Fire the Employee Within: Seven Foundations for a Trust-Made Founder

A lot of founders — even ones who've been running their own thing for ten or fifteen years — are still missing the foundational architecture that makes a knowledge business actually work. They've swapped out who the boss is without actually becoming the owner. They've built a Cheesecake Factory menu of offers instead of one great dish. They've built dependency on algorithmic reach and frictionless stranger contact and autonomous customer experience and hourly pricing, all of which are failing systems, without realizing that's what they've done.

Nick opens the episode with something personal: the moment mid-career when his anxiety got so severe he couldn't be alone in his house, and his best friend worked from his dining room for three weeks. He shares it not for sympathy but because it's proof that business design is a mental health issue, and that you can design your way toward something different.

From there he walks through the seven foundations that a trust-made knowledge business actually requires: owner mindset and what it actually means to fire the employee within. Designing a customer — one particular psychographic customer, not a list of everyone it could theoretically work for. Building an around-the-block offer — the one great dish people line up for — and killing all the escape hatches from it. Pricing and winning in a way that protects trust. Defining an operating model that protects the time of your most expensive employee, which is you. Building a relational go-to-market instead of a frictionless one. And developing the leader capacity to know what's yours right now and what has to wait.

The Damn Rules is out now wherever books are sold. The Wisdom School's next cohort opens in October at https://www.culturecraft.com/venturestock.

Chapters:

• 0:00 — News and Notes
• 4:33 — Introduction to the Public Classroom Format
• 13:52 — What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
• 16:12 — Context: The Two Failing Systems
• 20:16 — Exploring Trust Issues in Business
• 28:36 — The Seven Foundations
• 30:41 — The Shift from Employee to Owner Mindset
• 35:45 — Designing the Ideal Customer
• 39:25 — Creating the Around-the-Block Offer
• 44:09 — Building an Effective Operating Model
• 46:16 — Defying the “Frictionless” Buying Experience
• 48:52 — Recognizing Capacity Limitations
• 52:56 — Next Steps for Founders

Trust-Made Growth®

Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com

Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello, you are watching or listening to the Dams Given podcast. Uh, we're still in a little bit of an unofficial hiatus between seasons two and three, but we've been dropping some standalone episodes here and there, and we have some really exciting stuff coming uh in the next month as we officially launch season three. I've already done a bunch of the interviews. You guys are gonna freaking love it. Um but again, I'm Nick Richmeyer. If we have not met, I'm so glad you're here on the call in the studio with me. This episode, I'm gonna drop in here just shortly into what we call the public classroom. So a lot of the work we're doing with individual founders and soloists and small in both the small and mid-market spaces is we're creating these various different levels at which you can engage and learn and really embed trust-made thinking and growing into your business. And so I want to invite you into our most recent public classroom. And in that classroom, we we we covered a topic called Real Founders Don't Gamble. And the idea here is that a lot of founders, particularly in the first couple years or just as starting out, um, although I've seen this carry on well into year 10, year 15, year 20, are missing some of the fundamental foundations of what it takes to really go out there and grow the business in the best possible way and retain your values at the same time. Because for our founders, the one that works with Trustmith Growth, I really want you to experience three things. One, I want you to build the business you want. I want you to actually do the work you want to do, not the work that you can sort of contort yourself into and survive. Contorting yourself into work just to survive is for employees. That's not for business owners. The second thing I want is I want you to do it in a really value-based way. I want you to build something that puts people on a path to where goodness happens. There's so much going on in our world that is not goodness. And if we're going to launch businesses, by God, let us launch businesses that actually draw people into the good things that are happening in the world. And the third thing I want for you is I want you to do it in a way that allows you to have a rich life. There is, you didn't, you didn't launch a business so that you could be burnt out, right? You didn't launch a business so that you could just barely survive and be strung out and have a stressful panic attack. And I say all this stuff because I have lived it not that many years ago in the middle of my entrepreneurial journey, and it's been almost 10 years for me now. In the middle of my entrepreneurial journey, I literally was so anxiety-ridden, so overrun, so bent into the wrong shape for the wrong clients for the wrong reasons. I one morning woke up, I just I was having such a severe panic attack, I couldn't even get out of bed. And I was so frozen in time, and I looked at my wife, and I'm like, I can't be here alone. I don't think I'm gonna harm myself, but I just I can't be here alone. And so I literally co-worked with my best friend who was an executive at a large insurance company, and he sat in my dining room and worked for three weeks while I worked in my office just so I wouldn't be in my house by myself. That's how far it went for me. And so when I say that we don't have to lose ourselves to the stress of our businesses, I mean that in a very, very real way. And of course, there's therapy and coaching and mental health support and all those things are incredibly important. We don't minimize any of that. But part of what my work is about is say there's actually a business design component here too. That you have to design your business for self-trust, design your business for others-oriented trust, design your business so that we are working within the flow of what's good for me, what's good for the customer, what's good for the team, what's good for the community around us. And when we negotiate and navigate all those relationships well and do that by design, cool things happen. So that's really a little bit about what this open classroom is about. And so I hope you get a lot out of it. There's a little bit of opportunity to workshop a little bit while you're listening, or just, you know, while you're on your walk or on your drive home, give this a listen, and then certainly shoot me a message at podcast at culturecraft.com with any questions you have. Last thing before we jump in, because I won't pin this on the end, the book is out. So if you have not yet purchased your copy of the damn rules, it is available everywhere books are sold. Just search the damn rules or search my name in whatever spelling you choose, you'll probably find it. But let's uh let not waste any more time and let's jump into Real Founders Don't Gamble for this week's pod. Welcome everybody to this month's uh open classroom, public classroom. Those of you who've been with us for a while or been to some of these kinds of things before, you'll notice I'm continuing to play with the format a little bit. And I think we're getting closer to a format that I like. We are calling these public classrooms from now into the upcoming future. And the reason why we're doing that is because all of this is really part of an entire ecosystem of education and training and tools for founders called Trustmade Growth. And because I think really, while so many of the foundational things about how we build success and how we build economies together has been undermined, as I said in my book, the inefficiencies were load-bearing. Uh, and we've been obsessed with efficiency for decades. And so we're paying the price for that. And so we're going to, I'm intentionally creating experiences that have some friction to them. So we're abandoning the frictionless offer and saying, hey, if you come in and if you're going to take the time and if you're going to be here, we're going to give you an experience that validates that time. So a couple of things are true about that, just in preparation. One is this is this is being recorded for the podcast as well, so that people can have that experience. The second thing is that is up and through the presentation. We do the QA at the end. That obviously will be not included in the public viewing. The second thing is all along through this process, I'm going to ask you to actively consider what this means for you, and in some cases to intentionally put questions in the QA. Um, even if you can't stay for the QA, it is a practice, a discipline of this work, of doing this together to put those questions in the QA because it puts your skin in the game. If you want to kind of passively listen to this while you're doing other work, or you want to do what we all spend a lot of time doing, which is double and triple and quadruple screening, then I totally that's your prerogative. But you want to understand, I want you to understand that this space is built to be a learning environment and it's on the pathway for people who sell and lead and work in knowledge spaces. So that's advice, that's creative work, that's consultancy, that's professional services. Because in those spaces, you are being most impacted by um sort of the anti-intellectual wave that's around us, the anti-experience wave that's around us. And we want to give you the tools to not only survive but thrive in that environment. And to do that, we have to move knowledge out of the knowledge space and into the wisdom space, which is why we call the arenas of this work the wisdom school. So we're gonna do all that to say we're gonna do some work together uh for the next uh hour and 15 minutes this morning. Um the presentational portions of this we'll cover about the first 45 again, but we will really strongly encourage you to put questions and things in the chat as you go. I want to talk a little bit about how we want you to think about this time we are having together. People may, well, gosh, Nick, this is a lot of freaking throat clearing. But the reality is we are all badly prepared to have a good experience on a webinar like this. We are all badly prepared by the number of these kinds of things that we've been to and the way that they've been built and the way that they've been handled and the way that they've been sold, that we are pretty much trained to misuse them in how they're built. So what we're doing, and what I'm doing in both the paid and the free public versions of the work that I do is we're taking people through experiential learning for knowledge leaders. Because when you sell expertise or advice, you have to play a different game than the game that you're generally being offered through the did through digital formats. That doesn't mean you have to abandon digital entirely, but digital first offers you a particular kind of religion, and we're trying to help you intellectually sort of disengage from that religion and have tools to be able to do your work more effectively away from it. So I'm not gonna go into any of these in great detail, but I want you to start to notice there as they're happening here in this session and the other sessions we offer, because it is everything that we're doing every time we get together. The first is context attention. We are gonna invite you, I'm gonna invite you to actively pay attention to your lived context. That's your first job is to settle out of the what if and the imaginary and the future projecting and the oh crap, I did this wrong, and the guilt and the judgment and all of that positioning yourself in and out of the present moment to really become a student of context. Most of how businesses are run, the way board meetings are run, the way strategic strategic offsites are run, the way that a lot of traditional advice is delivered is to invite you out of your current context. It's to get you into forecasting and imagining and projecting into a future that will probably never happen, or doing a lot of regret work and a lot of like, oh, we could have, woulda, shoulda in the past tense. Some of those things are useful. A lot of it is stuff that pulls you out of from being attention to your current context. So we're gonna invite you, as you're with with me on this call today, in today's public classroom, to pay attention to your context. And we'll give you some clues how to do that. In that process, we're gonna surface the systems that you're living inside of. All of us live inside of systems, families are systems, businesses are systems, the social web is a system. All of these are, we all live in systems. And so we want to surface where it's useful awareness and clarity about the system that you're living in, because the system is making decisions for you. And if you don't like the word system, you can think about it as a game. The game that you're playing is making decisions for you, and we need to surface that in a real way and in a meaningful way. So we'll do some system surfacing as we go, and then we're gonna challenge you. You're gonna feel me challenging you to explore your level of openness to break or amend the system or to work by a different system. So that level of challenge is meant to feel stretching. You should feel your intellect, your will, your intention, your ideas, the way you think about your business, you should feel it being challenged and stretched. If it doesn't do that, we got to go back to am I being here in the moment? Am I paying attention? Um, and then we're gonna try to test some structure. If we introduce new structure, new systems, new ways of doing things, alternate ways of doing things into your current context, we're gonna test that against what's possible. Now we can't do all of that on the call today, but you're gonna start to see the beginnings of that here in the classroom. And then y'all will explain some other ways that you can do it beyond what's happening in the classroom today. And then lastly, the thing that waterfalls over all of this is capacity testing. You as the leader, you as the person driving change, you as the person who's taking ownership of what you do every day, whether it's as an in-house leader or as a founder or something in between, you have a in the moment, in this season, in this era capacity. And capacity isn't good or bad, it isn't right or wrong, it just is. And the best thing you can do as a leader that affects everything else that you do is become incredibly aware and realistic about your current capacity. Now, there are things we can do to expand our capacity, there are things that we can do to stretch what we're capable of in certain seasons, but there isn't a there is a limited elasticity to how stretchable we can be as people and as human, as founders. So there's nothing wrong. In fact, there's everything right about testing for your capacity as a leader, and then finding out, oh, this might be a really good idea in theory, but it can't be my idea right now because it's outside the scope of my capacity. And leaders who have the maturity and the strength and the wisdom to be able to say, that's really cool, but it's not cool for me, are the ones who are going to win in this next era. That level of judgment and wisdom to be able to differentiate between what's a good idea and what's a good idea for you. And probably as importantly, what is being presented as a good idea or a presumptive good idea for everybody, that may not be a good idea for almost anybody, but because it's being embedded into the system of the game that's being played. So we're gonna do that work as we go all along. And your job is to make this an experience. I can offer you an experience in the 45 minutes we spend together, but it's your job to make this an experience, which means to think about it, to take a piece of notepaper and write down, oh, this is what that would mean for this part of my work. This is what this would mean for this part of my work. To when you have a comment or a question pop up, if you're listening to this live, you're putting that comment or question into the chat for interaction for me to respond to in the in the AMA section. Or if you're listening to this in delay, you're sending that back to us through hello at culturecraft.com. You're saying, hey, I had this question. I want to think more about it. And you're sending that back to us so that we can one, respond to you and help you and support you. And two, so we can develop more tools inside the wisdom school for people who have that kind of a question. That allows you to own this. It brings your energy and your intention into the experience versus just I'm hearing this guy, yada, yada, yada, while I'm doing my email catch up for the morning. All right. So let's just get into it. A reminder, as always, that what got you here won't get you where you're going next. If you're on this call, you're probably experiencing some version of this systemic shift. That there is a whole stacking of the way things have been done in the 90s and 2000s and 2010s, and a lot accelerated in the 2010s leading into COVID that was, hey, everybody should do it this way. And if you're 40 and under-ish, it is probably the only business ecosystem you've known. When I talk to leaders in their 50s and 60s, they have lived experiences as business professionals prior to some of these systems. And they go, oh, well, fine, that thing can go. I don't need it, right? I don't need social media. I did all kinds of success without social media. They've seen systems come and go. That's why you hear older Gen X and uh baby boomers interacting with some of these things in different ways than millennials and younger Gen X do because they are inherently technology adopters. Or you, if you're on this, uh if you're listening in, are you inherently a technology adopter? And technology adopters can de-adopt. They can go, well, I did that for a while, I can stop doing it. Now, social media throws a unique chink in that armor because social media is designed to be an addiction system. So obviously we have to say that with a caveat when we're dealing with addiction systems. But regardless, we are in what I've been referring to in what in the book, The Damn Rules, talks about as the interregna, this space where a lot of these systems are fading out by nature of just things decay and take things go away, and new systems have not been built in their place. And part of why I am so obsessively passionate about investing in founders and business leaders is because if we in the small and middle markets take hold of the responsibility of building new systems, we become resilient and a built-in enzymatic defensive system against the mass extraction that's coming at us from the hyperscalers and the big players. All right. So we want to move you through areas of resistance, those resistance that happens in sub 1 million when you're brand new, those resistance areas at 3 to 5 million when you're trying to scale through your first round of growth. All of those resistance systems, we want to help you move through. And that's what these tools are really about. Um, as a reminder, we've talked about this before, but we you are sitting primarily, um, although there's a lot more going on than this, we want to talk primarily at the intersection of two failing systems. And I want you to think about and put in the chat or write down on your piece of paper where you see these things most significantly in your particular work. System one is the marketplace as we know it is failing. Trust resistance is at an all-time high. We can't just look at this as a sentiment, it is structural. So you hear a lot of people now, particularly people in the marketing business, talking about trust. We got to get back to trust, we got to get back to trust. And God bless them, I love that for them. And they should talk about that. But that what we have to understand is that trust is a system baked into the marketplace. And it is a system that is dependent on everybody's neurological well-being. The if if we're neurologically, if our brains and the way we think about the world and the way we absorb and manifest knowledge is broken, then trust is very, very difficult to do. Well, the essence of our reality right now is that knowledge and and reality is under assault, right? Everything is artificial, everything is, is that even really real? Did you really write that? All of this silly games being played of is that AI or is that AI, the game itself is part of what the people defining that game want you to play. They want you to play the is that AI game. They want you to cancel people for being too AI because it puts them at the center of the narrative instead of reality being at the center of the narrative. And reality is very easy to test for when we're having real life personal experiences. If everything is mediated through digital systems, then it's very difficult to test for reality. And that's why the marketplace is suffering. The marketplace is dependent on that things are what we think they are, or at least in the ballpark of what they think they are, and that is increasingly difficult to do. System two is most basic operating model. So your basic operating model, the way you sell, price, and build relationships, almost all of that has been built on a 15 or 20 year run of digital supremacy, where the best way to do everything, the fastest, most efficient, most frictionless way, all these words that we become to be obsessed over is through a digital format. And like I said at the beginning, we've obsessed for 15 or 20 years for a whole generation over efficiency and in the process decimated all of these functional ways of dealing with each other, dealing with the marketplace, dealing with business building that are theoretically are accused of as being inefficient, but are incredibly important for building trust and building long-term resiliency in your business, specifically if knowledge, advice, expertise is somewhere in that system. So I want you to make note of in the comments in the chat where you're seeing system one and system two start to pull away at the threads of your business. Because I'm sure that it is. I'm sure you're feeling it, I'm sure you're seeing it. Some of you will feel the impulse to defend the system. Yeah, but this is working for me on social, or I'm having this cool experience building out this AI and all of that. This is not about independent, uh isolated use cases of particular software. This is about the functional dependencies of a system. And so we want you to think about how all of those dependencies are affecting you, because that is the that is the soup that we're all swimming in, right? Probably nobody on this call is gonna go full analog and just, you know, as Jonathan Stark said to me recently, what are we gonna do? Just go door to door, right? We're not gonna go door to door in most cases. We're not gonna put flyers under people's windshields in parking lots. So we have to understand the rules of the game as it's being offered to us and then build in a way that makes those rules, those particularly destructive rules, less effective on us so that we can build businesses that are resilient over long periods of time. Um, we want to look at this again through this question of trust issues. What you see here on the graph is a 40-year trust fall. Um, so this is trust in global institutions. I won't go deep into this slide, but we are we are on a 40-year cyclical decline in trust across all institutions. And that includes you. Most of the time we talk to founders and they're like, well, but I'm trustworthy. Well, it doesn't matter. I I believe you. I believe that you are doing things to try and be trustworthy. If if the breakdown is systemic, it doesn't matter whether you feel trustworthy or your intentions are good or all those kinds of things. It's literally the ways in which you participate in the system around you, how you play the game that determines what happens, not your intentions. So, because of that, we're gonna pause here for a second and we're gonna invite you to become a student of your context. Now, we talked a little bit about how you're noticing how these systems are impacting you. We're gonna go a step farther, right? And this really gets us into where you have agency and where you have impact on the decisions that you're making, what's happening to your business. I want you to think about and make note of how are you participating in these failing systems? So these are some examples. These six things are not universal, but these are some examples in which you are actively building dependency on broken systems in your business or in your idea of a business if you're thinking about launching. So one is algorithmic reach. If if in any way your success is dependent on algorithmic reach working for you, that's SEO, that's LinkedIn, that's anything where you're kind of trying to get the algorithm to do. It's bidding for you, then you have to notice that you are building dependency on algorithmic reach. Okay. The second thing, where are you obsessed or focused or overly focused on what I call frictionless stranger contact? In the old digital marketing language, that was called tofu, top of the funnel, right? It's frictionless stranger contact. This idea that you should be doing something that the entire universe can access for free and without any friction to get to you. And what I want you to realize is that frictionless stranger contact, your ability to touch anybody at any time without any friction between you whatsoever is number one, a complete innovation of human experience in the last 20 years. Prior to the explosion of the social web, it was inconceivable that you would imagine that someone would have frictionless contact with the entire stranger general public as a function of building their business. Just what you wouldn't even imagine it. The closest you could get to that is mass media advertising. And that was never considered to be contact. This idea that digital, this invention, this imagination that digital offered that said, not only can you, but you should and you must have frictionless contact with the general public is a complete invention. And what we're seeing now in some of this social media mental health problems, AI, cognitive decline, digital psychosis, all of these things that have been actively studied by psychologists and neurologists, what we're seeing now is that frictionless stranger contact and the way in which it's delivered to us is denigrating to social structures, it's denigrating to our own internal psyches, and it harms your ability to build a business. So you're going to pay attention to the way that you're obsessed with that. Think about autonomous CX. Again, we like automation where it's helpful, where it makes things easier for people. But if what you're building is dependent on a house of cards of autonomous CX, this leads to this click, leads to this click, these to this click, these to this click, these to this click, all of that autonomous CX that where it's your customer interacting with machines instead of interacting with you gives you dependency on these failing systems. Coming out of the digital issues, hourly or pseudo-hourly pricing. So these are more uh old failing systems. Hourly has, you know, thanks to Jonathan Stark's work and others, speaking of Jonathan, um, has really started to fade into the background. A lot of people have realized, hey, that's not going to be helpful to me. But a lot of you are doing pseudo-hourly. You're building scopes and you're figuring out the price based on how many hours it's going to take you. Or you're doing what now what is now called fractional, which used to just be called freelancing. Um, fractional as a code name for freelancing, where what you're building is based on a certain number of hours for client A and a certain number of hours for client B and a certain number of hours for client C, assuming that your boss, the CEO that hired you, is going to somehow be able to fractionalize their needs into those hours that you've allocated. Um they're not going to be able to, and they they aren't able to. And so essentially what you've done is tripled your work and probably not tripled your income. So hourly, pseudo-hourly pricing, any kind of AI effecation where you're giving people digital avatars of your own reality, that includes what we're seeing a lot of in the knowledge space, which I think is incredibly dangerous, is people who have brilliant insights and have had brilliant insights over the years, feeding all of those insights into a machine and saying, hey, don't talk to me, talk to this machine, talk to AI Jeff, talk to AI Dave. Um, this is really, really dangerous and invites your customers and your prospects to break with reality, to start to build connection and even affection for a machine that is a fake of the real thing. This is this is not stuff we should be celebrating. I just can be really straightforward with you. This is harmful to people's ability to build social attachment. And attachment is the driving system of how we buy build and buy. Attachment is, I'll say that again, attachment is the driving system for how we build and buy. So you want buyers to attach to you, not to a fake you. You want buyers to attach to your team, not a chatbot version of your team. Now, this is not to say that there are zero applications for chatbots. But if your business is dependent on this, then it raises real questions. And the one that probably scares knowledge workers the most, as I'm talking to you guys out in the field, is this I've been here before, buy from me. This is how a lot of people who had successive VP businesses or successful VP careers, successful in-house careers go, hey, I could just do this for lots of people. It's the thing that woke me up one day to get out of corporate life, is I could do this for a lot of people. You should buy from me all the smarts that I had when I was on the inside. And the reality is that line of thinking may be a reasonable starting block for how you decide to get out of corporate life and into the real work of growing a business, but is not reliable for actually growing that business. You can have it as a way to drive your own motivation, but it that is as far as it is useful to you. So if you're out there in the world talking to people and your primary value proposition is, I did this in a corporate seat, you should let me do this in your business. You are inherently going to build dependencies on things that over time very quickly don't apply because that corporate environment, it's based on a lot of assumptions that don't work anymore. The bulk of what I did in my corporate work 10 years ago, now the person I became in that and the capacity that it built in me is very useful to me. But replicating that work today with my clients today would be incredibly foolish. I steal tiny bits of it. I use it as, hey, I learned it in this context. Now I have to reinvent it for a different context, or I have to do something entirely different because I now the rules have changed. So I became better because I went through those things, but the tooling, the behaviors, the things that I did in that corporate life are stuck in a context that is gone. And so we have to really, as knowledge and advice and wisdom sellers, have to start to learn how to move into a different context and sell in that way. So I want you to tell us in the chat if you're here on the live call or again, shoot us an email at hello at culturecraft.com. How are you participating in these six things? And what does that make you think? Where does it make you feel? What questions does it raise about being a part of those environments? All right, we're gonna get to the seven foundations here, and this is really the meat of the call. As we promised you, if real founders aren't gonna gamble, if real founders aren't gonna pull the slot machine on these broken systems, they have to build seven different foundations. And I'll tell you from the outset, these seven foundations we're gonna hit obviously at a high level today. We've got about 10 or 15 or 20 minutes to do so. But once we hit them at the high level today and we really give you some very intense and actionable things to do with each one of them, many of you are gonna be like, I need to do worker on this. I need to dig in on this. And we are starting our next cohort in the wisdom school starting in October. So in just two short weeks, to teach you and build with you, alongside you in one-on-one coaching and cohort-level coaching live environments, how to build these seven foundations for your unique context. Right. So, as you're thinking about these, um, we're gonna give you the tools on this call to do that, but realize it's gonna draw you in to wanting to do more and better work. And we're gonna give you some ways to do that here at the end of the call today. So the first is owner mindset. And man, I hated writing this down when I was working through this and designing this work because as soon as I wrote down mindset, I'm like, God, this is what we need. Another bullshit guru guy talking about mindset. This is not what we need. But the reality is you have a map of the world, and you have a map of the world about what work should feel like, leading things should feel like, business should feel like. And for almost everyone, that sensation of what it should feel like came from being an employee. Some of you have been running your own thing for two decades and you still have an employee mindset. You're like, hey, I just got to do what my client asks. I got to figure out what they need and give it to them. Right? You're still in the, they're the boss, I'm the employee, we just happen to have a 1099 contract between us instead of a W-2 contract. And if you're doing the very same kind of thinking that you did as an employee as you do as an owner, and the only difference is the style of contract that stands between you and the person telling you what to do, you've lost. Because you've lost benefits, you've lost 401k, you've lost health insurance, you've lost uh you've gained a bunch of taxes, and you haven't gained what the most important thing you've gained, which is the ability to own, manage, and control an asset, which is the business that you're building. That requires a fundamental shift. And that fundamental shift, I find, is missing in many, many, many, many founders. And that can happen all the way up to building 10, 15, and 20 person teams because you're still missing that clear conviction and that behavioral pattern that says, my number one job is to build this thing in a way that serves all of its constituents, including me. So when you're an employee, you have one constituent, your boss. And you keep that boss happy, and that boss gives you money. And one of the things that we transition into ownership life is we just swap out who the boss is. The boss is no longer my employer, the boss is my client. And that shift from who keeping the same mentality, but who the boss is, keeps you from actually owning an asset. You don't own an asset. You have a government skin called an LLC or an S-corp around an employee-level relationship. So you have taken on a ton of risk, legal risk, and gotten nothing from it. So your first move, and the thing that really takes a handful of laps to move through to actually solve for, is you have to fire the employee within. That employee mindset that says, I'm here to serve the boss. Well, you're the boss. And what what what owners have to do is to manage all five core constituents. So that's capital, which is you, capital ownership. That's the team, which is you wearing a different hat, plus some other people. That is the existing customer base, is constituent number three. That's your ideal targeted focused future customer base, and then it is your partners and your network, the fifth constituent. So number one, capital. Number two, the employees and team. Number three, the current customer or client base. Number four, your prospective ideal targeted focused customer or client base, which let's just be very honest, is very different from number three. And number five, your partnership and support network and shared business network. You have to build something. You're always negotiating something between those five groups. And an owner mindset says, I am number one responsible, the thing I am responsible for more than anything is the negotiation of what this thing becomes in light of those five constituents. Because all of them are gonna yank on it. And they're gonna yank on it in certain ways. The existing customers are gonna yank on it in one way, the partners are gonna yank on it in a different way. The target future customers, the number two that we're gonna talk about, they're gonna yank on it in a particular way. The employees are gonna let yank on it in a particular way. And in an incredible experience of schizophrenia, you as the owner and you as the highest paid employee are gonna want different things from it. And so if you as the owner are wearing your employee a hat all the time, you're gonna yank your business into employee thinking, and your thinking as a capital owner of it gets sacrificed. And there's a lot of rhetoric in the public about capital and and and the and the negative consequence of capital and you know everything being shareholder focused. And I endorse all of that. Read Eric Reese's book, it's an excellent book. But the reality is in a privately held business, you are the capital and you have to learn to think like capital. You have to learn to think like a person who's looking for risk-adjusted return. Because you are now all the risk. You have taken on all the risk as the owner. And if you can't think about risk-adjusted return, these other constituents are going to yank you and pull the venture, this negotiated thing, into their thinking. So, what I want you to look at right now is if you had to be really honest today, of the five constituents, capital, employee team, current clients or customers, future ideal client or customers, or the partnership network, which of your five constituents are running the business? Who's winning that negotiation? And whoever is winning, you decided that they should win because you're the owner, all right? And the beauty of what Eric Reese and Incorruptible and others are talking about doing is it's not about making capital the only decider. That we don't want that either. But the problem with small businesses is you've taken capital as a decider out of the equation altogether. Often as a feeling of like it's some sort of a moral high ground because there's some baggage around money. But you have to think like a person who thinks in terms of risk-adjusted return. All right. So in your business, who's winning that negotiation? All right, we're gonna move to number two, design a customer. People look at designing a customer like it's a marketing game. Oh, let's put together some avatars, let's put together some demos, let's make, let's give them funny names, let's, you know, like, and all of those things as independent tools can be perfectly fine and useful. But at the at it at its most strategic and effective level, at the thing that you need to run a knowledge-based business with real wisdom and discipline, is you need that discipline to speak to and commit to a very particular psychographic customer, a very particular decision engine, that the person who your business is built for thinks a certain way, believes a set certain set of things, acts in repeatable patterns, and makes certain decisions. And what I find with entrepreneurial founders over and over and over again, I literally had this conversation yesterday with a really brilliant entrepreneurial founder, is that eventually, and sometimes from the jump, go to, yeah, but think about all the other people that this thing I'm building could work for. It could work for these people, it could work for these people, it could work for these people. Well, of course it could, because knowledge business is built on universal, good knowledge business is built on universal truths applied in a particular context. And good strategic leaders know how to take universal truths and move them into different contexts. So literally, you are building something that by definition, if run correctly, could work in a ton of different contexts with a ton of different customers. So you built this thing for five million dollar SaaS founders who've gotten past the profitability hump but now don't know what the heck to do and are burning money on advertising. You built it for them, but then you're laying in bed on a Saturday night and you think, God, you know what? This could work for grocers, private grocers who are trying to compete with big grocery chains. Well, you're, you know what? You're right. It probably could. Do you want to negotiate simultaneously with private grocers and with $3 million SaaS founders? Do you want to build a business that has to have a partnership network for both of those groups, have a dis have decision pathways and customer experiences that work for both of those groups? Because every time you fractionalize and you break apart your customer design and say, we could work for these people, we could work for these people, we could work for these people. This guy breathed the mirror and he walks through the door and he's close enough. Every time you do that, you make your business more and more overhead heavy and difficult to manage, and you break its resiliency. So designing a customer and the process by which you design a customer, and we're actually gonna do this uh here in a couple of weeks on the podcast. We're gonna do this with a founder in the knowledge business. Some of you know Brad. He is gonna do his customer design process with me. I'm gonna lead him through his customer design process live on the pod. So you're gonna be able to see this in real time. So that's coming soon to Dam's Given. Make sure you're subscribed there where it shows up. But you got to design for a particular customer. Once you have that customer and you know how they think and you know how they make decisions, and you're gonna have the discipline to stay committed to them. Not what if this, oh, this person's interesting. Oh, they might want this. Oh, what if this might, right? You're gonna stay disciplined to that particular customer. Then you have the capacity and the ability to do number three. In the absence of a relationship, deep relationship with a very particular type of customer, you cannot do number three, which is around the block offer. Around the block offer comes from the language of restaurants. And if you know anything about restaurants, you know that the rule of restaurants is you need one great dish. Everybody comes here for the fried chicken. There's nine other things on the menu, but everybody comes here for the fried chicken. And what I find most knowledge work businesses struggle with is they don't know what their fried chicken is, or they don't know what their hamburger is. When you go through our Revenue Foundation's training at the knowledge school, or excuse me, at the wisdom school, what you'll find is we teach you how to find that hamburger, that around-the-block hamburger. And to do that, you have to kill all your other ideas, or a lot of them. If your website has, you could work with us on this, you could work with us on this, you could work with us on this, or more importantly, when someone raises their hand and says, How can can you help me? I've heard you're good. This person referred me to you. I heard you can be helpful, or somebody from your network, because you're just starting your business, says, Hey, well, how can you help a guy like me? You go, well, we could do this, or we could do this, or we could do this, or we could do this. All of a sudden, you've opened up that horrific cheesecake factory menu menu in front of them. And you're and where there's you know fajitas next to chicken alfredo, next to Thai basil salad, next to seven different ice creams and 27 different cheesecakes, and it's 20,000 calories of overwhelm, right? And the way most people show up and talk about their business is 20,000 calories of overwhelm because you're overwhelmed. You haven't done the work to think about your owner mindset. And an owner who's trying to think about risk-adjusted return on investment is not gonna invest in a Cheesecake Factory menu of options. They're gonna find out exactly what their perfect customer wants and serve that over and over and over again. One of the things I teach people is the only way to have a great business, and you have to figure this out in your context, but the only way to have a great business, I mean those of you watching, make eye contact with me, is to build a thing where you can do the exact same thing 10 times in a row and be bored doing. Great businesses, particularly knowledge businesses, have an element of boredom. There's fun parts, there's creative parts, there's energetic things all around happening in the business. But the core engine of the business, the thing that you do that actually pays you and pays everybody else, should be slightly boring and slightly repeatable. And the energy comes from the people or the unique context or whatever it is. So we got to build your around-the-block offer and kill all of your other escape hatches from that around-the-block offer. That gets us to foundation number four, which is pricing and winning. That builds you a positioning and a revenue model that protects trust. So once we know we're building for this person who decides things in this way with this kind of uh wants and needs and expectations at this point in their maturity as a buyer, as we're building for that person, and as we design the perfect hamburger for that person that they're gonna want to buy over and over and over again and say, hey, you need to go buy this hamburger, hey, you need to go buy this hamburger, hey, you need to go buy this hamburger. Once we've done that, and again, knowledge folks, you guys are just terrified of productizing. I've worked a lot with, for example, people in the wealth management business and wealth management business, like, no, we sell experience, and we're what we're really selling is care. No, you need to productize this. People need to know what they're buying. What are they getting? What's included, what's not included. Oh, well, just call us. We're available, right? That's silliness. You gotta productize. And then you can transparently price and position that offer in the marketplace competitively, so that you win and your customer wins. Once you can, once you have that hamburger, you can then price it appropriately and you can position it in the marketplace appropriately so that people can recognize it and go, oh, of all the hamburgers in the world, if you want this kind of hamburger, you should go see Dan. He is the king of that hamburger. And it is, and there's a fence around it. And people who are looking for a different kind of hamburger, they don't want to come to you. People who are looking for chili cheese fries, they don't want to come to you, right? So they can get better chili cheese fries somewhere else. And they know how to self-select out because you've priced and positioned in a way that helps them go away. That's foundation number four, pricing, positioning, pricing and winning, which is a function of positioning. Now we've got the makings of a how to make a market and how to engage a market. We have a customer, we have an offer, we have the field in which that offer is going to work. We have an owner who's gonna say, I'm gonna manage all of this. I'm gonna manage the customer and the offer and the field on which that plays. Now you have to define an operating model. And for knowledge workers, this is where it gets real messy because you often you're a solo or you're a small and you are doing a lot of the delivery. You are doing a lot of the customer FaceTime. You are the one sitting in front of the person that you're giving advice. Price to. And so now you play two roles. You've got two hats. You are the owner and capital, and you are also the most expensive employee. And so you have to build an operating model where the most expensive employee is only being deployed for what that employee can do best. This is where I have to challenge the solo model a little bit. We got to challenge the solo model a little bit because the solo model implies that you need zero help. If you just do it right and you get the right technology and you get the right things, you got the right software, you get the right automations, you don't need anything. And the problem with that is then your most expensive employee, the person who should only be doing things that start $250 or $300 or $400 an hour work, that person is out there doing $30 an hour work and $20 an hour work. Now you can do that through VAs, through 1099 teams, through bringing in agencies, through bringing support people, to rafting together other people who do different things but do it in a similar way that you. There's a lot of ways to solve for this and still have the extent existential experience of being solo. You don't have to take on employees. There are a lot of ways to do this. But you have to build an operating model that protects the time and attention of your most expensive employee and then correctly allocates power outside of that. You have to have a power allocation model. Who gets power for this part of the business? Who gets power for this part of the business? Because if all it is is a bunch of people waiting for you to tell them what to do, that's not an operating model. That's a bottleneck. You're not building to operate, you're building to create challenges that keep the business from functioning. So once you decide what the most expensive employee, aka you, should be spending their time on, then you can decide how to manage and operate the power around them and allocate power and accountability around them through your operating model. Then we actually get to go sell and we get to build a relational go-to market. And this is where we really defy what I call the frictionless surface. And the frictionless surface is this idea that if we did it right, there's this place where nobody has to do anything hard to connect with anybody and they'll still buy stuff. They don't have to talk to anybody, they don't have to touch anybody, nobody has to answer their questions. They can talk to chatbots and FAQs and blah, blah, blah, blah. And there is absolutely a frictionless buying experience. And here's what we know after 20 years of buying into the frictionless experience is that human, the human spirit, the human intent, the human drive, the hope and the wish to have a good life and buy things that help me have a good life, that that is dependent on friction. You cannot remove all the inefficiencies because then what you have is a slipstream of distrust. You have a slippery, oily plastic system that everybody just slides around in and never has the friction of going, oh, this matters to me. I'm going to give attention to this. And by way of giving attention, I can make attachment to this thing that I might eventually buy or this person I might eventually buy from. So you have, if you want to sell knowledge, wisdom, expertise, advice, creative, you have to build the right structure of friction into your go-to market, what we call a relational go-to market, that you build a way of going to market that actually makes people talk to people. You have to talk to people. You have to go out in there and have conversations with your network and say, this is what I'm building. This is who it's for. Who should I be talking to next? We call this a notice meeting. We have great better training on this on a notice meeting in almost all of our wisdom school uh groups. But we talk about notice meetings, this beautiful moment where you show up and you take in and you give your attention. You defy rule number one of the book, or you follow rule number one of the book that no one's paying attention, you pay attention, and you give your attention, and that opens up space between you and a person. And then that space allows another avenue for your business to grow through, a piece of a relational network. Because networks exist and funnels do not. Funnels are things that were invented so people could sell HubSpot. Networks are real. Networks are how people have connected to people for millennia. And you can learn the skill of how to do that without feeling like a dirty seller. I don't want to feel like I'm constantly networking. Don't network, don't do sales in the way that you're imagining, in the way that you've demonized in your head. But have a relational way that your business goes out into the world because it's the only way for it to be resilient and it's the only way for it to be trustworthy. As you're doing one through six, and possibly even as you're sitting listening to this and interacting with this class today, you're going, crap, you're feeling your own capacity limitations. I don't know if I can do that. I don't know if I can do that. I've never done that before. That feels weird or difficult or strange to me. All of those sensations, even the like tension in your chest or your stomach's churning, or you're like, hey, I gotta get off this call. Maybe you're having that extreme reaction. All of that is just some very basic capacity limitations. And there's nothing wrong with having a capacity limitation. In fact, there's everything good about having a capacity limitation. You have to grow your business in the way that is the right amount of stretch for your current stage and your current leadership and your current way of being in the world. If you try to go beyond that, you're gonna burn yourself out. And I'll tell you something founder burnout is worse than VP. You thought it was bad being a VP in somebody else's business and burnt out while they wrote you $300,000 checks. It is way worse being burnt out, not knowing where your next lead is gonna come from, and being overwhelmed, doing stuff that you don't have the capacity to do. So you need an environment, whether that's working with us and our training programs and our community of other people who are going through the same thing or other networks that are doing similar things. You need an environment that's gonna help you build that wisdom capacity around what's mine? What's mine for right now, what's mine next, what's mine after that, what's mine for right now, what do I need to push two to three years from now? Give you another quick preview for months, um, free public classroom. We're doing how to have a how to have the best year ever. And it's really a simplified, concise way to think about strategic planning through the lens of capacity. Every business can only do one or two really good motions in a year. Unless you're a hundred million dollar business and you got a bunch of things going on in different divisions and all that kind of stuff. But if you're a 50 million and below business, you probably have capacity to do one or two big motions next year. And your challenge now, between now and Christmas, is how do you decide intelligently with awareness of capacity of what your one or two big motions for the next year should be? We're gonna talk about that in next month's uh free classroom. So make sure you're subscribed to our uh the newsletter and all of that so you get to get all that information. Please don't depend on LinkedIn to get this information. All of you know I'm on my way off of LinkedIn. I'm not gonna be shipping information that way anymore because I think they're an extractive monster. So please make sure you're subscribed wherever you need to be, which is the easiest is damsgave it.com to get that information. All right. Before we move into the question and answer, I want you to write down which of the seven is crucial for you in the next 12 months. You may think, well, all of them, but the one that's like really scratching, really scratching at your intellect, the one that's really turning your gut into a knot. You go, yeah, I this is the one. If you're here on the call live and you're feeling brave, stick it in the chat. If you're feeling really, really brave, send me an email. Anything hello at culturecraft.com gets to me. So send me an email and say, Nick, foundation four, it's so important. It's so important for me. I don't know how to do it. I've done it wrong in the past. I need more help with this. This is how you showing that vulnerability, saying, I need help, is how you enter into the work of expanding your capacity. You have to own the problem, and then we find you the right support systems and the right ideas and the right tools to then move into the solution. So we need to really mentally commit to what you think that first one is. And again, if you want to be really, really brave, you can write it to me uh in an email or you can write it in the chat. All of this we evaluate just for a quick visual here through our trustmade systems. When you're working with us, we take your venture and we when we evaluate it through these systems. You see the same color coding here, this is in the system's names, community point, point of view, org design, culture, et cetera. And every venture, we look at this and say, where's the where is the stasis? Where's the growth? Where's where is it overbuilt? Where is it underbuilt? Where's their flow? Where's their resistance against these six systems? And anytime you work with Culture Craft and our work here, we're we're either directly or indirectly helping you move through these six trust factors to actually build expansion in your business and think through how these things apply to you. Okay, really quick here. I'm gonna talk about your next move and then we're gonna move into the QA. Your next move, if you're like, hey, I need to work on this, is to be with us at Venture Stock. So Venture Stock is our build the seven foundations foundry. You may not be new, but you may have the sense of I basically have to treat this thing as new. I need to relook at the foundations. I've not gotten to that $1 million, $3 million threshold I want to get to. And if you're in that place, Venture Stock is for you. If you're a $10 million business and you have a bunch of employees and a bunch of other things, venture stock's probably not the right place. Well, we have other things we can work with you on and you can message me about that or have a call about that. But if you're in that sub three million or you're thinking of launching going into next year, and you you're looking at those seven factors, you go, I that I I can't say yes to these. I don't know how to do these. I'm behind on these, or I these these are going to challenge me, or you're feeling that capacity strain. I really want to see you at Venture Stock before it fills up. Um we've got $1,000 off prior to September 28th. So if you be in the next six days, if you're listening to this live or anytime before next Monday, you have $1,000 off prior to September 28th. And you can get all the information about what it is and what's included, including the one-on-one coaching, including the capacity work with our partners at Rebellion Collective at culturecraft.com slash venture stock. If you're listening to all this and you're like, I don't even, I don't, I don't know what to do with any of this. I just need to think out loud, then just talk to me. This is my direct book of call. It will literally put you into my calendar. Just talk to me. Let's just have a chat. Let's see what applies to you, what doesn't apply to you. I know it can feel scary and you don't want to get sold to and all that kind of stuff. I know how all of our brains have been warped by the internet. But if you can sliver out that modicum of trust and go, I think maybe this guy Nick could be on my side, then just let's have a chat about it and we'll see what we can bring to the table to support you in the process.