Catalytic Leadership

Scaling Agency Leadership That Doesn’t Depend on You

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 3 • Episode 116

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If you’re scaling fast but still stuck in every decision, system, and Slack thread, this episode is for you.

I sat down with Flynn Zaiger, CEO of Online Optimism, a 13-year digital creative agency recently named one of Inc.’s Best Places to Work. Flynn started his agency six months out of college with no outside funding — and now leads a nationally distributed team that runs with clarity, ownership, and initiative.

We talk about the systems and culture shifts that made that possible — including how Flynn built layers of leadership, used internal AI tools without losing humanity, and developed onboarding systems that reduce churn and increase trust. This is a real-world, founder-level conversation about scaling agency leadership without becoming the bottleneck, losing your people, or burning out.

Whether you’re wrestling with client handoffs, team autonomy, or sustainable agency growth, Flynn’s insights will help you move from controlling everything to empowering excellence.


📚 Books Mentioned
The Power Broker by Robert Caro


Want to connect with Flynn? You can find him on LinkedIn at Flynn Zaiger, or reach out to his team at Online Optimism. And yes — they really did take away his social media passwords. You’ll hear why.



Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

I'm excited today to have Flynn Zeiger on the podcast. As the CEO of Online Optimism, flynn spends his day keeping his employees happy, his clients happier and the office pups the happiest. In 2012, six months out of college, flynn created Online Optimism, a digital creative agency performing much-needed internet marketing assistance to the many businesses of Louisiana. Over the years, that client base expanded and the team grew far beyond, him recently being named as one of Inc's best places to work. Flynn, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show.

Flynn Zaiger:

I'm excited to be here and share some of my thoughts and get to talk with you.

Intro:

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive.

Dr. William Attaway:

Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway coach, dr William Attaway, I would love for you to start by sharing some of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How did you get started?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I think I got started by how most good or eventual leaders get started, which is thinking that they're better than they actually are and having the confidence to lead something I think that's pretty key is to have a really unearned confidence in yourself if you want to be a leader in the world, and we honestly tell that to our interns and people at entry level, which is, if you're waiting for a day where you receive a document that says you are now a leader, that is not coming.

Flynn Zaiger:

You're going to have to learn it yourself, and so that's what I did, essentially. I had a job I didn't like and I decided that I would try my own thing for a while until the little money in my savings account ran out and it hasn't run out 13 years later, and I've been lucky to have a great team that I get to build a company with and really build a company around. A lot of what I think has turned me into a better leader has just been listening and getting to work with a lot of talented folks who have become great leaders themselves.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love that and I think that reflects what I find often in great leaders, and that they're not pointing to themselves as much as they're pointing to the people on their teams, the people around them who add so much value to the business, their clients, etc.

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I think you really have to show that appreciation. And pointing is like, I think, a metaphorical word and how you were using it, but it's true that you do need to call these individuals out. You were using it, but it's true that you do need to call these individuals out.

Flynn Zaiger:

A common phrase is praise publicly, criticize privately, and I feel a lot of leaders, particularly nowadays, are criticizing publicly and praising themselves publicly as well, and I think that you need to really keep that in mind and even in stressful situations, sometimes you'll feel really good in the moment to get to blame someone else, but that leadership just doesn't extend beyond that moment and it has a long-term detrimental effect. So you really have to point people out, as you said, and praise them publicly if you want to grow leaders beyond yourself and your organization grow leaders beyond yourself and your organization.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, appreciation is something that I have taken a great interest in recently, and learning how to speak other people's really their language of appreciation. I had a guest on the show not long ago talking about this. So how do you show appreciation to your team?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, there are a ton of ways, and I'll start off by saying that it is different for every individual. And this is the hardest part is if you're doing appreciation perfectly, which is impossible, but if you could magically do it, it would mean sitting down with every employee on day one and talking to them about their wants and needs, and whether it's money or time off or the opportunity to be more involved with their family or to focus on their career goals, and then you would get a perfect list of everything they need. You would plan out what their motivational treats would be and rewards for growing a new organization. Then they would come back to work on day two and you would ask them again, because those things change and they always need to be customized. Oh, that's good.

Flynn Zaiger:

That's a challenge. We at OnlineO Optimism we do actually give out surveys once a year, so it's not every day but once a year. We will check in with people and it is a long survey. It is almost comical how in-depth we go into favorite candy and specific brands of candy. You know people's preferences on nuts, so if someone likes cashews but hate almonds, we will know that about our company and we also learn about what are people like? Are they looking for more time off? Do they really enjoy being distracted with work? And how does all of that change on an individual basis? So that's just trying to understand the employee.

Flynn Zaiger:

And then there's the actual giving of appreciation. We have a lot of different layers of appreciation. We have literally an appreciation Slack channel. We've tested out a number of different organizations over the years because there's a lot of SaaS companies now who do ways to reward employees. We've customized our own system after trying them all. Basically, if you do something well in our organization, we will give you an appreciation and every quarter we tally those up and then, depending on how many times you appreciate others, how many others appreciate you, we do a donation to a 501c3 nonprofit in your name, based off the amount. So each one's worth like a quarter or so, for example, and that's like the smallest level of appreciation. Beyond that we have a most valuable optimist or an MVO of the week that gets recognized internally. We always do make sure they get public praise on social media as well.

Flynn Zaiger:

I think a lot of times companies are scared to do that. They worry that highlighting their top performing salesperson or top performing social media person is just making that person more likely to be poached, and I'm not saying that's an incorrect assumption. I think that that is a risk of showing this sort of public appreciation, particularly for employees that you really like. But I just have faith and trust that if we are loyal and showcasing those employees, that they will remain a little loyal. There's no guarantee of that, but I always try to push that fear I know other CEOs mention often when I talk about that to the side and just think about what's right for the staff member and in this case that staff member worked hard.

Flynn Zaiger:

You should appreciate them publicly. I mean, those are the big ones. We have larger things that I think just like are less tangible of like CEOs giving you a financial thing or a shout out. We do have compensation that comes with some of these things and we also like allow people to build a lot of their own appreciation programs. So, like, if our staff wants to like form different internal groups about like growing plants or exercising or how they being and they want to like work with others on that, we'll give them both the time and the financial empowerment essentially to grow these own programs that could become their own appreciation. And that's really what I think is the difference between just starting an appreciation program at your organization and actually seeing it thriving is when your staff take over and take the initiative to build different layers of appreciation that you didn't previously think about.

Dr. William Attaway:

I often say that great leaders don't just look at their team members as cogs in a machine, but they see them as actual 3D human beings who have wants and needs and dreams and desires of their own, and that when a leader recognizes that and asks the right questions to uncover those things and learns them like what you're describing, those team members lean in and they're not going to run down the street for another few bucks because if they feel seen and heard as a person, they feel like they've found their place, their team, and that sounds like exactly what you're describing.

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, that, as a person, really sticks out to me, especially in 2025. I'm really proud of us. I think we've gone about eight minutes in a podcast without saying AI, but I will ruin that. We did a great job so far and I think that that's whether you're incorporating it into your company or not. It is something in the back of all of your employees' minds. Is that my boss is trying to replace me with AI? It is something in the back of all of your employees' minds is that my boss is trying to replace me with AI.

Flynn Zaiger:

Whether or not you are, it is enough of a public story that it is on everyone's mind, and I think seeing those employees, as you said, not seeing them as a cog in a machine, but as a person and as a human, is really, really essential to providing a team that will last with you. Because, at this point, most of the workforce is millennials or Gen Z, and it's a growing number every single year. Those are becoming more and more, and generations are notorious for not being loyal. Right, like no one's staying 30 years at a company and getting a pension. At this point, you're hoping for two years before they bounce. At this point, you're hoping for two years before they bounce, and a lot of that is because companies see people as replaceable gears on a machine, and that sometimes makes sense in certain roles, but for a lot of other jobs, especially like our agency is very client-facing.

Flynn Zaiger:

They're not cogs. They both need to do marketing work at our company, but they also need to have relationships with people that you can't replace with AI. These are real humans, they know their names, and that both makes your company stronger internally like people build relationships with each other and collaborate better and want to help each other grow, but it also makes your resulting work better, whether you are, like us, a service industry or a service company and you're helping people with just their time and smarts, or even if, like you're a chef. Like people are going to work better when they actually like each other. I really strongly believe that, and the only way to get people to see each other as humans is to is to lead with that strategy and show that you, as a leader, are seeing your staff as humans even more than workers, I would say.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's so good. Let's talk about online optimism for a minute. You started this in 2012. So, wow, that's a run for any business, particularly in the digital marketing space. You've seen a few changes over the last 13 plus years, I would imagine.

Flynn Zaiger:

Just a couple.

Dr. William Attaway:

Just a couple right. What is your focus as an agency? Who do you want to help, why do you want to help them and where do you want to go from?

Flynn Zaiger:

here, yeah, and I think the key here is that it's changed over time. I'm very proud that we've made it 13 years. I always tell people the current year is the hardest is that it's changed over time. I'm very proud that we've made it 13 years. I always tell people the current year is the hardest, so that would be the 13th year is the hardest, but that's not true. It's the first year.

Flynn Zaiger:

I really the first year of running a business is wild, and I think anyone who makes it through the first year especially if you're not VC funded or anything, if you were just bootstrapped like we were, and you start day one with a runway, like I very much started day one of the company with this is how much money I have in my savings account. This is my rent. Here's where that line hits the other line and we get to zero, and that's something that I think makes that first year such a challenge. But beyond that, it's tough to try to make your business survive and be nimble. I think we got into it. I really love helping small businesses. Those are mostly mom and pop shops.

Flynn Zaiger:

We started in New Orleans, which is where I was living and that's where we grew. The first eight years we were all in-house before we went um hybrid. In 2021 we're still. We still have 4200 square feet in new orleans, but we now have about half our staff there, half our staff around the country, so we've had to navigate both changing services.

Flynn Zaiger:

Uh, when we started, we were pretty much a purely facebook shop, like the first year or two, and now facebook's maybe like three, four percent of the business. It's obviously on the social side side. It's a lot more Reddit, linkedin, tiktok, and then we have a whole video team. We have a bunch of designers and developers, which is great, because I was doing the design at the beginning and I can tell you that I am terrible at design. I notoriously will frequently get kicked out of our own graphic design conversations or social media channels. They'll change the passwords on me so that I can't go in and make my own collages, which I think look great, and it's a challenge but I think to be a good leader, you really have to thrive on change, right?

Flynn Zaiger:

There's nothing that's static, and that's another thing that we really teach our staff is that you can't. There's no business that is stable, honestly, like there's nothing that exists in a vacuum and could just keep doing what it's doing because competitors come, they go, industries change, laws, change, needs change, and so you can never feel like things are good and they're gonna stay that way.

Flynn Zaiger:

I realize that's a bit of a pessimistic way to look at it but I really think that's key to understand as you're thinking about your leadership is that you might get to a point where you can offload some of that nervousness about shifts onto other key team members. That's really crucial and trusting them to be able to make those choices. But someone at your organization needs to be empowered to shift services, shift team members, shift strategies at all times. There's no such thing as a static company, particularly nowadays.

Dr. William Attaway:

So true, that's so true. The ability to pivot and adapt, I think, illustrated most recently in the COVID pandemic, years when everybody was having to shift, everybody was having to adapt. But and you brought it up, I didn't but the rise of AI is causing a similar type of methodology, like how are we going to adjust to this, how are we going to adapt? How are we going to leverage this while not making what we do less human? And I love how you phrased that.

Flynn Zaiger:

And I think what both of those have shown is that this sort of ability to change and adapt doesn't have to be lightning fast. I think people are so nervous about it because they feel, oh my God, I'm a leader, my team needs a decision today. How do I do that? And the truth is that you don't. I mean COVID. People are still making decisions about workplaces three, four years later. I think at this point it's mostly said, but, like Chase and other companies are making changes in 2024, 2025. They had four years. They could have made that change April 1st 2020. They'd been working from home for three weeks. The company was still running. They could have decided, yep, we are 100% remote. And they didn't. They wavered back and forth on that decision for four or five years until coming back to that. They want to be, I think, mostly back in the office at this point.

Flynn Zaiger:

People would come back into our office in 2020. And it was based off like work schedules and whether you had client meetings and who was on your department. There was like four spreadsheets. It was beautiful. I was super proud of myself and then, about three days, in, my team sat me down and said we're not doing this and I adapted, I changed from that, and I think that's a nice For anyone who's worried about leadership and worried about the ability to be nimble and navigate these changes.

Flynn Zaiger:

They are long-term changes and I think even, as you were saying, ai is another great example of how. It could be terrifying how fast these changes are right, like if you don't check the internet for five days, there's some new wild video or graphic or automation tool based off ai that, like blows people's minds and goes viral. But the truth is, if you look at how these items have been rolled out to organizations, it's so much slower. We're a couple years into. The big ones, like ChatGPT, of course, that's been out, and even today, very few organizations have really good guidelines on both how it's implemented at the company, how employees are trained on it, how they look for new tools that are available, how those tools get distributed among the organization, how training continues to be provided. Like, how do you upskill people in a lot of these tools, especially since every day, not only are there new tools, but all these older tools are getting features.

Flynn Zaiger:

So we're mostly a cloud agency. It's an Anthropics tool and we have to adapt our rules for how we use it based off of the data. In the last month they started integrating with Canva, asana Notion, our new, all of our other platforms. So we've had to go back and think about how is this tool integrated into our organization.

Flynn Zaiger:

So I think the bigger decisions am I going to use AI or not those are helpful to make quickly, but the actual decisions of how do I implement and use this to grow my organization as a leader, those you do have a lot more time to decide on. It might feel like you're falling behind, but if you're at least willing to think about these changes and you are taking the time for your organization to say, hey, we are going to change, let's carefully decide how we do this and build it in a way that's scalable and documented so that future people can look at our decision making and learn from it. Like those decisions could take weeks or months and you could do them collaboratively with your team and you'll have much better results when you do. And then, when you look back on it, you're like this that actually wasn't too fast. It might look nimble from an outside perspective, but internally you had a lot of debates and conversations and this was a real methodical decision that you were able to make.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, as I listen to you talk about this and your interactions with your team, it sounds like you have a phenomenal relationship with them, where you're sharing what I call the last 10% of honesty with each other, where you're not holding back but you're sharing all of it in the goal, with the goal in mind of helping the clients more, of serving them at a higher level and of seeing the business thrive. Is that accurate?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I think it comes from who we hire, and I certainly don't make always the greatest hiring decisions, but one thing that I've always really strove for is hiring people that are better than you. I think that that's key to especially. A mistake that I see a lot of younger leaders make is you feel like, as a leader, you need to be able to manage and teach everyone something, to be able to understand their work and be able to kind of showcase that there's a reason you're a leader, especially if you're ever hiring people that are older than you, which I did often because I was starting a company at 22. So most people that you try to hire are older than you, and that's definitely a mistake. You'd want to hire people that slightly intimidate you, and I think that that is the key to success, because you want them to be able to build a company beyond what you were able to build and you want them to have their own area of expertise, and part of looking for that skill set also tends to hire people who are willing to talk back to you couple of days that they are there. You need to emphasize that you're here. You want feedback, no-transcript like hundreds of pages of documentation and steps and tasks. This will look like a very organized process because we've built it over the last 10 years. It is, but you should keep your eye out for ways we could do it better.

Flynn Zaiger:

In five days, you're going to get a survey that says how could we have done this better, and we would love your ideas. We'd love your feedback on that, because this is an ever-changing process and so that is a good way, from day one, to establish that they should be telling you ways to improve. They should be offering critiques and feedback, and it's super important. I think the most important thing is not only that you are asking for it and you're inviting it, but that you respond the first couple times that they offer feedback. If they offer that survey, they say, hey, you should actually start onboarding at 7am instead of 8am. You don't have to do that.

Flynn Zaiger:

I don't want to say like, blindly accept choices from new employees, but you have to respond to that. You have to say that's a great idea. This is why we do it. This is why we're not going to do it Like we're going to implement that in a few months. But that's good, offering just acceptance and acknowledgement of their ideas at the beginning, because their first ideas are not going to be like a $10 million idea that changes the organization. They're going to test the waters too, because this is a new role for them, a new company, and they want to see how well their ideas are going to be accepted.

Flynn Zaiger:

If you accept those and whether you incorporate that or not, at least indicate that you've listened and thought carefully about it, they will push back on you and more important decisions and in more important ways, um, and that's that's how you can make your company so much better, because you can be the most brilliant person in the world, but you don't have time to like do everything in the company, especially as you grow, and having other people willing to take risks and not feel like they're going to be let down if it goes wrong, and be able to explain their choices and be able to have that trust that you will back them up will make them a better employee and then will make their employees better employees. So you'll grow multiple layers of leadership, which is really, I think, the goal of a company is to build that next generation for yourself, because you know, eventually we're all aging. Unfortunately, no one solved that in the company yet, and so you'll need to have that next generation of leadership if you want to continue.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know, everything that you're describing requires humility on the part of the leader and really the leaders of anything. Yeah, is that something that you model and have always modeled, or is it something that you've learned over time?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I find a key to success is lack of confidence and imposter syndrome. In certain ways, I know I started off this conversation by saying have too much confidence. You really want to dial that way back at certain times. I think it's a mix of both. I feel think it's a mix of both and it's not like a. I feel that there's a lot of books that that's the quickest way to a self-help book is you come up with one idea and you're like if you follow that rule 100% of the time, you will run a much better business, You'll be much happier, You'll be a better partner, a better family member, and I think the actual key to success is taking all these ideas and concepts from mentors and podcasts you listen to and books and your colleagues, and figuring out the right ways to apply them. I think humility and empathy is just something that was taught to me as a kid.

Flynn Zaiger:

My parents and I guess this is the other element of why I started my business is they had a. My parents have a retail store. They've sold. They've sold many things. They've also pivoted. They used to sell a lot of school uniforms when I was a kid. Now they sell men's formal wear. We've sold a retail store. Then we were put on. They were on eBay and then Amazon, Yahoo web stores. We were one of the first third-party clothing sellers on Amazon. Oh, wow, Back when you would tell people you were selling a shirt on Amazon and they were like the book place, it was a long time ago.

Flynn Zaiger:

I remember, and now it's kind of gone full circle actually, and they're more of a retail store than online, just because very cheap fast fashion has kind of knocked out a lot of apparel. We'll do that as a separate podcast, just the world of e-commerce, but I think the point there is. I saw how my customers interacted, or my parents interacted with customers in their store and how they listened to their stories and how they like offer military discounts. They would, you know people were trying to get something for a prom. They would give them multiple ties if they weren't sure what their date's dress looked like, so that they'd have one that perfectly matched Like little things that go far beyond how most retail stores treat customers and that's really how.

Flynn Zaiger:

When I started the company that's in my mindset was like that's how I will treat my clients is give them that sort of empathy and willingness to be exceptionally helpful and go above and beyond. And what I've learned is that it's more important to not have that empathy for your. It's important to have your empathy for the clients, but it's more important to have that empathy for your employees employees and to see them as people, to see them as humans and to help them grow rather than seeing them as cogs, as you said. You really need to understand that they're people. They have unique motivations and dreams and hopes and fears, and work individually with them to help them build that career, however they want to do it.

Dr. William Attaway:

So good, but talk about your habits, your rhythms. How do you stay on top of your game? Your business, your team, your clients they all need you to lead at a higher level today than they did five years ago, and the same thing is going to be true five years from now. How do you level up with the new leadership skills that they're going to need you to have in the days ahead?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I think it goes back to empathy and trusting your team members. One of the things that I am very appreciative of is that my team is often looking for ways to help me be more efficient by taking me out of the loop. They could just not want to talk to me. That's one option, but I'm going to look at it as they want to free up my time, because they know that any minute that I get that I'm not working in the business, working on client work, is a minute that I get to spend growing the business, thinking of new ideas, and I've showcased that to them over time. I think they've seen how I've been able to pivot and adapt and add new service lines and listen to what they want to do and help them grow. And so, because of that, they're often stepping in and being like, hey, Flynn doesn't need to work on this, he should be working on something else. And that doesn't come from me being like I'm a CEO, I don't have time to do this. I am often sometimes stepping in and taking care of some of the grunt work, but that means that when I do that I kind of buy myself some favors. Why I don't do that in the future. But the organizational thing, like we have some standard systems, a project manager and we use Asana and teamwork like the software platforms. But I think the key that we found is is being able to delegate and then being able to make sure that other members of the team are as empowered as you are to make decisions, to add policies, Like a lot of our cultural stuff.

Flynn Zaiger:

I think when you go online on our website, our cultural stuff is a lot of what most people see. Most of those ideas honestly weren't about me. I wish I could say that I built an amazing company because I had really good ideas. I did not, and most of those ideas are coming from employees saying your idea sucked, Flynn. I built a better one, Can we do this? And I wish they said can we do this? But they mostly just say I'm doing this and I go wonderful, great, here's a ramp card. That's our financial system. Please take the money and figure it out. And that's where a lot of the workflows and policies and processes to staying organized have come from. Is empowering other people to invest in new software tools and processes that they build, they roll out. Then it comes back to me and I just have to follow their well-written instructions.

Dr. William Attaway:

Nice, as you have been in this posture of learning for 13 plus years and continue to, is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you'd recommend to the leaders who are listening?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I like reading books that are warnings. I'm reading the Power Broker, which is about Robert Moses which is not a great. I don't know if he's a wonderful person or not. It's mostly about, like, how power corrupts, but I think it is. It is helpful to understand into. Uh, I learn really well from warnings and kind of understanding what to do and what not to do.

Flynn Zaiger:

I think that was really key is when I started this company I was very early in my career. I'd had a lot of internships, wanted a job. I had some wonderful bosses, some not wonderful bosses, and I really think I would love to say that I learned more from emulating my wonderful bosses, but I think I learned more from seeing how bad bosses not only made you feel bad but made the work worse.

Flynn Zaiger:

So good made you feel bad but made the work worse, and that's really. It's not a very optimistic thing, but I think that it is key to think about a lot is that sometimes you can learn better by thinking what do I not want to do in this situation and acting the opposite. Anyway, robert Moses built a lot of things, wasn't the greatest, most empathetic human. So I think it's a lot of leadership lessons and how not to be that kind of leader which I'm gaining, but it's been interesting and something that I try to do at the end of the day try to read a couple of pages or so.

Dr. William Attaway:

Well, I think you can learn a lot that way. I believe you can learn from anybody. If you have a teachable spirit, you can learn from anybody. Sometimes you learn what not to do, and that can be insanely valuable, and that's what I'm hearing, and I love that you mentioned that.

Flynn Zaiger:

Hopefully you're not learning that from me today.

Dr. William Attaway:

You know people look at your agency and they're like, oh my goodness, man Flynn's just up and to the right, he's never struggled, he's never had problems, he's never had issues. And we know that's not true. If I could snap my fingers right now and solve one problem in your business, in your agency, what would you want that problem to be?

Flynn Zaiger:

Yeah, I think the one thing that I've struggled with for 13 years and I still to this day every time we do it, I make a change to the process, which kills my team, because they would love something they could follow and I'm like we could do this better. We could do this better. That's client onboarding for us, which is a pretty crucial step, but I think this is a lot of service organizations would know. This is when you meet someone. This is a lot of service organizations would know. This is when you meet someone, your sales team talks to them, gets all their needs wants, sells them something, and then that needs to now be done by an entirely other team. Um, and that is such a common thing.

Flynn Zaiger:

That's an issue, and I think that is where a lot of organizations, if you do that wrong, like you immediately get the contract, like there's no way to recover, and the big challenge here is that when we start talking to someone, we say how soon do you want to start? And they're almost always like yesterday I want to start, and we're like great, it will take us way longer to be ready, because we can't do an Instagram post, because we'll get a comment on it immediately and we need to know how to respond to that, and that takes time. You have to build brand standards, and so the real challenge is how fast can you onboard a client and get your team ready to work and build all the foundational stuff, um, and while making sure that you're not making any mistakes and we have wavered anywhere, I think, in the past decade or so from two days to five weeks. We have tried everything, and I will apologize if you're an online autism client listening to this and you're somewhere in that range. You're like, ah, I wish I was on the two-day side.

Flynn Zaiger:

We've made it a lot better and it is something that, like, I want to do it as fast as possible, as efficiently as possible, but it's something that you just need to build that trust and see your clients as humans, and that takes time. That's not something that you have one 30-minute meeting and you're ready to speak as them. It takes a lot of back and forth and a lot of questions and trust building. So, similar to how I try to build it with my employees, my employees then have to build it with clients, and that is something that I would love to snap a finger and have people do it, someone could invent telepathy. I think that would help me really nicely, just really a way for us to read each other's minds.

Flynn Zaiger:

That would solve my one business problem. I think that's probably the best use case. If you invent, mind reading is to help us onboard clients better. That's what I would do.

Dr. William Attaway:

Well, hopefully somebody listening to the show is going to reach out to you and say I've got the thing.

Flynn Zaiger:

Please do Make it also like $5 a month per employee. That would be super helpful.

Dr. William Attaway:

Exactly right.

Flynn Zaiger:

Not much for mind reading.

Dr. William Attaway:

I love it. Flynn, this has just been a masterclass in servant leadership and leading with humility, seeing your people as the most valuable resource you have and treating them in a way that is going to honor them, and I love that. I think that is such a phenomenal leadership principle that I don't see nearly as often as I wish I did, so thank you for sharing so generously and so openly today.

Flynn Zaiger:

Thank you. This whole conversation was a blast. I learned a lot and I appreciate your questions and really just being able to chat about this. Hopefully it helps other people be leaders too.

Dr. William Attaway:

I know it will and I know they're going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn more from you and about what you're doing. What's the best way for them to do?

Flynn Zaiger:

that you can reach out to me on LinkedIn Flynn, Zager, F-L-Y-N-N-Z-A-I-G-E-R. Neither of those names is easy to spell or if you reach out to our company on online optimism. Again, they took away my social media privileges, so that will eventually get to me. Someone else will see. So feel free to comment on anything we are doing. The only time I'm ever on our social media is if my social media team has figured out a way to embarrass me and they asked me to film a video and then I find out a couple weeks later what that was for so, but feel free to comment on that or just reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Dr. William Attaway:

I'm always happy to chat with anyone. Perfect, we'll have those links in the show notes, flynn, thank you.

Flynn Zaiger:

Thank you, it was a great time.

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Dr. William Attaway

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