. It's something that sounded awesome. It's like go-karting mixed with polo.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, so it's it's hyalide so it's played with these big sort of banana shaped brackets But instead of a hardball, which is what you play hyalide with it's a wiffle ball And it's played on a basketball court so you have to score a basket with a wiffle ball that you're whipping through with a hyalide racket And oh by the way, you're also driving a bumper car
00:33:15
Speaker
Right, right. So that kind of stuff, we've done, man, we've done offsite trips up to a lake and gone off for that. We've done, man, there's so many things that we've engaged in. What are the other funnest ones?
00:33:35
Speaker
Well, we've got locked in several escape rooms and had to be led out. And I believe sadly we never actually escaped any of those. So maybe problem solving or mathematics is in our strong suit, but it's fun. We did a offsite for our, for the leadership team where we did a school of rock where we all learned things that we didn't originally play. Like I played guitar for the first time.
00:34:02
Speaker
A few folks played drums for the first time, and we played, what was it, Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes, and Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, and so we did that. Yes, you have to have fun. And a big part of our culture and the interactions and the things that we do with each other revolves around the core values. We actually do have core values. We used to have them, and they were kind of complex, but we,
00:34:31
Speaker
We distilled them down to education, fun, and integrity. So fun is one of the big ones. We want to make sure that you enjoy working with us. Education, we believe big in taking some time to sharpen the saw, and it's okay to fail as long as you are learning from it. And so we try to make safe space for us to do things that might be a little off out of our comfort zone.
00:34:58
Speaker
Then integrity, of course, just being good people and making sure that what we say we do. I think the best example of culture that I couldn't think of is my first day in the office. I got a computer and I got a desk and I got a phone and all that. At four o'clock on the dot, you walked into my office and said, you want to lock up? I looked at the clock and I was like, what are you talking about?
00:35:27
Speaker
We all have kids, so we all got to go drive, get the kids around, do stuff. And so if you want to hang out, you can just lock up afterwards. But we're all going home. And so I drove home, I live about 45 minutes away from the office and I called my wife on my way in and she went. So I walked in the door about 501 and she was gobsmacked and overjoyed that I worked in a place that actually respected family, which I think is
00:35:51
Speaker
really something you didn't cover is that everybody has family and family comes first. And there's been times where, fortunately, because a lot of the things that you've talked about today, where employees and colleagues have just had to
00:36:08
Speaker
They've just dropped everything and had to walk away from work for three, four, five days at a time. And because of the tools we use, nothing really gets dropped for the clients because everybody pitches in and picks and we're able to
00:36:26
Speaker
Reconstructing the aggregate how everybody else is doing things, right? And seeing that part of having eos and having systems that talk to each other means that a you can pick it up But b you can trust that everything is going to happen because everything's being tracked. You know, we're all we're all adults
00:36:44
Speaker
and we expect each other to own everything that we do. So if you say you're going to get something done by a certain date, you gotta do it if that means that you gotta go pick up your kids at four, but you might have to log on again at eight. Cool. If that happens too much, we gotta start thinking about what we need to do operationally to make sure that that doesn't happen, and that's why we track our capacities and our overages.
00:37:08
Speaker
Well, the other thing that is really demonstrative is your time is your own. You are given a certain amount of tasks and a certain amount of things and how you choose to accomplish those tasks and accomplish those things are your own to figure out. And so oftentimes when I talk to clients and I say, you know, if we tell you something's going to be done Friday at noon, it's going to be done Friday at noon.
00:37:32
Speaker
Whatever you do, don't call 20 minutes to noon and ask how it's going, but it'll be done Friday at noon. Right. Right. Awesome. So we have a set of questions that we ask everybody who comes on the podcast. It's six questions long. You ready? Sure. All right. So first off, what is the most used app on your phone? I think right now, well, I'll give you two. One is the Fun app and that's TikTok.
00:38:01
Speaker
So I'm tinkering out with TikTok, trying to figure out how to use it for the business, but it's also just fun. And then the second one is Waze. So getting around, driving, I'm probably on Waze the most because it alerts you of potential issues on the road, like if there's construction ahead or a pothole or whatever, and that's just a little bit more useful. It's owned by Google, but I find it a little bit more useful than Google Maps. What is the most expensive thing you've ever done that was totally worth the money?
00:38:33
Speaker
business, it was getting HubSpot and that was totally worth the money. But then personally,
00:38:38
Speaker
I think getting a vacation place for the family, I'm still paying a mortgage on that, of course, but worth every moment of getting time to recharge away from home, away from the city, away from the bustle and getting to do stuff in a compressed and a little bit quieter place is hugely, hugely helpful. How much time do you get to spend up at the cabin?
00:39:07
Speaker
Probably not not quite as much as we want to right now because we have kids in sports But ideally in a summer will will be about 50 percent of the time on and off So two weeks on two weeks off is our best cadence What's a mistake that you made that you wish you had back? I think the biggest mistake that I made Starting busy web like when I first got started was I I really
00:39:36
Speaker
didn't bet on myself enough and I tried to keep too many safety nets open and I probably lost four of those first nine years that could have been growth years because I was playing it safe. And there's such a thing as a smart bet and I was slow playing the pot if you're familiar with poker and not pushing in my chips as hard as I should have.
00:40:07
Speaker
Three songs on a desert island. That's all you get. Oh, there's got to be a U2 in there. I'm a huge fan of the Joshua Tree. That's my all time favorite album. So probably one or two from that.
00:40:20
Speaker
probably a workout song, like one of those pump up songs that, gosh, what's the big one right now? Well, it was something, and I should know the name of that. And then the other one is probably an ACDC song, probably Thunderstruck. Really, Thunderstruck. You don't seem like a Thunderstruck kind of guy. Oh yeah, or maybe Back in Black, one of those two.
00:40:47
Speaker
So I love the story behind Back in Black. Do you know the story of that album? No, no. The I forget the guy's name, but their lead singer had died. I think he died of a drug overdose.
00:41:00
Speaker
Yes. And so they told the band, you know, you are required to do this one last album and get a new singer. They had practically no money and nobody believed in them. And the album that they delivered back was Back in Black. Yes. Which to me is just one of the ultimate comeback stories.
00:41:18
Speaker
Absolutely. And it was Bon. Bon Scott. Bon Scott. And then they brought on Brian. Brian Johnson. Johnson. Yeah. And wow. Yeah. What a fireback. Two more questions. What cliche do you hear is bullshit to you? Oh, I think the biggest one
00:41:43
Speaker
that I hate is time is money. So in my opinion, leverage is money. And if you do it right, you don't need to spend time in order to get the result that you're looking for. If you work smart, if you build processes, you can get a lot more done by working smart, not hard. And so time is money, I think is bullshit.
00:42:10
Speaker
All right, last one. What's the most meaningful quote or saying that you remember? This is kind of a deep track and you're going to have to be a kid of the 90s in order to remember this. But if you remember, say anything with
00:42:23
Speaker
Oh, John Keitsack. John Keitsack, thank you. The dad from Frasier. Yes, yes. All of the things inside of that. Lloyd Dobler, who is the lead character in Say Anything, the guy that held up the boombox, he said, I'm looking for a dare to be great situation in a job interview.
00:42:47
Speaker
And I think about that a lot because it's really about standing up and being bold in your decisions and then charging forward. Awesome. Well, we'll end it there. Thanks for joining us on the first episode, Dave. Thank you, Trigvi. This was fun. Can't wait to do it again.