Fractional
Fractional
Alan Paulin: Fractional as a path to starting your own company
This week we met with Alan Paulin, CEO of Flint.cc. We dove into a ton of topics.
We discussed Alan's journey to founding his own company, and how remote work has affected him.
We also discussed working with Fractionals from a founder's perspective, how aligned incentives matter for successful projects with fractional teams, and how he plans time for deep work.
Links to learn more about Alan:
https://flint.cc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanpaulin/
Episode edited by Caleb @ embrin.com
All right, hello and welcome to episode 55 of the Fractional Podcast. I'm Lance Robbins. I'm here with my co-host Joshua Wold, where we're talking about the portfolio career, future of work, modern work, all the things that are hot topics right now. and obviously the fractional career journey that Joshua and I have been building. We have an exciting guest with us today. Excited to introduce Alan Pollen, co-founder and CEO at Flint. Excited about what you're doing there, Alan. And yeah, I would love to have you introduce yourself to our audience. Tell us a bit about who you are and how you got to where you're at right now in your journey.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the intro, Lance. And great to be here with you, Lance and Joshua. Yeah, I've been at my career now for 23 years, and most of that has been spent in software engineering. So I'm probably a slightly unique guest in that sense. I dove into the world of HR kind of most recently when founding Flint at the beginning of 2023. And prior to that, I spent a lot of time kind of working from big tech all the way down to startups, kind of doing Microsoft and Google. And I was fortunate to join Square and Cash App right at the beginning of Cash App. And ultimately, after working on one startup, we started Flint to kind of take on some of the problems that we're seeing in the HR industry and have found myself working with fractionals, specifically fractional people leads as a lot of
SPEAKER_02:kind of who I'm working with. Cool. So this will be a little bit different perspective than our guests to date have been, where they're fractional service providers. You're actually working alongside fractional service providers. helping partner with them and totally different approach than what we've had so far. This will be fun. So yeah, thanks so much.
SPEAKER_00:I want to jump in with one of my derailing questions. I'm curious, you've been in this industry for a while. I've also been in software engineering from the design side for what, 17 years now. How has remote changed things as your career has progressed? Because this will also get into fractional in a closely tied way.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a great question, Joshua. Certainly prior to the pandemic, you would have heard me say that having everyone in the office was key to success. You know, having the more experienced senior people mentoring the junior people and having the junior people there to be mentored and to learn. Of course, mentoring does happen in all different kinds of directions, but... primarily being together there was something I would have said was a necessity. You know, fast forward four years, you know, at Flint, we're fully remote. Since the pandemic started, I haven't really worked in an office other than, you know, to meet up on the occasional basis, you know, a quarterly meet, I think. And it's been fantastic. I think my own journey, you know, at one point you would have heard me say a hybrid is the way to go. You know, having kind of relaxed some of my earlier opinions on working in an office, And then eventually it was like, actually, I'm not sure hybrid's the right way either. I think fully remote offers even more benefits. And in some ways, and I'm sure this is a great discussion, hybrid is either it's the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. It's the worst. I'll
SPEAKER_00:just say that personally.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, in terms of where the talent you can hire, being able to work remotely gives you almost infinite additional possibilities in who you can hire and the type of people and where you can find them. Hybrid, you're almost forced into the same constraints. And then you also have the same costs of maintaining an office. And people have multiple workstations. How are you going to pay and support that? So you almost have double the costs and for little of the flexibility.
SPEAKER_00:Would you say that there's still a specific benefit to an office for certain circumstances? And if so, what would those be? I
SPEAKER_01:mean, I think there's specific benefits to people getting together at least periodically. And I'm sure different industries, different companies are going to have a different idea of what periodically is. I'll say something like quarterly is great. And so like where you choose to get together, depending on the size of the group, you know, can benefit from having an office or it can benefit from doing it in some kind of offsite location. Most of the companies that I had done it with had offices and we did them in offices. You know, if you think about teams of between five and 30 people getting together, then coalescing in one office is a great idea. That's partly because they had offices because they were in them prior to the pandemic and so If you're thinking about would you get an office that size simply for a quarterly get together, the answer is probably no. But you can see where there are benefits here of having that space that you can go to when it makes sense. And having different teams coalesce in different places at different times is certainly valuable. You don't always need them at the same place at the same time, but allowing people to get together on the cadence that works for the projects they're working on, I think is really important. Obviously, in a startup like Flint, getting everyone together is where we would be No,
SPEAKER_00:I love that. And I also recognize there's companies and teams and stages of life and personality types where in person is fantastic. I've been in that position before. I remember I was 19 with my first startup. I had no real social group. So going to the office was great. To the chagrin of my colleagues, they were my social group. And that was where I got all my energy. My life is a little different now. I've got my local community. I've got my family where we hang out together. And yes, I have colleagues who have become great close friends Lance is a perfect example of that but that happens in a serendipitous way it's not a requirement and that's what I appreciate and also so i'm giving lots of caveats but being in the software engineering type company it's so great you can hire just about anywhere so yeah thank you i love your thoughts on that and i think i'll be curious how things go over the coming years lance and i have a friend who she's younger approaching her 20s and she loves being in office because that gives her the chance to really just have more social connections with people but for me i'm getting old i like hanging out with my family going into the woods it's fantastic
SPEAKER_01:i definitely saw the same kind of you you know, situations. Certainly right after the pandemic hit and everyone was kind of forced home, there was a lot of people that struggled, whether you think of it as struggle mentally or even just, you know, struggled to be productive when they didn't have their social circles around them. And that's because, you know, certainly when I'm in the first, probably five to 10 years of my career, I had the same thing where my social circle was in the office. And so that would have been really hard to be suddenly forced away from that during that time. similar to you right now. I now, you know, are meeting people in both socially at work and not, and also depending on how many sites or locations, you know, a company's at as to whether you were getting that already or not
SPEAKER_02:at all. Pushing this conversation a little further before we move back to our regularly scheduled show here. In your experience then, Alan, right, when a distributed organization that's not working together day to day comes together for, like in your case, a quarterly, how do you break down what you do, because I've seen organizations pack meetings from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and then it's, you know, happy hour after this. I've also seen organizations that go heavy on play with some strategic stuff going in there. What seems to work well for your organization?
SPEAKER_01:And I'll caveat what I say next with, I think there's at least three different ways people get together. You know, I've seen like a leadership team get together. I've seen like a functional working team get together, like let's call it maybe a project team, we'll call it. And I've seen a whole company or, you know, greater org get together with people who don't necessarily even work together on a daily basis, but are, you know, more or less on the same organization. In those three different cases, there's probably different ways of doing it. Certainly, I think there should be an element of play in all of these. In other words, building that trust is something you can really do best in person. And it goes so far towards what your future will be able to do and how you'll be able to make decisions together and get advice in some of the tough decisions that need to be made. That capital of trust that you can build up together is possibly the biggest benefit of being together. So I would say definitely and I still think back to I'll use an example of the first year of when I was working on Cash App and we were a distributed team not working remotely but in different offices and I believe we got together at one point to play trampoline dodgeball and it is just as good as it sounds and i'm sure there's a waiver for that yes it's not for every team look looking back in hindsight there's a little bit of huh we i'm not even sure that would fly in today's world but it was a ton of fun and we talked about it for a long time afterwards and it really helped kind of break down barriers and helped people and i think we went afterwards to have a meal at like a brewery kind of thing so that there was
SPEAKER_00:a I've shared this example before, but I have a colleague that over Slack over the year before I met him, I thought he was incredibly terse where he was just annoyed with me. But after I hung out with him for a couple of days, we went out to dinner. We just had a great time just connecting. And I saw how friendly and personable and social he was and just realized, oh, he just doesn't want to waste time on Slack, but he's a wonderful person to hang out with. And that made me reinterpret everything he said for at least the next couple of months until we met again in a more positive light. And that's just a great, and we worked together for years after that. And that little context, I would have struggled to get remotely because Zoom we were just there to get something done really quickly and hop back off to go back to our jobs but having dinner together it kind of changed something for me, and that was really great.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Did you kind of go back, Lance, to the question of how, you know, best ways to make these offsites work? Josh, I think you hit the right point of meals. You know, take advantage of meals, take advantage of evenings. Another instance, when I was working at a startup, we used the evening for almost like what I would call, icebreaker is the wrong word because it's too superficial, but deep icebreakers to really help bring a team together. And I thought that was incredibly valuable. The other thing I'll say about how you schedule the time is find ways to ensure people can shed their other meetings from their schedules. So the worst thing in the world would be to bring a whole team together and then someone gets called off and they're sitting in a corner or in a phone booth or something trying to call people who are not in the offsite. Or things like, I'll use an example of doing interviews, you know, larger companies companies tend to schedule interviews independent of teams and, you know, let's free those people up so that that particular time when they're all together, they can be focused on being together rather than focused on external things.
SPEAKER_00:The people who are there are the people who are there. And don't schedule your evenings to go have fun by yourself and hang out. Or I even had one colleague, they brought their spouse and every evening just disappeared with their spouse and hung out. That's not the purpose of an onsite if the company's paying to bring people there. Even if it's only two days long, spending 16, 18 hours together is fantastic because then you can break and go remote for the next few months and have that camaraderie ship. Yeah, two days of
SPEAKER_01:intense togetherness is better than a week of yes it was kind of scattershot
SPEAKER_00:100 cool
SPEAKER_02:all right so remote does not have to mean alone and that's yeah love this conversation bringing us back around to a regularly scheduled program. There's two angles here that I'm really curious about, Alan, and we touched on these before we started recording here, but you're having overlap with, in a couple of different ways, in practice, maybe just one way, but in theory, right, as a founder, If you're looking at growth and trajectory and access to talent and specialized sort of ways, how does this concept of working with a fractional from that angle, whether you're doing it yet or not, but how does that play into the way you think about growing your team? It's kind of a new concept. How are you thinking about it? What do you think other founders could be thinking about that maybe they're not at this point as it relates to this fractional marketplace for talent?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I'll start this response with thinking about depending on how your, whether it's your founders or your leadership team is composed, fractals can offer a really great way to round it out. And so one of the things that I'm always thinking about are how do I bring in people with skills that I don't necessarily have? And so I look at Flint. Both co-founders are software engineers or software engineering managers by trade. And it works really well because we can communicate really well. But it also means that we have holes to fill that are really important. And so being able to bring in people with those skills, sometimes you may be able to bring in an advisor. Sometimes it makes sense to bring in someone full time. And sometimes it makes sense to bring in someone in a fractional way. And it's great to have those options. that I feel like if you go back even a few years, it wasn't something that the market or people were focused on. And if you're a company of less than 10 people, you may not be ready for having your own CFO or controller, but getting help on those things, if no one has the skills, fractionals are a great way. And I'm starting to think about even sales and marketing as a way, maybe the first step is you might... outsource something, use some kind of agency. But I actually think a better approach is to bring someone in who has done this at a senior level and can do it part-time for you. And that's the beauty of the fractional model.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. My first experience with fractional was Lance and I were at XWP and we had a fractional chief marketing officer and kind of seeing how she was helping support us and others. And then at one of the startups working with a fractional CFO and And I've actually recommended him and pulled him into another organization that I was aware of because I saw how effective he was. And it felt like he was fully there for us, even though I know he actually had a few others that he was fully there for as well at the same time. And that was just a huge benefit where the small startups did not have to incur a potential six figure salary. Instead, it's much different because of the nature of the fractional and you're getting all of their expertise. Yeah, in my opinion, that's been so fantastic to watch.
SPEAKER_01:you know, as more types of work seem to gravitate towards fractionals, we're going to see even more of this. So like, I think finance was probably the first one to really embrace it because of the minimal time at the beginning and it grows as the startup grows. And then we saw, you know, people teams or HR start to really take hold as well as marketing. I think there's a future one around things like design is a great example. You know, and it's something that we talk about a bunch at Flint is, you know, is how are we doing design? And right now we have figured out a process internally where we have many people who are combining for the design hat. And part of it is that I know that that's not my strength. And so as a CEO, if you put me in charge of design, I'm gonna give you suboptimal results. And so let's figure out how we come up with a better way to do it. And we tried outsourcing and didn't love the results we got there. And so, you know, I've come up with something that, you know, works for the people we have and the things we're building. But I could imagine in the future having maybe even a fractional designer would be something that we would certainly look into.
SPEAKER_00:You're just throwing candy to me, so I got to answer this one. There's two software engineer manager co-founders that I worked with in the past, and it was so fantastic where they... knew what they needed to build overall. But what they do is approach me every couple of months and say, hey, Joshua, can you just spend a month wrestling with this new concept? We're struggling with the overall information architecture of how this will fit together. They would throw a bunch of thoughts at me. We'd have a call or two. And then I'd come back with some usually rough sketches and they'd go, oh, sweet, that's perfect. We'll build it out with Tailwind or whatever framework and we'll test it and then we'll come back to you. And that was actually a lot of fun because my sketches they would implement in a day or two and then they would go get feedback and then they'd usually pivot the entire idea and a few months later they'd say you know what based on market feedback we're actually we're going in a whole different direction can you now give us a couple more designs and sketches and that was a really fun way to watch a tiny team of two or three people and give them a little bit of design help but they were not at the stage where they needed full-time help that would have just been a waste of money to have a designer sitting around creating theoretical designs for months on end and that that to me was one of the my favorite ways to kind of see that happen in real time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. That's amazing. It's also one of those things where depending on how novel the approach someone is taking, like it's one thing to, to design something that is essentially, you know, use this company's design language to implement this thing over here that has already existed. And for that, it may be quick and easy, but a lot of the stuff that I find we're doing, we're pushing the envelope on, on product and how things interact. And it's like, You need someone to think it through. And what we've discovered is sometimes we thought we thought it through. We implemented it and then tried it ourselves and went, no, we didn't get that quite right. And so the faster we can kind of complete that iteration and then make adjustments, the faster we can get to the way we want that product to feel. And it's really powerful both on the design side and on the engineering side to be able
SPEAKER_00:to shorten that loop. And what I almost always found with these founders and others, they would tell me the problem they've been wrestling with. I'd come back with a sketch or two and they're like, oh, Nope, that's not it at all. That's not going to work. Joshua, actually, let's try this. And it brings such clarity. And some founders I've worked with, they've just started learning that sketching process themselves, which means I can work with them on something else, right? Where you, even two people who are almost twins, you can't truly envision the exact same thing until one of you has sat down and whiteboarded it out. And once that starts to happen, then you can actually have better discussion. So yeah, it's a lot of fun.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm thinking about your comment, Alan. You said a while back, this wasn't really a thing. Do you think if five years ago you're starting Flint and someone would have come to you and said, hey, what do you think about building out your team with some fractional talent? What would that have meant to you? Would you have just said no? What are you talking about? I would probably be web searching
SPEAKER_01:on what that meant. But I, you know, it's funny. I go, you know, way back at the beginning of my career, we were using contractors to augment teams and in some cases even hire those contractors full-time afterwards if we went, if it went well, almost like a, like an audition. And, but I found in general, most of the contractors were starting, you know, were fairly junior people. that this was their way into an industry. The whole fractional approach is very, you know, I find it's actually coming in from the other direction, where you see people who are, in a lot of cases, very senior, who want the flexibility to, you know, be their own business, who don't necessarily want to be at one place and want a little bit more, whether it's the remote nature, whether it's to be able to work with startups and have the purview of being able to talk to several. Like, I I actually find that most of the fractional leaders I talk to have a lot more experience than the early contractors that I was working with. So it's been refreshing in that sense. And so I don't even know if there's a true parallel to what I would have thought of five or 10, 15 years ago. I
SPEAKER_00:know in my experience when I was doing full-time fractional, the thing I was looking for was how can I learn very quickly from founders? And it was such a great opportunity for me where I knew my craft as a designer, but I I was trying to understand how does a startup succeed and what better way than to work with a dozen startups and start to see patterns for what's going to succeed and not, because my goal was ultimately to start my own company. And that was giving me insight into that. So some fractionals I've seen, they have a path forward for their own company and they're almost looking for something they can't find in any other way. And that's why they're diving into it. And yeah, that's been really fun for me to basically just to ask founders all kinds of questions about how the business may or may not succeed and also hear the same pitch many times why this company is going to work and no other ones will. And you start to see repeating patterns there, which is also fascinating.
SPEAKER_01:Certainly as a founder, I joke that you only really get to, you know, you pick your path. There's 10,000 paths out there. And at the end of the day, you've got to pick the one that you think is best for your company. And, you know, being able to see more patterns before you kind of choose your own. I could definitely see that as an advantage to to helping create your own successful startup in the future by getting to kind of be part of more startup journeys early on. Oftentimes you hear people talk about first startups failing, but second one has the benefit of all of their learnings the first time. I could even see the potential if someone wants to do their own startup to be a fractional in the space for a few years beforehand to kind of gain perspective. I could totally see that being beneficial.
SPEAKER_02:Joshua and you both are touching that's something that i hadn't really put my finger on before but when you're an employee right and you're not you're just a step away from getting to sit in that same room or five steps away the ceo or maybe you're five steps away from right and the learnings there are just so limited but when you're able to step into that room and sit in there and and and hear and observe and take part and all that's going on here at a strategic level yeah the it's it's It's definitely the fast forward button on learning. So yeah, I'm feeling that. And the other thing that I had in mind too was around going back to the like, what if I asked you this five years ago? What I think we're seeing is a lot of people moving into this fractional service provider side of the market. But the education of the potential customers is what needs to catch up, right? I think if in two or three years, as founders start to say, okay, there's something to this fractional and I see how I could work with somebody, I think we're going to see a lot more equity in the market. But right now it feels like fractionals are flooding in and we're waiting for the market to ripen in a lot of ways. If we take
SPEAKER_01:a step back even further and we say, you know, what what of any, you know, experience helps you in your next role, whether it's as a founder of something, whether it's a fractional. And the greater that breadth of experience, more likely you've kind of seen some of the things that are, you know, the situations and you're able to pattern match in the future. And so, you know, when people found their own company, if they already have startup experience, that's great, because they've either seen how this succeeds or they've seen how this fails and probably some combination of both. if they've worked in a large organization, they kind of have that view of what it looks like when you achieve that success and you get the growth. And so then that also rounds out a whole other set of perspectives. And I think being a fractional leader gives you a chance to do you know, many at once where you can gain, you know, in theory, you could be gaining experience in startups and midsize and enterprise all at the same time. I think that that's most likely unlikely given how most people structure their business. But the idea of having a breadth of experience, I think, is huge for any future endeavor.
SPEAKER_02:You can link into adjacent industries as well, right? Like my primary focus is tech, but, you know, maybe ag tech or biotech or fintech or, you know, is all adjacent to that and because you have this one skill set that you can move in there as well.
SPEAKER_01:I would say for my own career, had I not been the head of engineering or, you know, VP of engineering at a, at a startup, I don't think I would be nearly as prepared to, to found and start Flynn. And at the same time, if I hadn't seen what success looks like on cash app, essentially building it from, you know, a hack week idea through beta and through launch. And then, you know, nine years later having, you know, 40 million monthly, I could use this kind of seeing that whole growth then. then i wouldn't be in the same spot to kind of know what those stages are that we're going to hit in flint and and so you know every piece of experience gets you there and i think i think you know fractional leaders sometimes may be getting you know multiple at the same time
SPEAKER_00:which is this is massive bonus one other thing i want to hit on i've been reading this book called slow productivity by cal newport and a fantastic book he wrote deep work years ago and he just describes that if you want to do your best work it's good to have a life that's a little bit set up in such a way where you can actually think, where you can actually be creative, where you're not being asked to do 10 things in a day. And it just kind of strikes me that fractional can be a path toward taking on a couple of clients, maybe having a quieter lifestyle for a little while while you're thinking and trying to figure stuff out for what you want to build. I'm curious as a founder right now, so I'm just going to pivot the question because I just love to know this from other people. How do you incorporate the idea of deep work into your day when you're being asked to do a lot of things all at once. Yeah, that's a
SPEAKER_01:great question. It's actually something that's really interesting because I would say as a software engineer for many years, a lot of your work involves deep work where your head's down and you're writing and there's a certain zen feeling you get when you're sitting down for a few hours and you produce something and you're like, oh wow, that was awesome. And then as a manager of people or a director, I think that those deep work periods are much fewer and further between. And what I've actually really loved about founding Flint or being a founder is that I have fewer meetings in my calendar. Now, these days, I'm actually doing a lot of outreach and talking with fractional leaders a lot of the day. So I've kind of reversed that trend a little bit. But I definitely choose to find kind of deep work, whether it's for me in the mornings or even in the evenings. Sometimes I'm able to kind of carve out some time and actually go heads down and And as a CEO, like we cover a lot of different topics. So sometimes I'm figuring out product requirements and sometimes I'm figuring out a sales strategy. And sometimes I'm just making sure that I'm up to date on all the, whether it's current customers and any needs that the team has that we're trying to build towards, or whether it's potential future customers and making sure I'm on top of all my origin, even that feels like deep work because I, you know, I'm heads down in a task and making sure that, you know, it requires my focus. And if I'm not, then it's gonna take me twice as long. So, you know, making sure you find your happy place and whether it's in an office, whether it's in your home office, whether it's on your back deck, listening to the birds outside and, you know, you're enjoying some fresh air while you're working, whether it's with the music on so that you can tune out the rest of life or sometimes For some people, music, they get into it, and before they know it, they're listening to the music more than they're working. Knowing how you work and what helps you get into that space, I think, is the
SPEAKER_00:important part. For me, it's songs I've listened to hundreds of times in the past where I can listen to them even with lyrics because my brain just shuts off. And there's some songs I've heard hundreds of times and I still don't fully know the lyrics, but my brain just recognizes the patterns like, okay, time to work. I'm listening to this song again.
SPEAKER_02:So you mentioned that you're putting more time on your calendar to meet with Fractional. So changing the conversation a bit then from what it might look like to work with them within Flint, but then outside of Flint, Like what's the strategy there? Why connect with so many fractionals? How is you working with a fractional? Like you and I have done some work together here, right? So like, how is this part of Flint's strategy? And are there some hacks here that maybe other product founders could lean into? Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I definitely think there's an untapped market here. So here's what I've learned. And I say that as what I've learned because I feel like with any, whether it's a product strategy or a growth strategy, sales strategy, no matter how you frame it, I hope everyone is always learning. And I certainly find, you know, having never been a CEO before, I am learning every day on what works and what doesn't and what I should be doing and how we should be thinking. So what we've discovered is that, you know, if you'd asked me a year ago who our product would resonate with, I could have probably not been overly specific and said, oh, it'll work from, you know, companies with 25 people all the way up to enterprise. And while I think that's probably true in the long run, specializing a little bit finding your niche is important and what we've discovered is is that kind of the the niche of companies that flint is working really really great for right now tend to be ones who are going through growth that are oftentimes starting in that you know 30 and going up to several hundred people and that happens to overlap really well with fractional people leaders and so we are certainly working with companies outside of that range as well but from a from a who to talk to and whose problem are you solving? And I think this is a really key point to stress for any startup is make sure you understand your customers and make sure you understand what problems they feel so that you can solve their acute problems. And so working with fractional leaders has been something that we kind of stumbled into, which is great. You know, you're testing a bunch of things. You realize your product works for a few people. You double down, you double down again, and you realize, hey, this is a good fit. I'll say that there are some neat aspects of fractional people leaders that I've found amazing. One, I think I share a lot of values. with fractional people leaders, or even just people leaders in general, like HR leaders, depending on what terminology people are using. And so it's been really great just getting to talk with people leaders, because I just feel like we're aligned on a lot of things. Two is when it comes to doing outreach, I think, you know, even some of your previous episodes have mentioned, you know, fractional leaders are oftentimes out there looking for their next clients. And so doing outreach with fractional leaders turns out to be much easier than someone who's heads down in the company and, and, you know, not coming up for air to talk with anyone external. And, and so I, I found that be, you know, that that's really great. It's also. you know, given that you can talk to several, we've certainly seen places where when you, you know, when one fractional leader kind of introduces you to a client or becomes your client, depending on how you want to frame it, they may have other companies that they're working with. And, you know, if you impress them with your product in one company, they may recommend you for the next one. And so you've kind of got a built-in growth hack there where you can, you know, they can help introduce you to multiple clients. And at the end of the day, I've I've always been a fan of something, you know, I call aligned incentives. You know, whether it's, you know, back in the days when I was working, you know, at Square, having Square and merchants be working together and they both benefit from the transaction. The same goes true for Flint and the, I'll call it the people leaders we're working with. We want them to have a great experience and in some ways it helped them look really great for their clients. And so we recognize that we not only have to make the client's experience better, Better? but also the fractional people leads experience better. And if we can do both of those things, then it's a recipe for, you know, word of mouth growth and, you know, easier virality. There's also great networks of fractional leaders where they're talking, you know, people are talking with each other. You know, even this podcast is a great example. And so it's a great way for people, you know, word of mouth to spread.
SPEAKER_00:That also touches on a really important counterpoint, which is as a fractional person looking at clients, if you're You're seeing red flags that the client may not be set up for you to actually help them. Really consider if you're going to take on that work. So I'm speaking to the other side of this because it is a small world. News does go around. And in the past, when I've had a fractional client that I could tell I wasn't really going to be able to help them, but I took the project anyways. It went downhill and partly my fault, partly their fault. But now if I see the warning signs and I still were to take a project, that would be on me. So I've just noticed that when you're working with someone where there are aligned incentives and you can see that you're truly able to help them and the rate makes sense, the client is kind and supportive, that all just leads forward in a positive way. I remember this was like 12 years ago. I had a client where it got to the point that he He would verbally call me up on the phone and yell at me and that I was able to fire him and I was shaking. I was so nervous and it was over like$300, which even at the time was not much for me. And the moment I fired him, he actually started trying to backtrack and it was actually a manipulation technique he was using to yell at me to try to get more work out of it. And that was a such a great moment in my career to actually fire someone and be able to move on. I bring all this up to say that as a fractional, learn what kind of clients are actually going to make you feel better about your life and who you are and see those warning signs and move forward with those. A whole other topic, but you made me think about that.
SPEAKER_01:Let me ask a question here. I realize that may be a role reversal, but... Go for it. One of the things I've noticed with at least the fractional leaders that I'm working with is that most of them are brought in because their clients have a need. You know, it It's not like people wake up in the morning and say, you know what I really should do is hire a fractional people lead just because. There's usually something, a problem they're facing, a situation that they'd like some help on, they have awareness. And so in a sense, that's a great thing for us because these people, the fractional leaders tend to have a seat at the table. and can help bring in change and can help bring in positive improvements and all of those things that we think of as great things. I'm curious if that's the way that you see the role and if that's an experience you've had. Lance, that's you.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'll go first on this one. I almost brought this point up 10 minutes ago through the course of the conversation, because in my experience, it's usually, like you said, there's a problem. Either the size of the org has grown and swelled more than the founder or the office manager should be addressing the HR people function. So they need help. There's probably not a lot of maturity to their systems or the processes that they've built to handle what they need to handle. And so the next step is who can help us They grab a fractional person because they don't have budget for the full-time generalist or VPHR or whatever it's going to be. So yeah, I think you're spot on there, Alan, in that if you're a product company and you solve a problem for a certain industry, fractionals with expertise in that industry are a great entering wedge to the potential customer portfolio that they have because... Yeah, at least one of the train wheels is off the track on that one and the rest may be coming off too. And if you have a solution, There you go.
SPEAKER_01:Here's even the flip side of it and why working with fractionals is great. Imagine working with an enterprise-sized customer where they have, you know, and you provide an HR platform. I'm taking Flint, for example, here. Sometimes knowing who the decision maker is that's going to implement or essentially, you know, bring in and deploy a new HR platform, there may not actually even be one single decision maker. This may be something that has to go through multiple people. There may be, you know, functional lead like heads of engineering or heads of sales or customer success that have a really big say in this. It may need trial period that involve a whole team of HRBPs. And before you know it, you're sick to 12 months in trying to figure out who's going to make the ultimate call to set you up. If you've got a company with a fractional, you know, people leader, chances are they're the decision maker. And it's really great there. You know, you have one person to convince and when they see the benefits, then not only do you kind of do you work well for that client, but then also then get the benefit of multiple. So I would rather have one decision maker for many customers than to have many decision makers that I'm not even sure which one's which for one customer.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. And I actually just want to speak from my perspective. I've worked on a HR tool in the past. I've worked, I've had fractional, well, I've had many HR leaders at many organizations that I've worked with. And from my perspective, almost all of them are in that role because at some level, they care deeply about helping people. That's just in their heart who they are. And they've managed to either go into psychology or this, that seems to be the pattern. And in that role, if you're a fractional, you see people But the best tools that help the most companies move forward more quickly. If you're not, maybe you've done this for 15 years and you haven't seen how the industry has actually shifted for the better in some cases. So that's a great point that a fractional people leader would probably know which tools are working and which aren't. Lance and I have had many iMessage voice memos back and forth about companies in the past where I've worked where we've seen them stumble into this remote world and they're struggling. because they didn't start in it and they're not seeing how other companies do it, where they're all figuring it out roughly at different levels and they're going to go toward the same goal. But if you're a fractional people leader, you're seeing it across the whole industry at once. So that's just a great point I've never thought of before. I love that.
SPEAKER_01:One thing, and maybe this isn't specific to fractional leaders, but if you think about people leaders, almost every HR people leader that I've talked with goes into it to help people. You know, like that isn't, you know, high on their list of values and things they want to accomplish. And I look at, I'll call it the performance management space that Flint is tackling. And I don't even love the word performance management, but that's the industry term. So I'm going to use it for a moment. There is so much I'll call it animosity or pain towards how the performance management is currently done with things like long annual performance reviews. And so here you have these people who have gone into the industry to make people's lives better. And then they realize the status quo is causing a lot of pain in some cases. And I think that's challenging. And so certainly one of the things that I would love to change in the industry is helping people leaders get back to making people feel great and really helping them help others, which I think is probably the whole
SPEAKER_00:reason why they went into that career. I'll say one more thing and then Lance, you have the floor. I've seen the difference with a people leader. Maybe they're not even fully empowered, but they listen. And that's what Lance would do for me in the past where maybe he couldn't actually help me out directly with my problem, but I could tell he cared and he was happy to be a sounding board to at least help me navigate through that. And that's So even if you can't wave a wand and change everything, just by being a listener, it brings so much trust and it makes me think, okay, this organization at least has one person who cares. That's not really how it is, but that's how sometimes a person can feel when so much is going on.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Even this week, I've had conversations where I knew I couldn't do anything to change the situation for somebody, but it was really important for them to be heard and to be validated and that they felt like it didn't go their way, right? Or it wasn't what they wanted. And it's true, right? But I think part of... It's a difficult seat to be in. Here I am getting onto my soapbox, but as... As someone who does really care, coming into this because I do care about this, sometimes, A, you don't have the resources or the ability to do something different for somebody, and that's a really hard pill to swallow. Sometimes, B, the thing that's more caring for the larger organization is a thing that hurts one person more. more right it's the hard thing to do but it's the right thing to do it's rarely hey we're going to do something fun it's great for everybody everybody's going to like it and it's going to be rewarding for all of us myself included right it's usually one of the first two i can't help you or i have to do the hard thing to help other people so yeah if if you're on that if you're in that position of like i think i'll go into hr because it's really rewarding to help people it's not all that rewarding but but it matters
SPEAKER_01:and then the things that are easy and or the things that are where everyone is aligned on this is what should be done, chances are those things are already being done. Right. It's the, I, we, we oftentimes even talk about this in, you know, when, when you're trying to change an industry and, you know, when I was at Cash App, I was trying to, to change essentially the payments industry, or even before that, when I was thinking, you know, joining Square, how, you know, how do you level the playing field with, between large and small merchants? And then, you know, a startup I was at, you know, was also trying to, to level the playing field between payment and, you know, democratizing that. And with Flint, we're really looking at changing how performance management is done across a whole industry that's been this way for, you know, decades. And so like when you have big problems to solve, if it was easy, it would have already been done. Yeah, I think we would be naive to think that we're not the only ones thinking about this. And so, but because the problems are challenging, that's why we're here and that's why it is is fun when you see progress and when you can join forces with other people. I don't know if you feel this way as a fractional leader, but oftentimes, you know, I think fractional leaders are working, you know, as like solopreneurs there or essentially working on their own. But from what I've seen with the networks of kind of groups of fractional people that you can join, as well as the clients people are working with, it's not really the work by yourself job. In fact, you might, it might be the opposite where you're really to interact with more people of different backgrounds in different cultures. And to me, that's really exciting
SPEAKER_00:and a great place to be. And one thing I'll add is the moment some new thing comes on the scene, every single startup is at least asking about it. I remember when ML, AI, all that stuff started popping up two years ago, suddenly every startup is like peeking around with how to do it. And you start to see patterns and sometimes you can be quite supportive. Well, you You're aware of non-competes, et cetera, and non-disclosures, all that. But you can say, hey, in general, here's how another company is thinking about this. You may want to think about it this way. And that's really cool to be able to do that. It's a fun thing to be aware of.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm also really enjoying the network, the connectedness that's come along with this. And being able to work in community groups with other practitioners has been really helpful, rounding out skills that I don't have, but they do. And then also the opportunity to connect with really great startup founders like yourself and what you're building, what you're describing is one of those things that a fractional can put in their tool belt to actually make some of those wins happen. because sometimes you don't have the lever to pull on, but here's a new piece of technology that can make this a better experience. And I'll say firsthand, at least as a practitioner, it's been true for me.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Lance. That's awesome. And I will definitely say that I hope, you know, if we do our job well, we, you know, harm the leaders who have used Flint and know how to use Flint in a way that they have an advantage over others who are out there and also to make their lives And if you think about if you only have 10 or 20 hours a week with a client, then being able to spend that time on strategic things or the big important issue of the day is really important compared to potentially some of the tactical things around setting up or automating process that ideally the platform should be doing themselves these days. Totaling.
SPEAKER_02:So here's, we're wrapping up for anyone who's listening that's in the people space. I know a good, a good base of our listenership is infractional people, folks out there. So, you know, how can they learn more about Flint? How can they learn more about you and the work that's, that's being done there with your team or where would they find you?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So two places, one, you know, our website, we're flint.cc. You spelled exactly the way you would expect F L I N T. We're also, I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn. I do contribute from time to time or at least once or twice a week, even. So, you know, come in. We'd love to have a conversation. And also we would love to find out if we can help you. Feel free to reach out in that sense. We're definitely looking to help new customers or new potential customers in all kinds of industries. Fractional leaders are definitely our niche right now. I just want to say thanks, Lance. Thanks, Joshua. It's been great being on the show. Honored to be a non-fractional practitioner on the show, and I'm definitely
SPEAKER_00:looking forward to listening to more episodes in the future. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for listening. We'll be back. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email us, email at fractional.fm, and have a fantastic week.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
