Fractional
Fractional
Larry Miller: Not being a prisoner of the moment
Today we dove into a bunch of topic with Joshua's friend and colleague, Larry Miller. We talked about having a day job versus being an entrepreneur, the differences between leaders and individual contributors, how we've worked through challenging projects together, and much more. Today we dove into a bunch of topic with Joshua's friend and colleague, Larry Miller.
We talked about having a day job versus being an entrepreneur, the differences between leaders and individual contributors and their day-to-day jobs, how we've worked through challenging projects together, how being a founder helps with a fractional mindset, and much more.
Larry Miller's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larry-miller-b086a4bb/
Paul Graham's maker vs manager schedule: https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Note: For this episode Lance mentioned the wrong episode number, so our fantastic audio editor Caleb Johnson re-recorded the intro. You can book his services for editing at embrin.com.https://www.instagram.com/speechcraft_audiobooks
Hello and welcome to episode 47 of the Fractional Podcast. I'm your host, Lance Robbins. I'm here with my co-host, Joshua Wold. And today we're excited to chat with Larry Miller. entrepreneur, product manager, currently serving at Angel Studios. Joshua and Larry have some overlap that we're going to get to learn a little bit more about. Fun fact, I have an uncle named Larry Miller and it is not our guest today, but it's a fun coincidence. But Larry, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself. You mentioned entrepreneurship. We'd love to hear kind of what brought you to where you're at and I can't wait to dive in.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Well, I love the tie you have with the name Larry Miller. So I'm based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. And if you've been to Utah or spent any time here, you know that my name is a big name around this place. Not me personally, but Larry H. Miller was the guy who basically is known throughout the business world. He owned the Utah Jazz back in the day. His family owns all the car dealerships, the movie theaters. So all growing up, that was the question I got was, hey, are you related to Larry H. Miller? Is that your grandpa? The answer was no, but hey, Would have been cool, right? I could have had some free cars and jazz tickets and all sorts
SPEAKER_00:of stuff if that had been the case. So there's a name association that you're not used to hearing, which is that you Lance's relative. So that's great. Exactly. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Great to be here. Thanks for having me on, you guys. My background, I mean, I currently, like you said, working as a product manager at Angel Studios. That's where I've met Josh. We're on the same team right now, working on the same project. And We'll be right back. quickly turned to let's get a little bit more business focused. Maybe there's a route I can go down there. Basically went through grad school to still trying to figure out what it was that I wanted to do specifically, which is when around that time, yeah, it would have been like a year or two into grad school when I started my first company with my co-founders. And from there, it's been several companies that we've started and a whole roller coaster of up and downs up until the point where Here I am at Angel Studios, so I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more of the detail, but that's kind of the background.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. Actually, I'll dig into that now. You and I, we have regular conversations during the week, like trying to build a product together. So for our audience, we have people who have full-time jobs currently. They are working as freelancers, entrepreneurs, or some of them are this thing we call fractional, which is they split their time across multiple jobs. companies as a fractional type of engagement, almost like consulting in the day. But there's a whole different way we've defined over the last couple of months how that works. I guess my question, where am I going with this question? My question for you, you're an entrepreneur, but you're currently have this day job. How do you kind of wrestle with that balance of I I have great dreams, but I also have a family to cover the bills. So wherever you want to take that, because that's something that I know many others have wrestled with and myself too. That's why I'm here today. And I have this currently great day job, but I also have dreams. So I'm curious where you wrestle with that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, a hundred percent. So I'll kind of go back to the origin of where it all started, at least my entrepreneurial journey. So I grew up again, like I said, very much of the mindset, like college, my whole plan after that, medical field, dentistry, whatever it's going to be, it's pretty much mapped out. And at the time, I grew up in a basketball family as an athlete. And even though it wasn't really my aspirations or in the plans to play pro, that's about all I really thought about. I wasn't one who really thought a whole lot about career and you know what am I going to do with the rest of my life it was kind of just like prisoner of the moment like love basketball love playing golf love just hanging out doing stuff and kind of knew some of the immediate milestones that I was going to hit as far as like here's what I'm going to do you know age 19 and then after that you know I'm going to start college and then I don't know dentistry just seemed to be like that's what that's just what it's going to be never really thought more about that so fast forward to when I finally get there took all the pre-dental classes in undergrad, took the dental admission test, got wrecked, like in my opinion, right? Just was wrecked taking all that stuff. Science classes just demolishing me and finally came to grips and I was just like, you know what? I'm starting to find out that my motivation for going into this is that eventually I would like to buy up a bunch of different practices and like get into the business of this. And I thought to myself, why not just go directly to business instead of you know, trying to do it via some alternative route. That's kind of where it started. Talked with my dad about it. He is an entrepreneur, started his own business. And he was just like, yeah, I mean, you know, president of my company, he's got a law degree and law is a great thing to go into if you want to, you know, for business and great background to have. And about that superficial of a level, like didn't really dig into it any more than that. And I thought, why not? Like, let's go to law school. At the time, you know, this is Mitt Romney's running for president. Hey, he's a successful guy. He got a JD MBA from Harvard and seems to have done really well in the business world. Maybe I'll do that. I'll go get my dual degree. Did that, right? So now I'm sitting here thinking, okay, this is the new plan for me, is I'm going to get my JD MBA, then I'm going to go work as a lawyer for a couple of years, and then I'll transition over to the business world because... Every lawyer that I talk to says that they hate it and they want to transition to business or do something else. Mitt Romney never practiced law, so whatever. Anyway, I'm starting to figure out that, hmm, I did my first year of law school. It was interesting, but I wouldn't say it was the most exciting. And then I did the first year of business school, the MBA program, and I thought to myself, this is way more fun. At that point, it was me, two of my brothers, and my dad chatting. And my dad threw it out there and said, hey, I have this idea that think you guys could probably run with. You guys are young enough. You've got the energy to do it. Anyway, that's the origin story of the first startup that we did. I was still in grad school. My two younger brothers were still in undergrad. And we got two of my brother's buddies who are developers going to school out there with him. And we just thought, you know what, let's have a crack at it and let's go with it. So got some seed funding, family and friends round to basically incentivize, get our developers on there working on it full time. And we went from there. It was very much for me at that time, like a kind of a low risk thing, right? This wasn't something that I had to quit a day job for. My wife was working while I was in school. So it was very different at that point. We started that company, which at the time was, it was supposed to be a peer-to-peer delivery company, very similar to like an Uber Eats, DoorDash, but more like neighbor delivering for neighbor type stuff. And this was like 2016 when we started this. So right at about the same time that DoorDash started, Bill Reitz, all these things were starting to blow up, right? Quickly morphed into something a little bit different, which was more along the lines of the online order and then, hey, we'll find people to come deliver to your local area, like your local customers or whatever. Long story short, we quickly found out that, hmm, we're going to need to raise a ton more money to really make this thing work. In the meantime, we had been familiar with the space. I had worked with my dad previously before grad school. in his area, which was working with the postal service and reselling small parcel and kind of the e-commerce world there. And we had some relationships and we thought to ourselves, you know what? What if we transition more to that? If we could go secure a contract with USPS, we know that's a lucrative model. We could build a software around that. So jumping ahead, we ended up doing that. We secured a contract with USPS that then launched our next company, Goa Solutions, which actually... No. Yeah. Yeah. So again, this would have been 2020 is when we started Go Solutions, when we secured the contract. And then we knew that we had a tool to make money. Now it was, we need to build something around this, right? There's a whole story that we can go into more details if you want about, gosh, how we came about getting developers for that and all the different things we tried from independent contractors to firms and outsourcing to finally bringing someone in full-time. But Anyway, we eventually got that up and running where we actually started having some success. Revenue was going great, had that thing going for a few years. And then it was October of 2022, we had one of five reseller agreements with the USPS. And in October of 2022, USPS canceled their reseller program, which what that means is that for our business, which we have built up over the last several years, continued functioning And we continued servicing all of our customers, but revenue went to zero overnight when they pulled that plug. Because we had built a company whose revenue model was built around the revenue sharing, right? That reseller contract that we had with USPS. And we hadn't yet implemented, though it wasn't our roadmap, another software solution that we were going to charge subscription for to try and break away from the dependency on USPS. Unfortunately, the cancellation that we thought could happen, but we're hoping wouldn't, came about 12 months too early, I think, for us, and eventually led to, you know, the crossroads of what do we do now? Do we start over from zero? We kind of made a name for ourselves in that space. We had some good connections and knew that we could probably go raise some money to start over. But at that time, all of us kind of looked at each other, me, my two brothers, and basically just said to ourselves, we're all pretty young, you know, late 20s, early 30s, and thought to ourselves, do we really want to build, keep building this business whose business model is dependent on somebody else? And all of us were just like, no. So, at that point, bulk of 2023 was me trying to figure out, now what do I do, right? And immediately, I was just like, okay, I'm not going to go work for someone else, like W2 is not what I want to do, especially after You know, being an entrepreneur, running my own companies for the last few years, like I know what this feels like. I know the exhilaration, what it tastes like, like this is what I want to do. This is what I need to do. And so I feel like I kind of fought the, I shouldn't say the urge. It wasn't like I had an urge or a desire, but just the option to go out and find employment. because that's what I wanted to do. So I spent the bulk of the year kind of trying to figure out, okay, I could go down this route. I could talk with this person. It seems like this could be an opportunity or this could be a company that we start. Ultimately, what happened was your savings doesn't last forever. And so I thought to myself, you know what? Maybe I just need to suck it up and be like, go out there, go get a W-2, do a good job for someone. And that doesn't mean it's the end of your entrepreneurial journey. And I feel, Josh, like that is... A lot of the conversation that you and I have had is that it's okay, even if you're working for someone else and you're a W-2 employee, does not mean that you're not an entrepreneur or that you don't have opportunities to do things. Ultimately, for me, it was about, I've got a wife and four kids. I got to figure out how to put food on the table, pay the mortgage, make sure that we're taken care of that way, and then it's okay. I will say, and then I'll stop rambling. You guys can go ahead and interject or ask any questions. Probably the biggest lesson I've learned from this journey this past year, and I know it's been said a lot of different ways, but talking to a friend about this, it's amazing the clarity you have when you are not in a space of desperation. And what I mean by that is when I'm seeing the savings go down, I don't have any real income coming in, and I'm trying to figure out, should I start this business? Should I go with this person? Should I do that? Like, your ability to filter and think clearly when you're in just desperation mode like that, everything seems like it could be something versus now where I'm at. It's like some of those things that I was considering, I'm like, gosh, I'm glad I didn't like jump on that bandwagon or do anything like that because for whatever reason, right? Like just wasn't a good fit, wasn't a good option. So that's something that I feel like I've learned big time over the past year is get yourself in a space where your head can be in a clear space. You could make decisions, you know, rational decisions, not from a place of desperation.
SPEAKER_00:That mirrors my journey and people who have followed this podcast for the last year. That was, I was in this place of denial where I did not want to go get a W-2 and I was trying to make the business work. And I was watching savings go down and And seeing opportunities, but the horizon for the opportunities succeeding was further out that my savings could last. And so it was this frantic chaos to try and make it work. And I did for a while, but the stress was off the charts. And I appreciate your story. And this is part of why I wanted to have you on because. You were able to take a moment to say, hey, this isn't where I necessarily thought I was headed, but it's okay. I've got responsibilities. And now I can look at potential entrepreneur opportunities with a, hey, how will this succeed in the long term? Not will this pay all of my bills next week, which is the reality of where I was before. So, yes, I appreciate that. And I think everyone has a different way of approaching their entrepreneurial journeys. And maybe, you know, thinking back when I was 19, I stayed in someone else's house. I didn't even have rent for a few months. Like I could try anything. Now, not so much. So I appreciate that. And one of the things I would say to others is it's okay to try and find a place that you can have some calmness, that you can take that job and then dream again. So that's where I'm at. Maybe it's my coping mechanism, but that's where I'm at as well. A
SPEAKER_01:hundred percent. Yeah. Go ahead, Lance. I'm curious if there is a succinct thing that you might say to somebody who's watching the savings go down, the stress levels are rising, right? Maybe they found themselves in the entrepreneur seat, maybe not even by choice, right? Like a lot of people are impacted by layoff and they decide, I think I'm going to try this instead. And it doesn't mean that's the case for everyone here or who you'd be speaking to specifically. But yeah, for the folks who are kind of in the struggle and are feeling the stress, entrepreneurship doesn't feel like fun in this moment, right? Yeah. What's your message from what you've learned so far to somebody in that seat?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, I feel like trying to think how to say this. I would say that what I found out was that taking care of the money problem and still keeping the dream alive and being an entrepreneur are not mutually exclusive. That's a mindset that I didn't have beforehand. I really fought the idea of getting paid by somebody else because I thought that it was going to be the golden handcuffs, right? And that I was going to get locked in this cycle of now I'm working, trying to climb the corporate ladder, that whole thing. But the truth is, it's really not. And I did try the fractional thing, just contractor work, consulting during this past year. And I think it's just be honest with yourself. It was very clear that I was making some money from it. I was not making nearly enough to sustain what my family and I needed. And I think really for me, it was just a mindset change. It was this mindset change of, look, you're not throwing yourself into prison by going to work for somebody else. What you're doing is you're solving the money problem. And solving the money problem does not necessarily mean that you're solving all the other problems that you're trying to overcome, you know, freedom, doing something that you love. But I do think, and this is just me personally, I do think that there is something to be said for, even though this isn't necessarily what you want to do or isn't your first choice, can you take pride in going and doing a good job for somebody else, right? And can you go and be a difference maker? And that I feel like after talking to a lot of people and getting to that point, that headspace is where I was finding like, you know what? This just makes sense for me. And especially in today's age, right? So, something for me personally, especially with Angel Studios too, was I knew that the job description that I was looking for, I wanted it to be something where I could still be creative. I could still work with people who had creative minds. So, I knew that I wasn't totally getting away from it. I wasn't getting into something that was, you know, just that I didn't want to do. I wasn't going to go be a lawyer, right? I've found that out previously. And also... It was a hybrid position, something where I go into the office here and there, but also I had the freedom to work from home. And I think Josh alluded before we started here, just the attitude that I have of, look, get the job done, how you schedule your day and how you want to do things. I feel like we're blessed to be in a day and age where that's valued and we don't have to micromanage people's schedules. We can be results driven and set goals and have objectives and people are free to work the way that best suits them and the way that they can do their best work. And so all of those things combined, I think really just helped me to finally see like, you know what, I'm in a position, you know, like Josh was saying, I'm not 19, you know, I'm not a single guy living in my parents' basement where I don't have to worry about making whatever. I can go work for, you know, start whatever company and live off of peanuts, mom and dad's groceries for the next six months to, you know, 18 months. I was married and had a family. I had to take care of the money problem. And I really think that me thinking that that was going to chain me up actually did the opposite. I felt much more liberated and I felt free because I wasn't worried about how we're going to pay the mortgage or how food was going to get on the table. And now it's like I got weekends, I got nights to just think clearly about what's the next thing that I'm working on or
SPEAKER_00:the next options that I have. I love that. And if for no other reason, it's the boat I'm in. But I've had other friends that I've seen them struggle with that as well. And with Lance, you've, and you can speak for yourself, obviously, but we talked about this quite a bit. You've found something that's working really well for you. But I think... We both had this conversation that if there comes a day where it doesn't, yeah, you'll consider your options at that point as well for if you need to find a W-2. But right now, it's been so cool watching where your business is going. I want to transition a little bit here to... This is slightly different than maybe where we talk normally, but I want to get your perspective on a couple of points as... The difference between maybe being a manager inside of a larger company, so middle manager to use the quote unquote, versus running a team, and we'll get into a few other points, versus being an individual contributor. And the reason I bring that up, we talk about work culture a lot here. And I often bring the argument of defending the individual contributors in a team. Lance will often defend like the people running the company and the decisions they're making. And at the end of the day, we actually are quite alike in our thinking, but we take those angles intentionally to find out where people can do better. So my overarching question, then we'll get into some details. What have been some differences you've seen running a company versus being a middle manager in how you think? And maybe there are no differences, but I'll let you take that where you want, Larry.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think just from my experience, maybe the biggest difference that I have seen has been, so the biggest we got our company, we had about 17 total people working when we were there, which is not a big team at all. for an entire company. And so I feel like it was very, what's the word we're looking for? Horizontal, right? Not a lot of verticality and different layers going into it. And I would say maybe the key to that that's different is the objectives didn't get lost downstream. So I'm very much, I feel like my managerial style, and I think I'm like this because this is how I like to be treated when I have managers above me, give me the objectives, tell me the what, we're trying to accomplish. Let me know the goal, like very clearly define the sandbox that I'm playing in, but then let me play with the sand toys the way that I want, right? And let me have the creative freedom to figure out like, how are we going to accomplish this? And I feel like at times, the bigger the company, and I think the more verticality you have, sometimes those company goals and objectives can get lost or distilled in some way, which then makes it hard because I think that the natural effect of that is you'll have people at different layers who will have different objectives or different things that they think are important to them that maybe you're like not quite on the same page. Then there's confusion as to like, wait, so what are we going for right here? Are we going for this? Are we going for that? And then you're trying to work on some objective or some project that is going to accomplish said objective, but maybe that objective isn't exactly what your manager has in mind. And so you get the friction there. And the natural byproduct of that is that someone's going to feel like, oh, what's going on? Do we not have any creative freedom? Are we just here to do basically what said manager or middle manager is saying that we should do? And therefore, there's not a whole lot of collaboration. It doesn't have to be that way. And it's not always that way. But I think that that is something that probably, I don't know, can more readily occur in a larger organization, the more layers that there are. I think it's just a natural consequence of middle management versus right when I am, yeah, I'm co-founder, I'm, you know, whatever title I have, but I'm also the one leading, still leading the product team. And so there's not like this lost in translation coming down. And I can very clearly define, here's the objective. Here's what we're trying to go for. Here's our goals. You guys like collaborate, let's collaborate together. And then, you know, come back to me and let me know, what do you guys think? What are the solutions going to be? Versus, like I said, at times, right? The organization is too big. They're going down a whole bunch of layers. Sometimes that gets muddled. And I just feel like when objectives aren't aligned, that's where a lot of the disconnect happens.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And you'll have people at the top who are frustrated that no one's doing the things they were hoping and people at the bottom who are frustrated that they're not being heard. And that just creates so much opportunity for chaos. One of... This is partly related, but we had a project this week that I felt particularly blocked on. You have this kind of chill laid back like, hey, I'm here to make sure our goals are happening. You guys play with the toys as you want to. But how do you approach a project when it starts to go wrong? And so I've kind of fed you that a little bit and then I have some thoughts on what I've seen. But how do you like to approach that? Oh, man.
SPEAKER_02:Well, let's find out if Josh likes the way that we're approaching this or not. But no, speaking specifically to this week, kind of what we had happen. The first question I always ask when it feels like something is going wrong or there's confusion is I think, crap, me as product manager or whatever you want to call the title, obviously something isn't being communicated well enough to the team. That's my first thought. So what do I need to do communication-wise to fix? It seems like maybe... you know, Josh on design or whoever does on development, like they're not on the same page. And if that's the case, like, did I say something or did I not say anything? And people are confused about what it is we're supposed to be working on. So that's kind of my first is let's chat. Hey, are we all on the same page of like what it is exactly that we're supposed to be working on? Right. Sometimes. And it's very simple. Like, Hey, we're supposed to be working on this. Right. And this is going to be, top priority before we start worrying about anything else. Boom, problem solved. We got it. Sometimes though, it's no, I get it. Like we're here, but I'm just, I'm feeling like, I don't know, is this like what we're thinking? Is this what we need it to be? And I feel like, especially in new product lines or even startups, this goes back to the idea of you kind of just want to ship fast. And, you know, I'm one who's got, and I'll readily admit like a perfectionist mentality. I don't want to just throw stuff out there. That's not great. Josh, I'm sure you can relate because a lot of designers will have the same thing where it's like, I don't want, this is me reflected in this. I don't want it being imperfect. But I think that sometimes putting constraints can be helpful, whether they be time constraints, scope constraints, where it's like, hey, just give me the best thing you got by the end of the day or by end of the day tomorrow. Because for people like me and other people who have this perfectionist mentality, sometimes if there's no deadline, it's like you can sit and go crazy for days and for weeks just trying to figure out, but I can make it better or I can make this better. And it ends up pushing things back days or weeks. So I feel like number one, like I said, making sure that everyone knows what it is that we're supposed to be working on. Number two, we pass that and it's like, no, we know what we're supposed to be working on, but there's something else. Do we need to put some kind of constraint on it? Or another thing with that is it's not so much that I need a time constraint. It's just unblocked. And I feel like Josh, this week, it seemed like you had gotten to a point where you're just like, I've spun my wheels against this for hours and for days. And it's like, I really just need a new, a fresh pair of eyeballs on this just to see. And I feel like that was the unblocker this week. And sometimes it's as simple as that. It's as simple as just, can we get some fresh eyes on this? Because you've done 99% of the work. We just need that 1% that many times will come from someone who hasn't been in the weeds for the past
SPEAKER_00:three days. And that, I think, is exactly it. There's a difference as a leader where it could be, hey, Joshua, why have you not gotten that done? Versus, hey, what do we need to do to get this across the finish line? And there's just kind of a difference in that mentality where it's like, yeah, I'm feeling blocked and I feel very open to admitting that because I know we're together going to try to figure that out. And this kind of actually goes back to your previous point about Multiple layers of teams, like leadership really cares about doing something, then the middle management cares, and then the ICs care. And we've had some pivots where one week we're really trying to accomplish one thing, but then we see a need to accomplish another. And so this whiplash as a team, we try to juggle with, all right, this thing's really important, but why is it important? I thought the other thing... was important. And I think that juggle is hard sometimes. And that's where it takes someone in the team or everyone in the team to just pause for a second and look at why we're feeling so much friction. 100%.
SPEAKER_02:You know, not to get all like philosophical on us, but that concept, I feel like applies to just life in general and whatever we may be going through, not just in product teams, right? Where The context switching or shiny object syndrome, all these different things that come in where it's like back and forth and back and forth. There is so much wisdom in taking a deep breath, taking a pause, making a decision and sticking with something long enough to at least find out, is this worth doing? Is it not doing? Because man, it can be exhausting to constantly be going back and forth on different things. Now, it's a little different than what we were just barely talking about, about unblocking something in a management team, but you just got me thinking about that. We were thinking about, you and I are laughing because we know, we know what we're talking about here with different projects at work where it seems like one week, this is the priority and another week, this is going to be the priority and just kind of the mental toll that that can take on you. But I think it's related in a way because specifically that we're talking about in this example, you had been working so hard On solving this problem and designing this flow. And it was like you had reached capacity where it was like, you know what, I need a fresh set of eyes. I need to step back. I need to step back and take a break for a minute. And I think I'm tying this in with the point about, you know, shiny object syndrome and whiplash you're talking about because mentally, you know, you don't want to cause that kind of mental burnout. by anything that you're doing, I think it's okay to work super hard and then be able to take a step back. But you don't want to cause it by going back and forth and doing this thing all the time. The context switching is something that I feel like can really, I don't know, just really burn people out. And I'm bringing that up because I feel like that's where I was this past year in trying to decide what I wanted to do or what route I wanted to take. And I felt like it was every other day. I was just like, nope, I'm determined. I'm going to go down and I'm going to do this. But then it was like, but there might be something else out there. So then I start focusing on that. And then just constantly going back and forth on, I thought I was going to dedicate some time to actually see if this was going to work, but then something else came up. You know, what if I'm missing out on this? So I start doing that and it's just, yeah, don't make yourselves
SPEAKER_00:more tired than you need to be. There's a book I'm reading right now called Slow Productivity. by Cal Newport, and he wrote Deep Work, So Good They Can't Ignore You. Great books that I've really enjoyed, and I'm hoping to get him on the show here someday. Sent out a little feeler, so if anyone knows Cal Newport, we want to have him on as well. And it's this idea of you do not need to hustle and bustle day in and day out, unlimited hours. That's not how great things get created. It's finding the space and the time to think, maybe go on a walk, have deep work time. And then he has all kinds of little tricks like, all right, having office hours, having ways to make sure you can still work with your team, but having time to be heads down to really focus. And I think that's such a crucial part of making good products, building great things. And it's just a conversation we've had in our own team. We know we actually want to have meetings to make sure we're helping each other, but we don't want too many because we want time to focus. And it's this tension of zero meetings, probably not going to work, but hours of meetings every day, not going to work either. And so that's a balance you have to find out.
SPEAKER_02:100%. I know you and I have talked a little bit about that, but to get specific in the product and just building things, meetings and schedules and whatnot, great article by Paul Graham called Maker Schedule versus Manager Schedule. And any of your audience who's aware of that, They're going to know exactly what I'm talking about here for those who may not have heard it. I'll put it in the show notes. It's incredible, right? It's so simplistic in its theory and what it's talking about, but so powerful. The fact that basically the idea is a manager's schedule can be broken down by the hour, right? You're constantly meeting, you're constantly collaborating and making sure that, I don't know, everything's working, that everyone knows what's going on. A maker's schedule, so the actual people who are building, who need to have that time of creativity, really need to have their days broken up into half-day increments. The idea being that the amount of time that it takes to get into, call it the zone, the flow state, whatever you want, is, I don't know, that in and of itself, to be constantly interrupting your day with meetings, with other things. It's like you say, it's a whole deep work concept. You need to give yourself hours to to be able to get in, to think about something, to then start working on something, to keep working on something. So yeah, I totally agree. Like something that we obviously are experimenting with and trying to do on our team that I've done previously is meetings for meeting sake. Everyone knows are never a good thing and make sure that they're meaningful and try to have as little of them as possible.
SPEAKER_00:That's my whole philosophy. I love it. All right. I've got some rapid fire questions I'm going to throw at you and answer them however you want. We just had a discussion offline recently about trying out four day work weeks, maybe as a company, as a team. Do you have any thoughts on that in your experience? Have you ever tried it? There's something Lance and I have just been having a discussion to try to figure out how this could impact us if we were to do something like it. And you already admitted to dreaming about it.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. Yeah, what a great segue. I have never tried it. I am fascinated to try it because, again, me and Josh have talked. I'm like, if you were to do that, how many meetings are going to have to get canceled in order to provide the amount of work hours to get stuff done? And my hypothesis is that could probably be a net positive. Also, just anecdotally, I'm sure you guys maybe have had experience with this. I just recently went on vacation a couple months ago, the beginning of the year, Josh knows. And I legit disconnected probably for the first time in years because this is not the company that I founded. And everyone was very encouraging and just being like, hey, don't get on Slack. Don't check your email. Really just take a break. Boy, I did. And let me tell you, I was quite refreshed when I returned. I would imagine a three-day weekend could potentially have the same effect.
SPEAKER_00:So earlier this year. Yeah. And that was one of those things where I was secretly like, Larry, please take the full vacation so that when I do... I'll be able to take a full vacation. Earlier this year, because of one or two holidays and one or two personal things, I had like three weeks in a row where I took off Monday, I believe. And my wife and I started to look at each other like, so you get one day for us personally, we have one day for community, so we go to church. We have one day for church. chores, catching up on stuff. And then you have one day to do whatever you want. That's almost how it felt like having those three-day weekends, three weeks in a row. And I just wonder, there was one, my family doesn't listen to this, so it's fine, where Tuesday morning, I was like, you know what? I think I'm ready for work again. Where you have had such a great time with your family that you also are kind of maybe looking forward to having some time to do the creative craft that you have a career doing. So that's what I'm kind of curious about. And we may test it as a team. I've never been able to pull it off for more than three weeks in a row multiple times. And I'd be curious if I did it for a month or two, would I become better at what I do? So it's an open-ended question. I want to go back to, and I see Lance has got the sunglasses on now. We finally have sunlight. How's Utah? Because we finally have sunshine today in Idaho.
SPEAKER_01:No, it's dark and gray today. Tagging onto this four-day weekend, we kind of touched on this in a different show, but as an entrepreneur, as an independent, you know, where I'm sitting right now, I guess it's up to me if I want to do a four-day week. And I'm really curious now. I mean, I have customer expectations that I have to, you know, manage, but I'm not going to my customer asking, is it okay if I do a four-day week, right? Like, if I worked that out, schedule-wise for myself. It's an experiment I'm really interested in trying. So I've been practicing the last couple of weeks of breaking Friday down to a half day. And that's been refreshing. So I'm curious, where's the point where, is the per hour productivity massively better, the smaller amount of numbers that I work in a week? Where's the balance? Where's the tipping point? Where do the diminishing returns no longer... become a negative because the number of hours are too small. But right now, the half day Fridays has been good. Stay
SPEAKER_00:tuned. I'd be really curious, Lance, because if you know you're not going to allow yourself to work, let's say it was Friday. No matter how challenging a Tuesday afternoon is, you know you only have to make it till Thursday afternoon and then you're done or Thursday evening maybe. I wonder if that motivation of no matter what happens, I'm like two days away from having a break and you totally could test it out. But there's that fear of like, well, it's all on you if you don't, which is probably why. In my entire entrepreneurial journey, I never did it. Larry never did it. There's a reason why you don't do it because you're trying to hold everything together. So please test it out for us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I feel that pressure. And also there's kind of that moment of like, it's Thursday and I still have a lot to do. Oh crap, like it won't get done. What's the worst that will happen if it waited till Monday to pick it up again? Well, maybe in my case, like there could be violations and fines and, you know, if we don't I think that's a good way to think about it. Yeah, Larry.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I was just thinking as you're saying that, I do think it's probably less about thinking about a five-day work week and more about thinking about the standard 40 to 50-hour work week, right? And this is, what I'm getting at here is, this obviously is dependent on what industry you're in, right? Like this kind of thing, if you're trading time for money, then obviously the more hours you put in, the more you're going to get out. But it really is a question of output, right? The amount of input that you put in what kind of output are you getting, right? And is the output sustainable that you don't need to put in the standard nine to five or eight to five, whatever it might be, right? What if you get the same results by simply putting in half the time, right? But that time that you are putting in is actual, like real creative work that leads to the outputs that you're looking at. And I'm just bringing this up because I'm sure you guys are familiar with it and I'm sure everyone here is familiar with it, but Being in organizations or just jobs in general, where you're working a nine to five, like really sit and ask yourself, take a time inventory, how many of those eight hours are spent doing deep, meaningful, productive work, right? And so to me, what you're saying, Lance, I agree with, and that maybe it's not as much about like taking every Friday off, but it's more about how many hours do I actually need to put in to get the output that I need to keep this thing going or to grow or whatever the goal might be, right?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And
SPEAKER_02:not doing things just for the sake of, hey, we need to put in this many hours per week. Be less focused on the input, more focused on the output, and let that guide what you're actually doing. I feel like it's been the other way around for most of, I don't know, most of the time since we've gone to the nine to five schedule.
SPEAKER_01:I think there's an ebb and flow to this too, which is probably true for entrepreneurs or business Maybe there's a number of other roles where this applies to as well, but there's going to be, look, the next two and a half weeks are going to be intense. The two and a half weeks after that. you're probably going to have some breathing room. Take advantage of the breathing room when you have it and don't just feel the need to be present. And when the temperature's up, you're there and you're solving the problems, you're creating those solutions. It's really, that's what your customers are, at least in my position, that's what your customers are really paying a premium for is your ability to Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And in that situation, you are creating a system where when you have to buckle down and really do a lot, you're not worn out, right? Where maybe you have a little bit of calmness built into the system so that you can handle whatever comes your way when you need to, but not by default are you always that way because that will lead to burnout. I have many more questions I could ask but we've reached the end of our time here so I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up. Thank you Larry for joining. Is there a place where people can find you if they have questions and want to reach out?
SPEAKER_02:You know Just hit me up on my LinkedIn is probably the most accessible place. Yeah. Without giving out my phone number.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Before we wrap up, I want to give a shout out. We got some really great feedback from some listeners this week. So a big thank you to Doug. Doug, you're a longtime supporter of the show. Really appreciate the feedback that you gave us on a number of recent episodes. Also, Ellie sent us a really nice message commenting on the new music. in the intro and complimenting the artist there and really appreciated a couple of episodes. So thank you for that. Always love hearing that feedback. That's super awesome.
SPEAKER_00:And we will have a feedback episode at some point here. Lance and I are working out the logistics. I want to get to that specifically. Final thing, if you have any feedback, send us an email, email at fractional.fm. And thank you so much. Thank you guys. See you next time.
