The Dave Crenshaw Success Show
Learn how to achieve balanced and lasting success with world-renowned author and keynote speaker Dave Crenshaw! Dave has already taught millions how to be more productive through his online courses—now listen in as he explores the untold stories of some of the world’s most accomplished people. Dave’s mission is to help his kids become successful human beings, and you get to come along for the ride! Discover how to develop your career, manage your money, find time for fun, build stronger relationships, and make your mark in the world. Every episode ends with clear, concise tips you can implement to reach your goals. If you’re looking for a wholesome, family-friendly podcast to achieve happiness and find prosperity, The Dave Crenshaw Success Show is for you!
The Dave Crenshaw Success Show
The Anti-Hustle Founder, Laura Roeder - Founder of Meet Edgar
Discover the inspiring journey of Laura Roeder, who navigated the challenges of building and selling businesses, all while making time for family and adventure. Her determination, creativity, and ingenuity are key to her success as an entrepreneur. In this episode, you’ll learn how she built businesses designed to grow without constant involvement from the founder, as well as finding what comes naturally and delegating tasks. Listen to her story and choose which action serves you best today.
Action Principles
Pick one to do this week:
- Network with purpose. Network successfully by building relationships with people you naturally connect with rather than forcing one. ACTION: Go to an upcoming networking event and find someone you genuinely connect with to grow a natural connection.
- Identify your natural gifts. Figure out what comes naturally to you. You should highlight your strengths rather than dismissing them. ACTION: Take Discovering Your Strengths on LinkedIn Learning.
- Focus on your MVAs. For optimal productivity, spend the majority of your working hours on your most valuable activities. ACTION: Reserve larger blocks of time in your calendar to focus on your MVAs.
- Make work enjoyable. Look for small ways to make your work easier and more enjoyable. You’ll find yourself more focused and productive! ACTION: Think of something you can either delegate or change and ask to speak with your manager to discuss options.
Guest Resources
Learn more about Laura Roeder at LauraRoeder.com. You can sign up for her newsletter to stay updated on all her courses and events, or you can follow her on social media.
Suggested LinkedIn Learning Courses
Discovering Your Strengths
Prioritizing Your Tasks
Time Management Fundamentals
Dave Crenshaw develops productive leaders in Fortune 500 companies, universities, and organizations of every size. He has appeared in Time magazine, USA Today, FastCompany, and the BBC News. His courses on LinkedIn Learning have been viewed tens of millions of times. His five books have been published in eight languages, the most popular of which is The Myth of Multitasking—a time management bestseller. As an author, speaker, and online instructor, Dave has transformed the lives and careers of hundreds of thousands around the world. DaveCrenshaw.com
So if you're not sure how to start a software business, you should marry a software developer. That's what I did. Get advice for the audience.
Dave Crenshaw:In this episode, you'll get to know Laura Roeder, the anti hustle founder. And you'll hear the story of how she builds and sells businesses, while still leaving time to have fun, and travel the world with her family. I'm Dave Crenshaw, and this is my success Show. Welcome back friends to the Dave Crenshaw Success Show. This is where I speak to some of the most successful people I've met and my life's journey, and I'm on the hunt for universal principles to help both you and my family succeed. In case it's your first time here and you're not familiar with me, I'm a best selling author. I speak around the world to Fortune 500 companies. And I've taught millions of people how to be successful through my online courses, especially on LinkedIn learning. With this show, I wanted to create something lasting to help my family succeed, and I thought you'd enjoy learning along with them. I'm looking for people like today's guest, who is an amazing example of having multi faceted success. That means success in many areas of their life, not just with money or with their career. And as I talked to them, I'm looking for actions that you can use right now to be successful. So as you listen to today's episode, I want you to look for something you can do. Look for one action you can take today or this week to make my guest success story, a part of your success story. Laura Roeder is a lifelong entrepreneur and founder of several multimillion dollar bootstrapped companies. She's the founder of paper bill, coach, compare, Meet Edgar Marie Forleo is B School and LKR social media, Laura was named one of the top entrepreneurs under 30, and has spoken about entrepreneurship at the White House in the United States. Her favorite way to have fun is traveling around the globe with her family. And Laura, thank you for taking a little time from all of those things to be here on the show today.
Unknown:Thank you, Dave, I'm excited to talk to you today. As I was doing research
Dave Crenshaw:and looking into what you've accomplished, I'm just so impressed by the number of businesses that you've started, how you've successfully built them and exited them. That is not easy to do. And the fact that you've done it many times is truly remarkable. Thank
Unknown:you definitely had a few failures along the way, as well, all part of the journey. But yeah, I think yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:well, and as we go through this journey, I would like you to talk about those because as you know, learning from failures is sometimes more instructional than, than just all of the success, right?
Unknown:Yeah, definitely.
Dave Crenshaw:So where are you located right now?
Unknown:I'm in Brighton UK, which is just south of London. And
Dave Crenshaw:you're married? You have children? Yep. I
Unknown:have two kids in elementary school.
Dave Crenshaw:Oh, that's great. So all right. Let's talk about where you started. Every guest I asked the same question. And it's a question that we were asked many times when we were growing up, which is what did you want to be when you grew up?
Unknown:One thing that I was focused on for a long time was actually being a speech writer. I don't know why I wanted to just write the speeches. But I thought that would be a cool job to be a speech writer. I didn't end up doing anything like that. But I was I had that idea for a while. You
Dave Crenshaw:didn't want to get up in front of people. You just wanted to write the speech. Yeah.
Unknown:Which now I really like doing. So I'm not sure. Maybe I was like, but what but I talked about it, but I got off in front of people. So yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:well, I saw that I was I was watching some of the places where he had spoken in front of an audience. And I was like, Oh, she does a great job with this. I'm assuming you do that, as well, as part of your career. You accept invitations to go speak at events.
Unknown:Yeah, it's something honestly, you know, for a lot of speakers, they're getting customers from the events. For me, I just kind of love business and entrepreneurship. Like I've spoken at a conference called micro comm for software businesses. You know, my business targets life coaches, they're not at software conferences, but I just love learning from others there and love talking about it.
Dave Crenshaw:Okay, so you wanted to be a speech writer. But when you started to form concepts about what your your real career was going to be, did that happen in high school to that happened in college? Where did that idea start to come from? Especially that you would be an entrepreneur? Well,
Unknown:before I was an entrepreneur, my first career was a designer, graphic designer and web designer, and that's something that I started to get interested in, in high school. I'm kind of that first internet age. So I had AOL when I was in middle school in high school and I was I learned how to code websites and create websites and do A basic graphic design then. So I got interested in graphic design. And when I went to college, that's what I plan to do as my career. And that's what I did do for my first job. Okay, where did you go to school? University of Texas at Austin, which is well, so where I'm from I grew up in Austin,
Dave Crenshaw:were there things that you studied or learned in college that were helpful for you later on, or that are still helpful for you today? No.
Unknown:I had fun in college, and I made some some really great friends. But you know, I went to University of Texas is one of the largest universities in America. My classes had hundreds of people. And it was a lot of like, multiple choice test. There was almost nothing that I learned at college that I ended up using later. That's
Dave Crenshaw:an interesting experience, though. So clearly, you're highly educated, clearly, you're have a lot of expertise in what it is that you do. Where were you getting the knowledge that you use? Now? Were you just studying a lot on your own? Where has that knowledge come from? If it wasn't from your university experience? The
Unknown:internet? I would say largely, so yeah, I mean, the internet and just figuring it out as as I went, I mean, also back then, you know, now you can study entrepreneurship, and university, which I think is really interesting. I don't think that was a thing back then. Or if it was, you know, I had never heard of it. But when I was in college, I definitely wasn't thinking, Oh, I'd like to be an entrepreneur, I just thought I'd like to be a designer. I actually wanted to be a magazine designer. But I did end up getting a job as a designer at an ad agency after I graduated. And
Dave Crenshaw:how did you get that job? It tooks
Unknown:it was really hard. It took such a long time, I always have so much sympathy for people who are looking for a job because I think that's just one of the toughest things in life to be applying and getting rejected over and over and over again. So I was in a new city, I was in Chicago. And I didn't know anyone, I didn't have any connections. So it was just applying cold to job after job after job. And finally, I got one. That
Dave Crenshaw:brings up an interesting concept, though, which is, I think sometimes people look at being a business owner, being an entrepreneur, and they see a whole lot of risk. And there is risk. I'm, I'm not going to sugarcoat that. But what they don't realize and you're bringing up here is that to work for someone else is also risky. Oh, yeah. When you create your own workplace, when you create your own job, it's all on you. There's no one to blame, but you but when you're applying for a job, right, you got to go through all of those hoops. And all of that was going through that experience did that form part of the way that you were thinking about what you wanted to do in the future, running a business rather than trying to apply for a job.
Unknown:It didn't occur to me at first to run a business, the way I got interested in running a business was so I was a designer at an ad agency. And I was interested in the advertising strategy, marketing strategy client work, you know, I didn't want to just design I found that a bit boring. But in the agency world, to be involved with the strategic side, you have to be at the top of the pile. So you have to be like what's you know, often called a creative director title. And I kind of thought, Okay, I don't want to switch over, I thought maybe I should switch careers and be an account executive and be on the strategic side, I don't really like that either. And I'm like, okay, being a creative director sounds good. But I'm 20 years old, it's going to be another 10 years before I can climb up this ladder and be a creative director. Or if I started freelancing, I could kind of do whatever I wanted. And I could kind of do it all, you know, when you're freelancing you're obviously involved in and getting the clients and the strategic direction of the work that you're doing that whole client relationship. I think, actually a lot of the things that a lot of designers Hey, I was really excited about, like I was interested in how the business worked and getting the clients and stuff. So that's where I had the idea to start working for myself. I'm like, I don't want to wait 10 years to do the work that I want to do. If I started working for myself. That's just sounded like a much more interesting workday to me.
Dave Crenshaw:Did you start to create that business while you were still working as a designer within a company? What was that balance? Or what did that transition from working from someone to owning a business look like for you? For
Unknown:me, it was a jumping off a cliff, which I would not necessarily recommend. So I had this idea, okay, I could go part time and that could be best of both worlds and I was really underutilized on my job. I spent a lot of time and nothing to do so. I thought, oh, okay, this is gonna be great for my employer, they'll only have to pay me half the amount. And then I can, you know, still have that steady paycheck while I'm finding my first clients. So I talked to the business owner about it. She said, No, you can't go part time. But at that point, I had gotten so excited about my freelance business, I said, if I can't go part time, I'm just gonna have to quit entirely. And so that's what I did. So I didn't do. Again, not not saying this is advice, but I didn't have any clients, I didn't have any work lined up, I was just like, into my job, start my new life as a freelancer and I had a little money saved up. But I, you know, it was my first entry level job out of college, I wasn't making much money, and but my expenses were also really low at the same time. You know,
Dave Crenshaw:it's interesting, Laura, that you brought up, you jumped off a cliff, I just interviewed another entrepreneur who talked about how she had another job that was going on, and how that worked out for her to do both at the same time. But I've seen the either pathway can be successful. I mean, at least you're more focused, right? Because you don't have anything else. And sometimes that pressure creates urgency that's necessary to get the business off the ground. Was that the case for you?
Unknown:Yes. I mean, I totally agree with you that there's no one right way to do it. But for me, it was like, Well, I better find a client or I won't have any money, I didn't have any other source of income, or anyone paying for anything. But you know, that's what I will say, as advice is when people are interested in starting a business. I'm such a huge fan of any kind of freelance service coaching, consulting, because all you need is one client and you get paid right away, right? It's not like you're starting a restaurant or a shop where you have all these startup costs, and you need all this money, like to be hired for any service. If I give you an hour of my time, and you pay me for that hour, I just need one client and you get paid right away. So I think that's a great way to start out in business, especially if you've never run any kind of business before because you just learn all the basics, the ins and outs. I mean, I was new to Chicago, I knew that I would need a business owners, but I didn't know any business owners. So I started going to all the Chamber of Commerce events. And that's how I found my clients.
Dave Crenshaw:That is such an important point is when you are trying to grow a business and get clients and I think this applies to someone who maybe isn't even an entrepreneur or someone who's in sales, you need to go where your customer is you go where your customer gathers, it's such a basic thing. And yet, I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs miss that step, they start advertising, they start buying space, they go out knock doors, whatever heck it is. And that's not the way to do it. That's the less efficient and effective way to do it. Yeah,
Unknown:I just showed up at at the time, Chicago had different chambers of commerce for all the different neighborhoods, because it's a big city. And I actually found that they all want to do to join, but actually, they would let you pay like $5. And you know, because they needed people at the events. So I was like, Oh, I don't really have it, you know, $200 to join, but I'll just pay the $5 to show up to the one event. And it was great. And I met so many people, that helps me along my journey. So it's like I met people that became clients. But I also just met experienced business owners that were so helpful, and it just taught me so much. Let's
Dave Crenshaw:pause on that for a second. Because I think networking, which is what you were doing, and those who are not familiar, sometimes we have some some novices here. Networking is building relationships with other people, professional typically. And there's a right way to go about networking. And there's a wrong way to go about networking. Clearly you were successful with it. So can you talk about just a couple of things that you did, or you saw others do in those situations that made them successful with networking.
Unknown:A big lesson that I've learned about networking, is there some people you hit it off with and some people you don't, and just focus on those natural relationships that you hit it off with, because I've been in situations where there's someone who I quote, unquote, should meet, you know, they would be a good connection for me, or they might know people that would know clients for me, but we just didn't connect. And I always found that it was always much more valuable, even if someone didn't seem like a strategic connection, right? If I couldn't see how they were gonna get me business. If we just liked each other, and we just liked chatting, that was always always always more valuable than someone who kind of made sense on paper, but just we didn't end up becoming friends. So that's just always been my strategy is just like, which is great, right? It makes it really easy and fun to talk to who you actually want to talk to keep up with who you're actually interested in keeping up with they like you too. They remember you because If someone doesn't like you, they're not going to refer you is just the truth.
Dave Crenshaw:Well, and you're just gonna waste so much time and energy trying to make everyone like you that that is such a true thing. And it took me a while to learn that, that principle. So this first business, what was that that you were building?
Unknown:So that was just freelance design. So I would mostly make websites for local businesses.
Dave Crenshaw:And how did that go? As a business? Was that pretty successful that it worked for a while and then not?
Unknown:It was very successful for me. So I was making about$30,000 a year at my job. So that was kind of my big goal, you know, to make $30,000 a year in my own business,
Dave Crenshaw:what year are we talking about with that?
Unknown:That would be about 2006, something like that. Okay,
Dave Crenshaw:that just gives us an idea of how much 30,000 was worth.
Unknown:Yeah, so I hit that number in my first year, which I was, you know, very proud of going from zero to like, replacing my my full time income. And then I was like, Okay, I want to double it. And then in my second year, I made about 60,000, I hit that goal. So after that, I'm like, Okay, I want to make six figures, right, really common goal, I want to make 100,000 a year. And that's when I kind of hit a wall. And I realized, with my current business model, I'm like, Okay, I can't really, you know, work double the hours, I'm already working full time. I don't really feel like I can double my prices, because I'm brand new. I'm like, Okay, well, I guess, you know, in order to grow the business, I would have to kind of create an agency and have people under me, and I had just, I had seen all the things I didn't like about the agency business working at the ad agency that I had been at before. I'm like, I really don't want to have an agency business. And that is what guided me to my next business model, which ended up being online courses, which is a much more scalable business model. What
Dave Crenshaw:led to your interest in that? Like, why did you feel like that was the right business for you?
Unknown:Because I'd been making websites for local businesses. And like I said, this was around like, you know, 2006 2007, this is when social media started becoming a thing like Twitter was released, you know, you can make a Facebook, I think it was called a community page, then for your business. So my customers would ask me, Should I be on social media? You know, what do I do? How do I link it on my website? How does it work? And I would just tell them about it. And one of them said to me, you know, you could get paid just for this part. So I'm like, Oh, this sounds a lot easier than like making a whole website, I can just talk about social media. And I started down the road of doing social media consulting. But you know, I was in the online world, I knew that online, they weren't called online courses, then they were called info products, then I knew that info products were a thing. And I'm like, okay, I can make an info product. My first one was about how to use Twitter, for marketing. And like, I could make an info product about how to use Twitter. And I think it's so important to find what's a natural fit for you. Like we were talking about the networking, some people are a fit for you. Some people are not. The first time I did an online class, I found it so much easier to sell than consulting. I think I made like $3,000, the first class that I sold, and I was like, Oh, this, you know, this was great. I felt like it was so much easier than trying to sell a contract for $3,000. So that's how I kind of stumbled into it.
Dave Crenshaw:There really was a time period wasn't there where that sort of product was easier to sell, and commanded a much higher ticket. Price.
Unknown:Yes. I think it was a few $100 that I sold it for was
Dave Crenshaw:Meet Edgar, what you did next after that? Yes.
Unknown:So Meet Edgar is social media scheduling software. So you know, I brought up social media, I continued to do classes about online marketing, and social media marketing. And I was teaching a class about how to create a collection of all your social media updates, and not just post them once or repurpose them and have them in different categories and all this stuff. And Meet Edgar was and it is software that did for you automatically what I was teaching people to do manually in the class. See that? I
Dave Crenshaw:think is a totally different ballgame, right? Because it's one thing to teach people. This is what you do on social media. This is how you bring in customers. That's all educational. Now you're providing a software service. And I know that for those who are not familiar, if you haven't heard of SaaS, Software as a Service, that's a particular type of business. So to me that feels like a very, very different discipline requires a lot different skill set to create that. So what was that like for you making that transition? Was that easy? Was that hard? Where'd you get the knowledge to do that?
Unknown:So if you're not sure how to start a software business, you should marry a software developer. That's what I did. That's my advice. So yeah, so that's how it came about. I was doing the social media class. And then I met my husband, Chris. And he helped me figure out that what I was teaching in the class, you could make an A software. So for me, I don't know how to code. I don't know how to make the software. But what I did, and what I still do is focus on the marketing side. So I actually was using the same skill set that I'd used for my online courses, just applying them to a different kind of business model. If
Dave Crenshaw:you hadn't met your husband, do you think that that's something that would have been on your radar? Or would you have gone down a different path? Yeah,
Unknown:I mean, it was definitely something that was already on my radar. Because at that time, I didn't have kids yet. But I knew that I wanted to have kids. And I knew that I wanted a business that could really thrive without me once I had kids. And once I wanted to spend more time with my family. So I was interested in different business models where that can happen. And software was one of them. So it's one of those alternate reality, you know, I don't know if I had met him if I would have still gone into software and found a different co founder or something like that. But he definitely shorten the path. And yeah, we started that company together.
Dave Crenshaw:Yeah. And you knew that you, you needed to change away from that. Just a side note, the word launch is triggering to me, because of what that's like in those info marketing things, right, because everything's about the launch. And you got Yeah, it's very time consuming to prep for those launches over and over on a consistent schedule.
Unknown:It's a very different type of, especially marketing schedule, actually, it's something that confused me a little bit when I started into software, because I was used to, I love doing the big when you do launches, you do the big yearly calendar, right? You have your calendar for the year, and you're like, we're gonna do launches in February and September, and then we're gonna launch this other program in July, and then we're gonna run the promo on Black Friday. And you you have your marketing mapped out that way. Now in software, I don't do any of that. There's no event based marketing, there's no live marketing, it's all kind of improving systems to bring people in. So launch also is a triggering word for me. But I do miss the big wall calendar. That was that was kind of fun.
Dave Crenshaw:So I want to pause for a second before we go deeper into Meet Edgar, which is a huge part of your story. And just highlight something that I'm noticing, and the words come out from you as easier and natural fit. And that's too hard. It's too much work. And I think that's, that's great. I love that. Where does that philosophy come from of wanting to make life easier for yourself? Can you just sort of expand a little bit on on why that's a big deal to you?
Unknown:Yeah, I mean, I definitely started my business for freedom, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs do, I think a lot of us start working for ourselves, because we want more freedom in our lives. And I really wanted to enjoy what I was doing. And there's so many people that are running businesses that they don't enjoy. They don't like the business, they don't like the clients, they find it very stressful. And I'm just kind of like, what's the point of working for yourself, if I'm gonna have this much stress, I'd at least rather have a job and not be responsible for the whole thing. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think sometimes we can forget how much optionality we have. We all it's just human nature, right? We get used to one thing, we get used to doing things a certain way, change is scary. And I've just always tried to be really open minded. And remember that I can change anything, if I'm not enjoying the customer base. If I'm not enjoying the business model, if I'm not enjoying the way, I'm running the team, try something else. And that's what I do.
Dave Crenshaw:Let's go into that Meet Edgar story. Talk to me about the ramp up the first year or so.
Unknown:So me and Edgar was a huge success right away. And I will say I've since exited the company, which is why I often talk about it in past tense, but it does still exist. And so we when we launched mean, Edgar, it was an existing category. There were already really big players in the market, but we had kind of a new spin on it, this idea of loading up your content and letting the tool keep sending it out for you. And in retrospect, it was very much Right Place Right Time. I already had the audience built up because I was already doing social media classes. So I wasn't, you know, launching it totally cold. I had an existing business that I could launch it to. So we were a bootstrap business, you know, meaning we didn't raise any money. If, and we hit a million dollars a year in reoccurring revenue, I think 11 months after launch, which is huge for a bootstrap business, very unusual. And I went on maternity leave, three months after launching the business. And when I worked part time ever since. So I was pregnant, when I launched this business, I knew I was going on leave. So I'm like, I'm not going to launch a business that's going to fail. As soon as I go on maternity leave, that doesn't make any sense. So I really designed it from the beginning to be able to grow and thrive without just me pushing everything forwards. Yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:that's so important. And I think that definitely contributed to the success. So many entrepreneurs create their business, and they build it dependent upon them. And often without realizing, right, their intent is just to grow the business. But what they don't realize if the business growth is always dependent on them being there, like you said, they're just creating a job, they haven't created something lasting. So I like the fact that the difficulty that having to go on maternity leave presented actually contributed to the success of MeetEdgar. Yeah, I
Unknown:always joke that everyone should be pregnant when they launch a business, I guess it was, it was a great forcing function, you know, because this is hard for so many entrepreneurs to take themselves out to let other people do things. And I, I just kind of had to from the beginning. So
Dave Crenshaw:you built the business so that it wasn't dependent on you? How long did you run it with a lot of employees? When did you make the transition in that business model.
Unknown:So something really unique about a software business is the actual value delivery, the core value is in the software, what people are paying for is the actual software. And the software is not provided by a human, right, it needs humans to like fix its bugs, it might, you know, go down or threaten to go down every so often and someone has to pick it back up. But software businesses are a very, can be a very low human business. And after the business had plateaued for a while and still wasn't growing, I'm like, I think this business could run with kind of a skeleton team and go into a kind of maintenance mode, and it wouldn't actually change the revenue of the business. So about seven years after starting it, that's exactly what we did. We went from having a team of you know, w two full time employees to cutting it down to just like one part time freelance developer, like we had two part time freelance customer service people, and just kind of put the business and maintenance mode. And we're able to do that because we had built up the revenue. And the beauty of SaaS software as a service, as you said earlier, is the reoccurring revenue, people pay for a subscription. And if they're still using the software, they're gonna keep paying for a subscription. And that I mean, there were so many lessons and that but I think one of the core ones for me, it was like really getting clear on what that what that value mechanism is in your business.
Dave Crenshaw:One of the hardest things for entrepreneurs to do, in my experience coaching them is, let people go. And I'm sure that you experienced that. Can you talk a little bit about how that felt to do that, and how you move past it in a productive way that was still compassionate. So
Unknown:it took me definitely a long time to come to this decision to run it and maintenance mode and let the team go. And you know, because the business it had stopped growing, but it wasn't failing. So we were able to give people a generous severance, we were able to give people you know, plenty of time to find your new position and help finding your new position. So all of that certainly helped. But it was I mean, you just getting fired is horrible. And there's there's no two ways around that. And that's kind of, I think the mistake a lot of entrepreneurs make is focusing on how hard it is for the business owner, it is horribly hard for the business owner. You do not need to talk about that with the employee, they do not care. Oh, it's
Dave Crenshaw:really hard for me to fire you. Right. I want you to understand how hard this is for me. Yeah, that's a good approach.
Unknown:That is your problem. That is that is not their problem. So it was a really difficult thing to do. Although it's been, you know, I was able to leave it on good terms and people went on to have like amazing careers at some really cool companies. And that's kind of how I framed it at the end of the day was like, this company isn't really going anywhere like this company has gone flat. There's not growth opportunities for you and your career at this company and you deserve to go Oh, somewhere where, where you have those growth opportunities?
Dave Crenshaw:So you achieved the dream of being an entrepreneur, which is a successful exit? How did you make that happen? So
Unknown:I let the team go, I put the business in maintenance mode, I actually thought that would, I would just keep running it like that, I was like, Okay, it's gonna be kind of, I'll just collect the money from the business, and I won't have to mess with it too much. And we'll be in maintenance mode. And that was my plan. And then after doing it for like, not very long, like three to six months, I was like, This doesn't feel good. And I think it was because as an entrepreneur, it's about growth, it's about that excitement and running a business that I had just accepted was going to be flat, you know, was going to decline was not going to grow. I'm like, this isn't really how I want to spend my time, even though I wasn't spending my time day to day, just mentally, it felt like a drag. And that's when I decided, I think I don't think holding on to it is the right move, I think it's time to sell it. And even though the business wasn't growing anymore, it was still a great asset for someone else to acquire, so that they could do some different strategies on it, you know, maybe that we hadn't done and get it to grow again. So, which I think is another big lesson. Like, I see a lot of people who don't try to sell their business, it doesn't occur to them that they can, a lot of businesses get just shut down or left or the business owner gets so burned out that they can't even deal with the idea of selling it because it is a big process to sell it. And there's often valuable assets, like even if the business itself maybe isn't profitable, maybe you've built up a website with a lot of SEO value. Or maybe you've built up a great email list or something like that, there's often assets that you could sell it a business that just get kind of left behind.
Dave Crenshaw:Well, and another thing that I see keep people from selling it is it's their baby. They don't like the idea of someone else taking it over. And so they cling to it, because they're afraid of someone else ruining the thing that they created. I'm not getting that impression from you. Sounds like you were much more pragmatic about the sale.
Unknown:Yeah, I'm like, my babies are my babies. My business is my business.
Dave Crenshaw:That's healthy, though, I think that's really healthy to separate yourself from it like that. Okay, you mentioned your babies, your baby. So let's pause and talk about that for a second. How do you structure yourself and your week to give time to them, I can tell that being a mom is very important to you. That's a very difficult juggling act to be an entrepreneur and to be a mom. So what are some tips? What are some things that you do to make that work? Yeah,
Unknown:so um, you know, my husband and I worked together. So now we're doing another software startup that we also work together on. And so we both have worked part time since we had kids on our oldest is nine now. So that was nine years ago, at our current company, actually everybody works part time. And I have a few theories about this one, I think people have about like three or four hours a day in them have really focused, deep work, I think most of us have a kind of half day of like really good work. And then we often have another half day of like meetings that we may or may not need to be in email, a lot of busy work. So that's part of it is just cutting down your hours to only the essential hours where you're actually getting productive work done. And the other big thing about balance for me is, it all needs to get done. But it does not all need to get done by me. So especially some of the more like time consuming parts of the business, like customer service is just something that it's not something we're trying to optimize, right, we're trying to answer every email like very well very thoroughly give people a great experience. It just takes as much time as it takes, and we have 1000s of customers. So it takes a good amount of time. So if I did my own customer service, I wouldn't be able to do anything else. We only need two part time people is what we have at paper ball. Now they focus all of their time just on doing that. We don't have any meetings, we don't have any other busy work for them. All they do is the customer service. But this collection of people all doing their thing that they're great at and they love doing focused work. We can get all the things done for the business with the founders of the business, only needing to work limited hours on the most important things. Does
Dave Crenshaw:that make growth difficult to not have someone that is doing something other than maintaining or is that part of your three to four hours of deep focused work?
Unknown:Right, my focus work is on the growth. So yeah, so paper well actually has had a Yeah, excellent year over year growth, right. We've doubled every year. So all of our growth strategies are scalable. As we grow, largely by SEO, we also do paid ads. So
Dave Crenshaw:this is a great example. You're saying you're doing part time hours as focused as possible, you're speaking my language, I use a fairly similar structure with my day. What are you doing with the other hours? How are you spending those,
Unknown:I kind of more or less work kind of school hours, which is like nine to three. I also don't work on Fridays, but then also nine to three is my time to exercise to see my friends. So I usually don't start work until 10. Because it's kind of like Kid time, drop them off about nine and then I have that hour to do exercise or meditation or whatever. And then yeah, my husband and I trade off sometime. And it's like, we're also very, very flexible with our schedules. Like, right now
it's 5:30pm My time, because I do podcast recording with people in the US. And it's too early to do them in the morning, the UK. So it's like, I have flexibility where I need to, today, I'll get home later than normal. But like, at six instead of at three. And this happens, like once a month. So we have that flexibility. But yeah, I think you know, school hours are kind of a good, something that's worked for us. It's like get kind of our life outside of the kids done, and those school hours, and then we're having family time, basically outside of school hours.
Dave Crenshaw:So this brings up another question with you and your husband, it's very important that you've been working together as business partners. A common obstacle of people who are married in business together, is it's hard to turn it off. Right? You're going on a date, but you're talking about something that the employee did or something that the customer said, Are you successful at being able to create a barrier? Is it a struggle? And if you are successful, what are you doing to maintain that boundary, the
Unknown:way that we handle this, which works for us really well is Chris will sometimes joke that he is uncredited co founder. So one reason for that is he has no interest in having any kind of public persona. But the other thing that's worked really well for us is, even though we're co founders, we started the business together, we don't run the business together, he creates the product. So we actually aren't collaborators on like, who to hire and how to spend the budget and kind of like strategic decisions with a business. That's all me, he is in charge of making the product. Great. So we do talk about work at different times. But we don't tend to have much conflict about work, because we're not having to like, discuss and compromise like we would, we would have a lot of conflict, if we had to figure out everything together. You know what I mean? Okay, it's kind of a divide and conquer strategy. I think that works for us, like we have our separate lanes that we're solely in charge of. So there doesn't really have to be debate about work.
Dave Crenshaw:But you're you're able to also not discuss the bigger picture issues of work? Or is that sometimes something where you have to remind each other, hey, let's turn this off for a second. I
Unknown:think we're just not that interested in each other's work is the truth. So, you know, for us, the core metric is like monthly reoccurring revenue, he didn't even know what our monthly reoccurring revenue was. He's like, he's not that interested in the business side of the business. And I'm not that interested in when the server goes down. We do talk about work at different times. But it doesn't tend to be this like, Oh, we're always discussing the next crisis, I think, because we have like our separate crises from from each other. Well,
Dave Crenshaw:you have a really clear division of labor. And that's where I see the problems occurs where two people are kind of in that leadership, managerial role. And that, even if they get along, it just starts to become a consuming conversation. And if I'm coaching someone, I say, you know, okay, you got a need to schedule something that you're going to do together, that is not work related. Something else to talk about some other hobby that you're interested in. Yeah,
Unknown:I find for married couples who want to work together. If you have totally different skill sets, it's going to be a lot easier. And that I mean, I think this is true for any co founder relationship. And this is something that I've just come to over the years in business, I've become so much more of a dictator. And I find like, obviously getting feedback as as needed. But I find that it's so much more clear. If it's just like you're the decision maker on this. You don't need to talk to anybody about it. You don't need to get anybody's input. It clears up a lot of potential conflict that co founders have with each other is just that clarity on like, Oh, this is a finance one. And we decided that you're in charge of finance stuff. So like, That's just you. Yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:and this is true, even without being married to someone when someone starts a business, and there are partners involved. You need to have Have those clear dividing lines? Like, like you're sharing? Laura? That's a great example. All right, unfortunately, I need to start wrapping this up. So the big question five years from now, where do you see yourself? Where do you see your business?
Unknown:Oh, so I don't I mean, I'm not someone who sets big long term goals. Actually, I'm more of a believer in discovering what amazing experiences life presents me with because, like, some people love to have a bucket list. I'm like, show me what you got. Because there's so much. There's so much cool stuff that I wouldn't even think to put on my bucket list that that comes my way. So I think in five years, I probably will be doing a different business. I've been running paper ball for four years now. I think I do love that like startup stage starting something rather than being the one to grow something really huge. So I wouldn't be surprised if I have a different business. My family loves to travel. Last year, we took six months off to travel full time around Asia. And we definitely want to do more time, full time travel as a family. So maybe we'll be having our next go with that in five years.
Dave Crenshaw:Actually, I do want to talk about that. Just briefly. What does that travel look like? I mean, how do you? How do I hear about the the nomad lifestyle, the digital nomad, right. And I think I've got children who are in school, I've got an 18 year old now he's kind of out of the house. But we've got a 15 year old, I got 11 year old, we'd like to travel but doing that for six months. That just seems like a logistical nightmare. How do you realize?
Unknown:Yeah, you spend a huge amount of time on logistics for sure. My friends with older kids have all told me like do it before they're teenagers, because once they're teenagers, they don't want to. And we've we've always done a lot of travel with our kids, we've taken a month to go to Thailand, taken a month to go to Japan. So it was something we were already doing as a family and our kids were kind of used to it. But when we did the six months, my daughter was four and my son was a, so she didn't really need to do school yet. He's actually just a really big reader. So he just reads all the time anyway. And we're like we're in Korea read this book about Korea. And you know, we just sort of pretend that that was. That was enough as far as the the education went, but it's an intense experience. I mean, we were together literally 24/7 for
Dave Crenshaw:six months. Oh, my goodness. Yes. Yeah, I love my children. But that's a long time to be continually.
Unknown:It's a lot, we wouldn't want to do it. Some people do it full time, like all the time we liked it, or six months. And we're like, this was super fun. We're ready for some some normal time at home. Yeah,
Dave Crenshaw:I found that about six weeks is our max limit. It's too much now it's probably more like two weeks now. But that's wonderful that you do that and create those those opportunities. Okay, Laura, this is the part where I like to help someone who's listening, find an action item that they can do not like a month from now or a year from now. But something they can do today, this week, to help them be successful. And the goal is to help them make your success story a part of their success story. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to summarize about why there's so many things in here, but I'm going to do my best to choose three possible action items that they can take. And then I'd like you to chime in at the end with one of yours sounds good?
Unknown:Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Dave Crenshaw:The first thing that I'm going to call out is going back to your story, when you were starting your business, you were going to the chambers of commerce, and networking, and that concept of focus on people who you naturally connect with, you don't need to be everybody's best friend. And you probably shouldn't try instead, find someone that you connect with and build that relationship and then find one other person. And I'll also add this, make sure that you're making it about them, not you. So look for ways that you can network with people, either in person or online and start to build those relationships because down the road, they always have an impact on your business success. I also want to I'm going to combine a couple of concepts here. But your example of looking for what is easy for what is natural. That sounds lazy, but it's not. It's smart. It means that you're going to learn how to grow a business without being dependent on you or even if you're not growing a business, building a career where you're doing the thing that comes naturally and that is such an important point. I have built my career by doing what is easy and natural from Me and usually what is easy and natural for you is not what it is for someone else. So don't discount it, don't think, oh, I don't, I don't have that. So just take some time this week and consider what is easy, what is a natural fit. And then I'm going to call out that principle of three to four hours of deep focused work a week. Now, someone listening, you may be in a position where you need to work a full time job. We're not saying I don't think Laura, you're saying, don't work a full time job, right. But what we are saying is, recognize what are those hours when you're getting the most done in my books and courses, I call them the most valuable activities, and focus those most valuable activities during those hours when you're most productive, try to move meetings, outside of that time, try to move busy work outside of that time. And the more you focus on those most valuable activities during the time, when you have the most energy, the more successful you'll be and grow in your career. So those are three that stood out to me, Laura, what's one that you would add as an action someone can take today or this week. So
Unknown:I would add looking for something that you can make easier and more enjoyable. And I think often when we are on a job, we forget how much control we have, because we often don't ask right like, so a really common example of something you could change this week, as maybe there's a meeting that you're in every week, that's just a total waste of your time. You don't need to be there. It bores you to death, right? If you can bring up with your manager, you know, I think I could have a more productive hour. I don't think I need to be in this meeting. And I see something else that I could do that would add more value to the company during that time. Do you think I could try skipping it for the next month? And we'll see if I'm still able to keep up without it. Right? I think we often just don't think to ask, we just accept the status quo. So I think what you can do this week is look around for things that you want to change that you're not enjoying, and make one of those little changes to make your work easier or more fun, beautiful
Dave Crenshaw:principle. I love how you created it in a way that someone can listen to it and apply it to themselves, no matter what their position is. I can tell you're a pro that you're comfortable behind the mic and sharing these things with us. Thank you so much for your wisdom for your example. And I think people are really going to gain a lot out of this. So thank you for being generous with your time, Laura. Thank you. And thank you everyone for listening. Remember, it's not so much about the knowledge you gained or the stories that you heard. It's about the action that you take. So do something today, and that way you'll make Laura's success story, a part of your success story. Thanks for listening.
Darci Crenshaw:You've been listening to the Dave Crenshaw success show hosted by my dad, Dave Crenshaw, and produced by invaluable incorporated research and assistant production by Victoria Bidez Sound Editing by Nick rights. Voiceover by me Darci Crenshaw, and the music is by Ryan Brady via pond five licensing. Please subscribe to the Dave Crenshaw success show on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you like to get your podcasts. If you have a suggestion for someone my dad might like to interview, please send it to guests at Dave crenshaw.com and please don't forget to leave us a five star review. See you next time.
