Episode 214 – Sean Campbell

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[00:00:00] Heroes are an inspiring group of people. Every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes, you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell from the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers and the firefighters who risk their safety to ensure ours.

[00:00:18] Every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there is one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what? I can fix that, I can help people. I can make a difference.

[00:00:31] Then they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service, some go on to change the world. Others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to The Hero Show. Join us, as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest HEROpreneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence.

[00:00:47] So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews. And we are on in 3…2…1…

[00:00:56] Hello, and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I have live on the line. Sean Campbell. Sean, are you there?

[00:01:03] Yeah, I’m here. Thanks. For having me on.

[00:01:05] Awesome. Glad to have you here. I know we were just chatting before you got on here. You are in Oregon. Is that right?

[00:01:10] Yeah, exactly. We were talking about how I’d like to be you and travel the country in an RV and whatever rig you’ve got, you know, we do a ton of camping and getting out in Oregon is an easy place to camp.

[00:01:23] I think you could spend your whole life going to campgrounds here and you still wouldn’t see everything. And there’s places here where you, I mean, it’s hard pressed today to find a place where you can actually tell yourself. I wonder if someone actually stood here and not have cell coverage at the same time.

[00:01:41] And that’s a good thing for my standpoint. And Oregon has a number of those places. So that’s a good deal.

[00:01:47] Yeah. And for the people who are watching our show, who has been following along with my wife. We’re back in Florida. We’ve officially seen all four over 48 state in our last five years of travel.

[00:01:58] So that’s pretty cool. Which is I think a good goal. I guess my three year old has seen all 48 states in a contiguous us. Which is impressive, cuz I didn’t get to do that until I was 35 or six or whatever.

[00:02:13] Yeah, no, that’s a good deal. That’s super good deal.

[00:02:16] Yeah. So what I wanna do before we get too far is just do a brief introduction for you.

[00:02:20] So you’re the CEO of Cascade Insights, which is a market research firm. And then you guys do marketing work based on that market research. So what I wanna just start the interview off with is what is it that you are known for? What’s your business? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

[00:02:35] We work with technology companies, but we only work with technology companies that have a business to business focus.

[00:02:41] So for example, you know, we don’t work with Samsung’s dishwasher division. We don’t work with the Xbox team, even though that would be cool, but we do work with Microsoft because they have a bunch of business to business services. You know, they sell office and windows and cloud services to a variety of businesses.

[00:02:56] And it’s all tech in the sense of the way most people think of that, like, which is software cloud hardware, you know, there’s plenty of tech, that’s rockets and aerospace and all kinds of things like that, but that’s not us. And that’s our core market and we’ve been doing that for about.

[00:03:12] Well, I’ve been doing that myself and my business partner. We’ve been working with that market for over 20 years, but this company has been in place since 2006, cuz this is my second company. And we do a lot of market research work for those companies, you know, answering questions about their market and their customers and their prospects and their competitors. And that’s, that’s the lane we’re in.

[00:03:34] So how is the market research make a difference for a big company like Microsoft versus a small company. Like, you know, we run a technology company that works in the podcast space.

[00:03:49] Well, yeah. It’s a good question. It’s different. In a few ways, I mean, one, I tell people all the time, like if you’re small market research is. You know, most small business owners are probably better to drive off their intuition, their network and doing some kind of lightweight versions of research themselves. I mean, if you’re a very small business, you can call lost customers and figure out why they didn’t work with you or they changed providers, you can, you know, do some web based research on competition.

[00:04:21] You can even set up a program to figure out why your current customers are staying with you or leaving. I mean, you can do all that kind of work. But underneath the covers though, I think the fundamental problems are still the same. You know, it’s very hard to get outside of yourself and see what’s wrong with your business.

[00:04:38] And on top of that, it’s very hard at times to get an external party to be as frank with you as they might be with a third party. That’s even more so a problem with a small business. I mean, large businesses, people are completely happy to say best buy sucks. You know, Microsoft didn’t treat me well. You know what I mean?

[00:04:55] Google’s awesome. I love Apple, but I hate this about Apple, but you know, if you’re a small to medium sized business and you’re kind of just talking to people that are Friendly, it can be very hard to get out of them, you know, how you should improve in a meaningful way. So I think it’s kind of different things for each side.

[00:05:14] You know, the big guys, they hear the complaints, but maybe they need better strategies and better tactics that the research can help them kind of play out and on the small side, you know, maybe you don’t have the budget for the research, but you really have to be careful that you’re not hearing a bias perspective.

[00:05:29] And you’re digging into kind of the hard things you need to learn. So different side.

[00:05:35] How does what you do ROI for a company?

[00:05:39] I think that’s pretty easy. I mean, they generally walk away from a project with us with better sales, tactics, and strategies, better marketing tactics and strategies for a better plan for the product or service they have.

[00:05:52] And at the end of the day, all of that is gonna generate more revenue. So that’s the outcome really. You know, we kind of joke around here that we deliver bad news to good people. It’s actually our somewhat informal motto so much so we just put a video up on our YouTube channel about it, like about a week or two ago that we had a little fun with because it’s really what we think of ourselves as doing.

[00:06:12] Like we need to deliver news about what you need to fix and you come to us because you’re courageous enough to recognize that something might be wrong and you want to get an external perspective that’s independent. And then our job, because I think you’re a good person if you do that, cuz you kind of recognize the problem and faced up to it and you wanna make a change. That’s a good thing.

[00:06:37] Our job then is to show you how to make that change. And that’s what we do. So we don’t stop at just basically saying, oh, the market thinks this. We try to take that another step and get into like how you should actually act based on the information and what you need to do.

[00:06:51] And that’s really where the value is because if they take those steps and they’re the right steps to do, they’re gonna be a better business in the end.

[00:06:57] Yeah, absolutely. And I know probably one of the biggest complaints I see with businesses that sort of make that transition from small to like successful and starting to get into that big business category is they don’t know how to listen to their customers once they get bigger.

[00:07:12] Yeah. Well, one quick thing. I mean, a lot of that comes from the myopia of the senior leadership team, right? I mean there was a book I read once that has always stayed with me on this point. It’s called Stall Points. The book should get a lot more publicity than it did.

[00:07:30] It’s a really, really stellar book based on some really fantastic research about when companies reach kind of their last period of superior growth. They have a much more mathematical way of describing it that I won’t spend time getting into now just for the sake of time. But think of it that way, like companies kind of arced to its greatest point of growth.

[00:07:50] And ever after that point, they’re not growing quite as fast or maybe they’re massively shrinking. And one of the pieces that in the book that always stays out to me of the reasons why companies stall out is that when you look around the company, the senior leadership team came from the business that was the company’s initial business.

[00:08:12] So if you were to look at a Microsoft, they all came from windows, or if you looked at Apple, they all came from Mac OS right. And so it creates this like myopia after a while of, well, we are awesome, you know, it’s like the Lego thing, you know, everything is awesome. Right. And they just cannot actually see the complaints or they dismiss the complaints.

[00:08:34] And it’s even doubly worse when they try to do new products because they kind of believe in the halo effect of what they used to do and how it applies to the new thing. And sometimes all that’s true. I mean, you can go from building one great product to another great product to another, but more often than not, as you change market segments and customer types, there are things now that you don’t know, right?

[00:08:55] Yeah.

[00:08:56] That were true about your original customer base, but aren’t now, and you’re mapping the old world to the new and I just think about that all the time. Last thing on it, when I taught an MBA program for a few years which I’d love to get back to, I just stopped cuz my kids were grown and I wanted to spend time with them.

[00:09:11] I went through that book with the students and an exercise I would do is I’d give them publicly traded companies. And I’d say, just go look at everybody on the leadership team and figure out what percentage of them came from the first product group, the first product, the company ever built that these individuals got their start in that team.

[00:09:26] It’s always the same 70, 80, 90% of the leadership team came from that group. Unless the company had gone through a major change, like the equivalent of jobs leaving Apple. Right? And then there would be a shake up and then all of a sudden things would be different, but it’s just the way it works.

[00:09:43] Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense too. And the company as it’s growing. The leadership team is taking it through that first phase. And then they shift into that next phase of growth. Like after that, what did you call it? That sort of like the apex level of growth. It’s a very different set of challenges there too.

[00:09:59] And so like everything that they did to build, this is not the same skillset they need to build in the next sort of phase of their business growth.

[00:10:06] Right. And you can leverage the first into the second. I mean, you can, people do that all the time. You know, Windows began office and it worked really well, but they’re very different, you know, user bases and, that’s true of everything.

[00:10:19] I mean, so, I think it’s a completely viable thing to expand the business and do so in a meaningful way, you just have to be careful where you’re getting your inputs from.

[00:10:28] Yeah, absolutely. So my next question for you is about your origin story. How’d you get into this, right? Every good comic book hero has an origin story.

[00:10:35] It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today. So we wanna hear that story. Were you born a hero or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you wanna get into market research? Or did you start in a job and eventually move to become an entrepreneur and create this company here as a captivate?

[00:10:49] I wanted to be a college professor. That was my goal. I didn’t have any desire to do business. I also didn’t have any desire to do sales and I’m basically have been for years like the chief sales and marketing and operations, legal guy, contracts guy, et cetera, around here. And on top of that I do a lot of writing now and I think my high school English teachers are laughing.

[00:11:11] If they were listening to this, they’re like, you have to be kidding me like that kid could talk, but he couldn’t write a coherent sentence if he tried. And now I lead a marketing team that one of their main strengths is they write. And I’m not saying I’m a better writer than the team. The team’s a better writer than me, but like so I’m in a role that no, I didn’t think I was gonna end up here.

[00:11:29] I thought the kids that went to business school classes at eight o’clock in the morning on the college campuses were, well, I mean, not dumb, but I thought it was lame. I was a comms major. I was liberal arts and history and you know, our classes started at 11 and maybe at six at night, you know, and that was like the best thing ever.

[00:11:44] So and my bachelor’s degree was radio and television production. And my master’s degree was political rhetoric and instructional design. So I had no idea I would end up here. I mean, as I look back. I don’t think of myself as a hero, but I get where we’re going, like in that sense.

[00:12:02] But I mean, if I was to, is there a thread through the origin story that I can see and stick with and go, oh, I get it now. You know, like with the benefit of hindsight, why would I end up over here? Yeah, I get it, but no, absolutely no plans I’m going to do it. So depending how far back you wanna go back.

[00:12:23]How did you go from liberal arts major to running a market research company?

[00:12:29] Well a, a couple things. So and by the way, the professor thing was there for a long time. I mean, when I was in second grade, my mother used to tell me a story about Father Boyvin because I grew up Catholic and Father Boyvin looked at me.

[00:12:41] And his favorite phrase for me was the little professor, not because I was like egotistical or had a big brain or anything like that. It was just, he could tell, I like to learn and I like to talk about learning and I would just be like spouting off of random facts here and there I guess. And so he just called me the little professor, which I never even knew that was my nickname till like years later from him.

[00:12:59] And so I was on that track. And then I met a girl and it’s not the girl’s fault. I didn’t become a professor, but I said, you know, okay, I could be a starving PhD student in Waterloo, Iowa. And my wife to this day always says, I would’ve followed you to Waterloo wistfully. But I said, you know, let me see what else I can do.

[00:13:17] I still would like to do a PhD someday at that time, but you know, what else can I do? And I said, well, I know a lot about computers relative to somebody who doesn’t have a degree in it. Cuz I was always thinking around in them in my spare time. And in circa late nineties, there was a whole industry around training people, how to use office and windows and basic productivity apps.

[00:13:38] And graphical user interfaces were new. We were moving from dos to gusion. And so there was just a an army of like training centers. They were called that would like hire people who liked teaching and liked computers. And you would roll into a room and you’d teach, you know, 30 people from the department of immigration and naturalization services.

[00:13:57] That was one class or you’d go teach 20 people from some company how to use CRM software. You teach people how to use Excel or whatever. And I said, oh, that seems interesting. I don’t have to get right into the PhD program. And I was teaching during my master’s program, so I felt comfortable in a classroom environment.

[00:14:14] So I went off and did that. And and so I did that for a while, took a couple jobs like that. And then I ended up at this place called metamore who got sold and bought so many times. I don’t even know what their name is now, but that’s what they were back then. And this guy there, Jerry, probably the best boss I ever had he gives me a shot doing really nerdy, technical training, like databases, networking cybersecurity stuff.

[00:14:38] They didn’t really call it cyber security that time.

[00:14:40] All the hard stuff.

[00:14:41] Right. All the hard stuff. Right. And webpage development. When the web was like basically new and all we had was like the blink tag you know, and every webpage blinked. Never saw the internet circuit, 1998, the internet blinked for about 12 months and then stopped blinking.

[00:14:55] And that’s the way the web worked. And so, he gave me all this hard stuff to go do. And I had to go pass a bunch of certification exams and in a weird way, looking back, it kind of was like professorial. Like I had to study a ton and I had to go pass these big exams and then I’d have to go in and teach.

[00:15:12] And I was getting paid decent money more than I ever would if I was just a PhD candidate. And and it wasn’t the money so much, it just, this track felt interesting. So then I get a job that takes me out to Portland because my father-in-law has said he will build a house at cost for us cuz he built spec houses his whole life, or rather I should say he will build a house of cost for his daughter.

[00:15:32] If we were slave labor on the house, that’s to be clear. So so we end up going to Oregon cuz that’s a pretty good deal. And so after a few years here, we build the house. And we’re still in it. I’m never gonna leave this place cuz we built it with our own hands. Plus it was a pretty good deal.

[00:15:46] We liked the place. And so we’ve been here for 20 plus years and and so then the next big change, which was really the next big kind of archipelago I jumped to was I’m working for the outfit here and I meet two other guys Bob and Scott and we decide we wanna go form our own company being independent trainers.

[00:16:05] So doing really, you know, deep technical training on Microsoft products and some other solution sets and we start a business and initially it’s just three guys kind of sharing a domain and that business eventually becomes a 25 person. That I learned a lot from, because it grew way too fast. And we eventually had to split up that business because we were three young men who were probably not mature enough.

[00:16:32] Let me just leave it at that. I’ll just be completely honest. And we didn’t do anything inappropriate mind you just, we were not mature enough with each other. Like, there’s a lot of intensity in running a business that you have to go through to experience. And so one business partner left then I split up the business with another one.

[00:16:49] Eventually ended up growing my side of the business to about double its size and then selling it. And then oddly enough, getting back together again with one of the business partners from the first company that we really got along really well. The other one and me were a little more oil and water and And that business partner, Scott I has now been a co-owner of cascade ever since 2006.

[00:17:12] And that’s kind of the trajectory that led there. And so, you know, it was in a way, all along the way it was teaching and it was education. And then maybe to put a little cherry on this that we can visit or not, if you want, you know, well, why didn’t I stay teaching? Well, I really love teaching.

[00:17:29] It’s one of the reasons I still get on podcasts. And at the minute I can go back and teach in a collegiate setting again, even if it’s part-time, I’m sure I will. So if anybody’s listening and desperately needs an adjunct, that knows the things I know, just please let me know. Cause I always like teaching, but and I’ve got more time for it now, but I had no idea that owning a business would be just an endless series of problems to solve.

[00:17:58] Not in a bad way, just like challenging intellectual things to go after. And I had no idea that you could just constantly be learning as a result of that. And at the same time, if you had a staff and you were kind of wired right, you set the culture right. Everybody could also be learning, growing, and expanding. And you could be a mentor to a lot of people. It’s not the same as a collegiate setting. It’s not the same as an educational setting. I’m not trying to say it is, there are distinct differences, but I get a lot of juice out of that. I get a lot of juice out of learning and growing and mentoring.

[00:18:37] It scratches that itch to want to teach.

[00:18:39] Yeah. It does it again, not quite the same, which is why I say, I think I’ll end up with some mix of that at some point, you know, when I’m semi-retired or who knows when, but it does. And I think, and also then I ended up doing market research and the reason we ended up with a business focused on market research, that’s kind of a subplot, if you will, you know, to the business ownership.

[00:19:03] And I can talk about that if you want, but that’d be like, the six part TV separate series that is like outside the main story arc, right. You know, like why market research, that’s a separate discussion, but oddly enough, if you just talk about the end, it’s like, well, market research is also a lot of learning and education and research on the market, right.

[00:19:24] I mean, what is it? It’s research. So in a very weird way, I ended up orbiting halfway back to where I wanted to be just in a very different capacity.

[00:19:36] Yeah. And serving a lot of people along the way. So that’s, that’s kinda a cool way to do that.

[00:19:43] Yeah, and I didn’t have any idea this was gonna happen. I could not tell you that, like, there was never a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere that was like, you know, own business, own secondbusiness go. I mean, I know there’s people who do that and I try not to be dismissive of people who do that. And I’m sure you’ve had people on the show who say they wrote something in a book, and it works.

[00:20:00] I mean, you know, what was that movie Will Smith did with the William sisters king Richard, you know, I mean, it can work, right? I mean, you can write a plan down and follow it. Most of the time, those plans don’t look in the end, like the way you think. And so, I’m not one to believe in those super strongly, but I think you have to have focus for what’s just over the horizon, but you go too far over the horizon. I think you’re just guessing at that point.

[00:20:26] My wife and I had a little goal thing we wrote down when we first got married. It was a little after we first got married. It was like 2012. And it said you know, where do you wanna be in five years? And one of the things said, traveling the country with our kids, at the time we didn’t have kids or any ability to travel or any money or anything.

[00:20:44] And then five years later, we moved into an RV and started traveling the country with three kids, which so it does, but it was one of those kind of things that like, we hadn’t focused on it. It was just like in a book somewhere. And we were unpacking all of our stuff, we found it and we were like, oh, look, we hit that goal.

[00:20:59] And of course it doesn’t look anything like what you imagine it’s going to, but you know, one of our goals for a long time has been to travel and that’s what we do. And so like a lot of our decisions are based on, Hey, can we run our business and travel? So, you know, and yours is like, can you run your business and teach

[00:21:14] Right, right. Yeah. If I didn’t have the, I mean, like there are many businesses I think I could never own. And I think there’s certain businesses that I wouldn’t be a good fit for because they wouldn’t have that element of teaching and mentoring and learning. And then I would probably have not ended up here, but yeah, but it’s interesting.

[00:21:36] I mean, like I said, every day I get up and I’m like, oh, a whole bunch of new stuff I get to go figure out, you know? And I’ll be honest. I mean, there are some like any business owner, there are nights where that list wakes you up in the middle of the night and you go crud.

[00:21:51] Okay. I do not have time to solve said list in the next 48 hours. Right. You know, but that’s just part of it. There’s a book I read once called the Hard Things About Hard Things, which is a really good book about entrepreneurship. And I forget what he called it in the book, but he basically said, you know, you haven’t owned a business long enough if it hasn’t woken you up in the middle of the night, at least a couple times.

[00:22:13] You know, like, you just cannot help that the real issue is can you go back to bed? You know. And that’s a skill you learn, I think, after having it for a while. I think that happens in the beginning.

[00:22:28] My my secret for that is I keep my phone by my bed with the notes that app open. When you wake up in the middle of the night, you’re like, idea, thought, problem, solution, whatever it is, you just write it down and then go back to sleep because if you try to think about it too much while you’re sleeping nothing happens.

[00:22:47] Then you’re in the office. In the bed at 3:00 AM, which is a really horrible combo. Right. You know what I mean? No one should be in the office at three in the morning while sleeping. Right. That’s not, you know, you need to get that outta your head and move on to the next thing.

[00:23:00] Yep, absolutely. So I wanna move on a little bit and talk about your superpowers that you’ve developed over your career. Right? So every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky. In the real world, hero’s have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over your career that really help you to help your people slay their villains, and come on top of their own journeys.

[00:23:24] And the way I like to frame it is if you take a look at all the skills that you’ve developed over the course of building your couple of companies, there’s probably a common thread that sort of ties all of those things together that allows you to do what you do at the level you do it. So with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is in your company?

[00:23:41] I am pathologically incapable of learning something and not wanting to teach somebody it. That’s it. I said that very serious, like, but it’s true. If there was a superpower that was like, must transfer knowledge.

[00:23:56] That’s mine. I don’t know how not to do that. And that’s in my personal life too. I mean, fishing’s a hobby, my first goal is to put as many children on the boat as I can. And adults, mind you, who haven’t learned how to fish and I’m like, here’s a rod, here’s the right lore. We’re over the fish catch one, you know?

[00:24:15] And like, I’m wired to do that. I’ve been that way my whole life. And why, I don’t know entirely sometimes, you know, the origin of the superpower, isn’t like a super crystal that you dug out of the ground. Right. It’s something else. And my parents were always very vocal about like discussing things, you know, like watching the news was like a tennis match and an educational thing.

[00:24:40] And we do the same thing with our kids. It’s like we watched three minutes of the news and we had pause. Okay. Not that I say, what does everybody think? But like, they’re used to talking and sharing ideas and saying, you know, and and I think that’s really important. So that’s it, that’s been the superpower.

[00:24:55] I learned something I want to turn around and teach it. It doesn’t mean that I’m the only one that knows everything because what I said there was, if I learned something, which by definition means somebody taught me something. So there’s always been this like duality.

[00:25:08] You’re not dumb anymore.

[00:25:10] Yeah. Exactly. I feel it’s just a credit of knowledge. I think it was Warren Buffet that said it, I’m not necessarily a Warren Buffet fan or non-fan, but I know certain names register with people, so like, I’m not trying to say like he’s a genius one way or the other, but he said something like, and I know he had a habit, I guess, of, and this wasn’t me, but it’s kind of a similar analogy.

[00:25:31] I think, when I think about whatever my superpower is, I guess, you know, he always reads like seven papers or what it is in the morning and he does this and he reads about the markets. And when I asked about it, once he said, knowledge is kind of like an exponent. It wasn’t really what he said, but it’s like, it just creates exponentially.

[00:25:52] Like once you add layer one and layer two and layer three, it’s not like that’s just three layers. It’s like, it’s nine layers, and I feel that so, so strongly. And I think, it’s a bit like your 401k. Like if you feed that sucker when you’re 18, you can retire at 62, but if you feed that knowledge bucket and that kind of layer, and you only start putting those down when you’re 51 and faced with a life crisis.

[00:26:22] Well, great. I’m glad you’re learning now, but that that’s gonna be a lot harder for you to get to the end of the story you want to get to and I think that’s a big deal and if like superpowers have the main power and then they have something else, like, the guy.

[00:26:37] With secondary powers.

[00:26:39] Right. I don’t know like Thor has the hammer, but Thor is also completely hilarious. Right. So that’s one of his superpowers, right. Yeah, I mean, Thor being funny is a superpower, right? So like, that’s just the way it works. And so, a sub for me is I have, and it is directly related, which is the only reason I’m bringing it up.

[00:26:59] I read a lot of stuff I disagree with.

[00:27:02] Yeah.

[00:27:03] I read a ton of stuff I disagree with. I’m also somewhat pathologically incapable listening to one point of view forever, which is maybe subtext, why I ended up in market research because like I’m into F1 over the last few years, because it tried to survive and my son really got into it and he wants to work on a racing team and he’s in an auto program and he’s super great with cars and anything mechanical.

[00:27:28] If I listen to a single F1 podcast, I will like after a matter of a few weeks, just like without fail, go listen to three different ones to hear different takes. Or if I have a political leaning podcast, if you looked at my podcast player, I have one across the whole spectrum. You’d have no idea how to be able to figure out how I vote.

[00:27:48] I do vote a certain way, like most people do, but I don’t let my media consumption map to that because I feel the reason, in this case, not to zero in on voting for too long. Cause that’s not really a big thing. I wanna talk about forever, but I think, you know, the reason you vote a certain way should be because you have a multitude of inputs that have now led you to pick choice A, it shouldn’t be that you only have one set of inputs that completely line up with your choice from the beginning.

[00:28:18] And now you’re picking choice A. And I feel that’s the same thing about business choices. That’s the same thing about choices about family. That’s the same thing about choices about career. So it’s really common for me to like, even in the company, say, let’s go read this other thing that technically we might all disagree with, but let’s learn from it.

[00:28:36] Yeah. It doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, family or business or politics. If you create yourself an echo chamber for your inputs, then you’re not actually challenging any of your beliefs. And they probably won’t stand up when they get challenged. And so if you know what you believe and why you believe it and how it stacks up against whatever the competition is, again, it doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, you’re a business dicision I’m making this choice for this reason.

[00:28:59] Right. You know what you’re doing. And you may not know how it’s gonna turn out, but you know why you’re making that decision.

[00:29:05] Right. Exactly. And if I sound a little evangelical about it, I guess I am, because I feel like even if we leave the world of personal lives aside, cuz there’s applicability to what I’m saying there, and we just talk about business.

[00:29:23] There are so many business owners who stop learning. They just stop learning, they stop reading anything. You know, they’re like marketing is X and sales is Y and you know, sales is only cold call.

[00:29:34] You learned that when I was 20, now I’m 60 and it’s over.

[00:29:38] Right. And here’s the thing. The reason why that happen is I’ve always felt really one main reason is owning a business is an ego creator and deflator machine, right. That’s what it is.

[00:29:51] That’s a good analogy.

[00:29:53] And until you understand how to control that little mumba wumba, your brain will go all kinds of directions based on the success of the business. And that’s actually one of the blessings that I had by having a business initially selling it and getting into a second one is that mumba wumba doesn’t happen the same way to me as it did in the first business.

[00:30:15] You know, I mean, business did good. I felt good about me. I felt good about where we were going. Business did bad. I was like, that must be me. I need to go fix things, you know, and in the second business, well, if the business goes bad, I’m one of the co-owners. It is me, but it’s not me. It’s not me with a capital me.

[00:30:31] you know, it’s more like, yeah, I gotta go solve it, but that doesn’t mean I have a problem. Like I’m a good human being. I can fix this. Right. That kind of thing. It’s an identity wrapped up in the business thing that when you still have that, it becomes very hard to hear a contrary point of view.

[00:30:48] Right. And I think, you know, I feel real blessing by that, like that I got to do this twice. And I think, anyway, go ahead.

[00:30:55] I say, I have a theory about the whole businesses and technology and other things like always having problems that have to be solved. And you know, in physics, we have the I don’t know if it’s theory or if it’s sound science at this point of how far we are into understanding that.

[00:31:08] But entropy is, you know, the idea that things are always like falling a part. And for whatever reason, don’t think that our business or the technology programs that we set up, aren’t exactly the same. And so like people, for whatever reason, like I set this up, it should work. Right. You know, maybe it’s an automation or maybe it’s a process in your business or maybe it’s, you know, something you have going on in your family, but it all has to be sort of like, I don’t know, it has to be worked on constantly and there’s always problems because it’s always breaking down.

[00:31:39] Well. Yeah. And then there’s competitive threat and there’s the environment that’s working against it. And it’s just not static. And to some people, I think that’s a joy and to other people, especially if the business is wrapped up in their identity and their ego, it’s a threat.

[00:31:55] Right. And those are some of the worst kind of business owners in my mind. Although, like I said, admittedly I had to go through it twice to get that kind of perspective.

[00:32:06] Yeah. Yeah. I was just reading psycho cybernetics. And he talks about that, about wrapping your identity up in your business and whatnot what you’re doing. But anyways, it’s several chapters dedicated to your identity versus the identity of your business.

[00:32:19] Well, and one last thing before we leave this, if anybody’s listening and they’re like, aha, that just proved that you know, that elitist class of business owners are egotistical jerks. I would say that’s not what we were just talking about.

[00:32:32] What we were just talking about is the idea that when you run a business and accolades and complaints eventually end up on your desk because you run it, I should say it this way. Most people don’t have the experience of being the ultimate decision maker in most things in their life. And so when you are eventually the ultimate decision maker for an entity separating those decisions from who you are and what you’re about to become is a skill.

[00:33:06] We’re not necessarily born innately with that. So it’s if anybody’s listening, it is like, see, I knew owners were egotistical. It’s like, no, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the idea that it’s an inflation and deflation device that you need to learn how to control.

[00:33:24] Otherwise you might become a terror and you don’t want to do that. And I think we see in the business world today, there’s some people who never learned that lesson, and frankly, sadly, some of them are successful even in spite of that, but that’s not a path I ever wanted to take.

[00:33:41] Yeah. And I really like the idea of having learning as a superpower too, the idea that learning stacks together and creates sort of like an exponential knowledge base. And the more I have grown in my own life and learned other things like I have a pension for learning things.

[00:33:56] Like, really like picking things up like new skills. And so I’ve always got something in my life that I’m like I’m working on. And so over the last, like five years, I’ve learned plumbing and electrical and other things, because we’ve refitted two RVs and we’re working on, refitting a boat here next.

[00:34:14] I’ve learned how to draw last year and I just rebuilt my desk after I learned carpentry, so I could build a piano at my desk. And so I have a piano built into my desk now.

[00:34:23] Oh wow.

[00:34:24] I can learn how to play piano on break times. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that as I learn more skills in other areas that have literally zero to do with my everyday business it gives me more ideas and more creative thinking and different solutions to problems that I wouldn’t have come up with before.

[00:34:40] And it’s like, I have something I learned from renovating our second coach that I use all the time and teach my clients all the time. It’s just a concept that is really useful. When you’re working on a renovation stuff, that happens to be useful in business when you’re trying to get things completed as well.

[00:34:54] And so it does, it creates like an exponential stack of skills when you learn a lot of different things.

[00:35:01] Yeah, completely agree. And a side note that anyone who hasn’t owned an RV or even has, cuz it might resonate is you’re always working on your RV. That’s the short version, because they don’t call it a mobile home for nothing.

[00:35:15] It has everything in your home, in microcosm, which means, and also that gets rattled around and what’s that line from Armageddon. I just rewatched that the other day for some reason. But like, I mean that, it’s kind of a happy fun movie to watch at times, but that year where Armageddon and deep impact two meteor movies came out at the same time.

[00:35:32] I’ve always been more of a fan of deep impact, but in Armageddon, there’s this line where the guy says something about who wants to fly this rocket, that’s built by the lowest bidder. You know, that’s kind of your RV. Like every component in it is built by the lowest bidder. I don’t care what quality the RV is.

[00:35:47] And so all it takes is three potholes and your fridge is now like on the floor or something, you know what I mean? It feels like.

[00:35:53] Been there, don that.

[00:35:55] Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just, you pull into a campground and you’re like, oh, no water. And just think about that for anybody who doesn’t own an RV, it’s not like your house just looks at you one day and says no water today.

[00:36:07] You know what I mean? Like that just doesn’t happen. But if you own an RV, you get used to fixing stuff like that with a small box of tools at a campground, with no power, you know, that’s just what you end up learning how to do.

[00:36:18] Yeah, cuz we’ve been traveling long term. One of the most common questions I get is like, Hey, if we wanted to travel what would be like your number one piece of advice.

[00:36:26] And I always tell people that the number one piece of advice I have for moving into an RV or traveling at all is if it can break, it will.

[00:36:37] Totally a hundred percent. There’s nothing in your RV that will like, no, exactly. I could keep going, but I completely agree.

[00:36:47] If it comes into contact with your RV for even a short period of time, it will probably break.

[00:36:52] Totally. If you can touch it or the ground makes contact with it, it will break like at some point or another. Right. And people are like, no, how could that be? And I’m like, I don’t know, built by lowest bidder, perhaps. Maybe that’s the answer I’ve come to.

[00:37:05] Yeah. I was like, we pulled in here like two days ago and extended, everything, put all up and we’re in Florida.

[00:37:11] So Florida, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Florida or not.

[00:37:13] Yeah.

[00:37:13] It rains at three o’clock every single day during the summer.

[00:37:16] Totally. Totally.

[00:37:17] Like you can set your clock to it and be like, it’s three o’clock’s it’s gonna rain right about, oh, there it is. And so it starts raining yesterday and then like our slide just starts leaking into our sink.

[00:37:27] Right. No, no, exactly. There are things that happen in RVs that like, you know, not that this is the RV show, but yeah, totally. There are things that happen in RVs that if it happened in your house with that regularity, you would like be calling your congressman. You know what I mean?

[00:37:44] You would be like filing lawsuits, but it’s just what happens with RVs. And yet at the same time, it’s the best way to see the country. It’s an awesome experience. I love having one. I would never not have one, but yes, you get fairly handy. Usually in the middle of the night or early morning too, that’s the other thing.

[00:38:03] It usually breaks at like four in the morning or something. And you’re out there with a flashlight trying to like, you know, not have the trailer flood.

[00:38:10] Or on the side of the road when you’re like a destination with a due date that you’re trying to get to. And you’re like, oh, of course it blows up now. So yeah.

[00:38:18] Well, one small thing about trailers and then we’ll move on. Cuz I think people would appreciate this, even if they don’t own one, one of the weirdest things I think about trailers because I always like sharing this briefly. If I get a chance, one of the weirdest things about trailers, I think, just for the listeners to think about this for a minute.

[00:38:35] So you get a motorcycle, you need a particular license to ride a motorcycle. In some states you gotta go take classes, right? If you wanna go drive a semi tractor. You gotta go take classes. You need a whole CDL. If you wanna drive a bus full of school kids, separate license, right. You can go to any camping world and I’m not disen camping world.

[00:38:53] We bought stuff from them before, but just people might know who they are. Right? So big RV dealer, right. You know, you can go to any camping world by any trailer of any size, 30 feet, 40 feet, you know, whatever, hook it up to your rig. They will give you no lessons. They will not tell you how to drive it except to tell you that it’ll be fine, which by the way is not true of just camping world.

[00:39:15] Just anybody you could buy it from. Right. And you will drive out hauling 6, 7, 8, 9, 15,000 pounds of junk down the road for the first time in your life, trying to make left and rights and get on the freeway with no training, no experience. And I always look at that and go, what, how do we allow this?

[00:39:34] Like, I’m not a big, huge regulation guy by default, but like, even I’m like. How does that even happen? How do these people even get home with these things? Because you know, you look at, and I remember feeling terrified, like who, it reminds me of a line. My business partner said once about babies, you know, when he brought his first child home and they were in the car and he turned to his wife and he said, they’re just gonna let us take her home.

[00:39:59] Like, we’ve only had 12 hours of instruction. You know what I mean? And it’s like, this is even worse. That’s a hospital with nurses and everything it is, they just take your check and you drive off. And so for anyone who’s ever followed an RV and you’re like, they drive like a drunken sailor, there’s your answer that you get zero training on how to drive a trailer until you really just figure it out. And I personally find that very strange. It’s just me maybe.

[00:40:26] No, I got a quick story on that, that I think you’ll appreciate. Cause it ties in directly. So when we go to move onto our RV. Basically we had a really tight deadline for moving into an RV, moving outta the place we were in.

[00:40:36] And so we drive across the country to go look at a few RVs. We ended up in Texas where we’re gonna buy where we found the RV that we wanted. And it was a 30 foot class A, which is the kind, if you’re not familiar listening to this, it’s the kind that you drive, right? You have the steering wheel in the trailer, so it’s a 33 foot class A RV.

[00:40:52] And I hand the guy the cash for the RV and he hands me the keys for it. And we’re all done with everything. All the paperwork’s been signed, I’ve got the title in hand, all of it. Right. And I go and put the keys in the RV, turn it on and go to drive off of his lot. And if you’re not familiar with Texas, Texas has big dips on all their roads for all their water that runs through all the rain.

[00:41:10] And it’s the first time I’ve ever driven an RV. And I take the RV straight over the dip and center it so that the back tires are spinning in the air. And the acid of the trailer is sitting on its trailer hitch on the one side of the ditch and the front wheels are sitting on the other side of the ditch.

[00:41:27] And the back tires are just spinning in the air, which is where all the power is at. So I then have to get out of the RV, go back into the place where he’s like still putting the money into cash register kind of thing. I’m like, so, the RV’s stuck in your driveway and he comes out and looks at it and he goes, oh, I know how to fix this.

[00:41:44] And he gets his forklift and he brings the forklift over and he’s like, we’ll just put a strap on the forklift forks and run it down to the trailer hitch. And we’ll use the forklift to lift up the end and we’ll just roll it back. Totally. A great idea works great. Except, as soon as it lifted off and the pressure came off the back of the RV swung on the strap and stabbed six new forklift holes in the as end of my brand new RV.

[00:42:05] Oh ,oh.

[00:42:07] So one of my first skills that I learned on how to fix things was how to do fiberglass repair.

[00:42:11] Which is not the easiest thing to learn. Like, that’s definitely, you’re pretty handy then. I mean, I get some basic patching straightforward, but I mean like, yeah, that’s a good skill to have.

[00:42:21] It was one of those things that you’re like, this is gonna be really, really hard. And you watch all the YouTube videos and you’re like, it is gonna be really hard and you do it. And you’re like, okay, that was difficult. But it wasn’t as bad as I thought. And now I’ve like got friends of mine who own boats that are like, Hey, I’ve got a hole in my boat.

[00:42:35] Can you help me fix it? I’m like, yes, I know how to do that. So I did that last week. And then he spent the next, like 10 minutes teaching me, like, here’s how you go across ditches sideways in a certain particular way. And I was like, I didn’t know that. How would you know that?

[00:42:46] No, that’s what I mean. Like, every time I go drive by like one of those big stores and I watch somebody drive off and you can tell I’m like, go with God young man. You know what I mean? Like, just hang in there. You know what I mean? Just try not to kill yourself and others on the way home. You know, after a couple years you’ll have it figured it out.

[00:43:06] One of our favorite hobbies being full-timers is Friday afternoons. Is when the weekenders show up at any of the RV parks that you’re staying at. And the difference between weekenders and full-timers like ourselves is weekenders don’t use their RVs nearly as often, and don’t have nearly as much experience like backing their RVs in.

[00:43:24] So it’s definitely fun to set your chair out and just watch people back their RVs in. I think, it’s a sport.

[00:43:32] Oh, well, there’s a guy who told me that about backing boats in too, because boats are actually harder to back in than RVs in a way. Like they pivot faster on the tongue.

[00:43:40] And I mean, if you’ve never done, I mean, listeners, if you’ve never done boats, boats are actually a little harder to get down a ramp. And I had a guy once tell me, he said, first day of fishing season, I take a six pack, lawn chair, just stare at the launch. It’s it’s a show. I just watch everybody try to go down and, a related last thing on that from my side is my wife teases me about this event that happened.

[00:44:01] We’ve been towing trailers for a couple years, maybe a little less, I’m pulling into this campground. And you know, I kind of zoo zop backed it all in, did it all kind of really nice and clean. And I popped out of the. And the ranger walks by and she goes, nice job putting that in. And my wife just looks at me like she could just see me beaming, like, you know, oh, I, and the line we use for that is the one from Apollo 13, where the guy says, come on, rookie park that thing, you know what I mean?

[00:44:28] If you’ve ever watched the movie and like that there is a certain joy of putting a big rig in this spot cleanly and you’re equally true that I’ve watched marriages, I think dissolve in front of me in a campground when the weekenders show up. And there’s just like a lot of yelling as they try to park something really large.

[00:44:46] I’ve gotten incredibly skilled at backing a 40 foot bus into very tight spaces. And like the place we’re now is really small. But I pulled it in and it was straight and I put it in the first time. And like, people come up to you afterwards. They’re like, how did you do that? And I’m like, I’ve been doing this a lot. This is probably TMI, but my wife has decided that watching me do that is very hot. She’s like, I don’t know but she’s like, that’s hot.

[00:45:07] Well, that’s a little bit of the ranger thing. Cuz my wife kind of looked at me like, you’re really proud of yourself right now, the ranger who sees everybody back in goes, you did a nice job there. You know what I mean? And you know, and I’m like, yeah, I feel good.

[00:45:20] I feel really good right now, you know? And there is a certain bit of that, but anyway, well, this was fun to talk about so we can call this the RV trailer life 20 minutes of this show or whatever so.

[00:45:31] Well, it is a part of our lives and we’re talking about our stories. So I think it works.

[00:45:35] But I want to flip that over on the other side. The superpower is the fatal flaw, right? So if your superpower is the ability to learn and to wanna teach things you know, every Superman has a kryptonite, or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelet’s a victory without going mad.

[00:45:49] And it’s basically something that you struggled with. Struggled to grow your business. For me, I struggled with a lot of things for a long time. I struggled with perfectionism forever, which kept me from shipping products. Cause I thought I always make it a little bit better before I go to market with it.

[00:45:59] Cuz you know, I was afraid of the feedback and other things like that. I also struggled with, self-care, which namely brought itself out in having a terrible relationship with time. And also having a terrible relationship with my clients and not having good boundaries set. So, I would answer the calls at 3:00 AM and not sleep and things like that.

[00:46:13] But I think more important than what your flaw was is how have you worked to overcome it? So our listeners might learn a little from your experience.

[00:46:22] Yeah. Yeah. You had me till the second part and I thought, have I overcome it? I’m not sure. So the

[00:46:27] You’re working on it, right? I’m still working mine all the time.

[00:46:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I’m working on it. I would say, well, you know, your spouse tends to know your fatal flaw. And if my wife was here, I don’t mean that in a negative way. Just you live with somebody, you know what their flaw is. This show isn’t about my wife. I know hers too. As much as I know all the things that make her beautiful and awesome, but I’m too responsible for everything.

[00:46:57] I don’t know if it’s a boy scout problem. I was never in Scouts. I don’t know if it’s a Issue that I was, I joke sometimes I should be on Oprah because my parents got divorced when I was in fifth grade remarried in a year and then divorced again. And I’m a little bit of a statistical oddity, I don’t know too many people who have been through that.

[00:47:18] Usually your parents flip, they don’t get remarried again and then split again. And so, at a very early age, I think probably that first divorce did a lot to it is cause I was also the oldest and my sister’s like eight years younger than me. Everything around me I’m responsible for.

[00:47:36] That’s my fatal flaw. I’m you know, and I will carry that with me longer than I need to. And now if you’re around me, in a way, I guess it’s kind of a blessing sometimes, cuz it’s like I’m taking responsibility. The downside, if you’re me. Is that, you know sure that can create resentment.

[00:47:55] If you’re being honest, you know it can create a load that kind of is emotionally draining. It can create frankly, just too many things to do. But on the flip side, I think responsible leaders are responsible. I’ve never actually said that out loud before, by the way, I might try to remember that, but like responsible leaders are responsible.

[00:48:15] Meaning like if you’re going to be a good leader, you have to accept responsibility. And so, I’d like to think that is one of the things that helps you make a leader, but how do I work on it? Honestly, without a change in my faith, I would’ve never been able to push some of that feeling of being responsible for everything away.

[00:48:42] I had to put it somewhere else. I had to put it in God’s hands. I had to, and I still struggle with it to this day. I still wake up in the morning sometimes and I’m like, okay, I’m doing all this stuff. I’m responsible for this. I gotta make sure we’re here and there and whatever. And I go, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

[00:48:57] There’s somebody else holding the universe together and it is not me. And I’m going to leave that person that job, and I’m gonna do what I feel called to do, and that’s where I’m gonna leave it. But that is a daily struggle for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever quite conquer it, cuz I think in a way it is precisely what makes me who I am.

[00:49:19] And it’s so much of just my experiences led me to be that person that I don’t know if I will ever quite be a, you know, Hey, whatever happens is fine kind of guy. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be a you know, it’s okay whatever you wanna do with that, I don’t really care. You know, I’m just not really wired to do that. I really like to help people. And when there’s something on fire or I’m usually the first guy to say, can I help? And and I

[00:49:49] Has it impacted your ability to delegate in your business?

[00:49:52] Well, that’s a good question. For some reason, well, no, it’s an interesting question. First business. Yes. Second business. No, because I learned it from the first business that it was the wrong way to go. I was, you know as my business partner, Scott used to say about me, and this is true. He said, in the first business, you needed to be good at what you were doing. And then you needed to be as least as good as everybody else because you felt you were responsible for them.

[00:50:18] Right. And like, you know, I don’t feel that way anymore. I delegate pretty cleanly and I put a lot of time into mentoring and making sure that people kind of understand like the right way to do something and help get them set on the right path. So no, no, not as much as you would think.

[00:50:39] I mean, I might carry a little bit of that emotional weight of responsibility from time to time, but I have successfully conquered in business too giving people a really big open lane to do their own thing. Even though I may feel ultimately responsible for kind of the company’s performance and their performance and, you know, cuz they’re part of the company, but that doesn’t trickle down into them feeling constrained in their day to day.

[00:51:05] That’s that’s an interesting line to balance too, because ultimately as the CEO or the owner of the company, it’s your responsibility. But also have people that you are delegating work to cuz you can’t do everything. You can’t be responsible for every outcome.

[00:51:22] Right. Well, there’s a phrase I started saying recently about leadership that I never used to say before, but I feel like it’s kind of what I believe about it, these days. Leadership is talking to people. So they do the right things when you’re not talking to them, you know, like you’re never going to be as the company grows around everything while it’s happening. So the minute that starts to happen and you’re not physically present or able to oversee, or, you know, you’re not a two, three person business, it’s now a 20, you know, we’re 30 people, right.

[00:51:58] A million things happen today that I have no visibility on no direct visibility. Well then you have to work your management style so that you can talk to people in such a way that you’re clear. They have good guidelines and they have a clear lane to make good decisions based on good evidence and good teaching when you’re not around.

[00:52:20] Yeah. And in a way that takes me back to teaching where like I’m teaching people so they can be independent.

[00:52:26] Right back to like instructional design and other things. So like, one of the things I spend a lot of time on is like process documentation with our team and like process documentation.

[00:52:33] Like I think one of the biggest flaws that a lot of companies have with it, cuz we’ve helped a lot of companies with it is they talk about how to do something like the steps for a process. And that’s only like one part of good instruction. Like you have to get your terms defined. You have to have a really good reason why, so they understand the thinking behind the process.

[00:52:51] And then you have the actual process and then there’s some other things that go into it. But yeah, like processes and decision making has a lot to do with learning how to teach well as well as going with your processes.

[00:53:01] Right. Yeah, no, exactly. But the reason I think it, you know, that’s so important, the ability to like, think of leadership as talking to people in the right way so that they do the right things when you’re not around, is that there are so many owners that don’t even really know how to do that.

[00:53:19] I’ve met a ton of them. Like the minute they’re not in contact with the problem, their team just kind of falls apart, right. Or they tell themselves they’re building really good processes and templates and tools. You know, it sounds like you have, but you’ve probably met people who tell themselves they have, but they’re not really functioning well.

[00:53:39] So the minute the owner leaves the room, the team follows the procedure and guideline book, but they still fly into the moon. Right. They still don’t really actually get the job done. And there’s a lot of faith that has to go into that interaction. Right? I mean, you talk to an employee for 45 minutes in a week, maybe.

[00:53:59] And the other 38 hours and well, 39 hours and 15 minutes, you know, they’re doing hopefully productive things based on your coaching and based on all the coaching that came before. And like, I know owners that they have not conquered that. They just do not know how to do that. And and some of it is process and templates.

[00:54:23] Some of it is workflow. Some of it is inspiration. Some of it’s culture, some of it’s training, some of it’s like self education, but it’s an art I think. And I think it’s not taught in us.

[00:54:37] You get wrong a lot before you start to get it right.

[00:54:40] Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:54:42] So I wanna shift gears and talk a little about your clients, right? So you do market research and it’s Captivate, right? Is the name of the company? Cascade, sorry. Cascade in my head.

[00:54:52] Yeah. No worries. No worries. Captivate. Would’ve been a good name too.

[00:54:55] So I wanna talk about your clients with Cascade and talk about your common enemy. Right? Every superhero has an arch nemesis, right? It’s a thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. And what we like to do is put it in the context of your clients and it’s a mindset or a flaw that you have to deal with that like, when they signed on the dotted line, if you had a magic wand, you just bop them on the head and not to deal with that anymore.

[00:55:15] So you could actually, you know, get them the result that they came to you for. What is that common enemy that you regularly have to fight against with your clients?

[00:55:23] I’m actually gonna do something cuz we’re we’re online and I want to pull it up and I want to give appropriate props to one of our marketers, but I need to pull it up because to answer that question, it’s interesting. One of our marketers was writing a blog post recently and it’s only in draft form.

[00:55:37] It’s not on our blog. And she had an analogy for this thing related to market research that I totally wanna pull up. So in full credit, this is Alexis Ford on our team that she pulled up this quote from this guy, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was a German philosopher. So I’m gonna answer the question, but I get it a little bit roundabout way.

[00:55:56] This guy posited that there are three stages of truth, ridicule, violent opposition, and acceptance as obvious. So ridicule. Violent opposition and acceptance as obvious. And our challenge is where our clients sit on that continuum with what they think about the market that’s our enemy, our enemy is clients sometimes think they know it all.

[00:56:22] And clients struggle to recognize a challenging perspective and what it means for their business. So that’s our biggest enemy. In a weird way, our enemy is the client. You do a market research readout and a senior leader says, yeah, I kind of knew all this already.

[00:56:40] No, they didn’t. We know they didn’t because most human beings hate to admit ignorance. I mean they do. And so, it is probably one of the strangest things maybe heard who’s our arch enemy, our clients, it is, they really are. Our arch enemy is the client. So the client needs to get to this place where they don’t just ridicule the truth a little bit, like we talked about earlier. Right.

[00:57:04] You know, we’re awesome. Everything is awesome. You know, this can’t be true. Right. It can’t be just violent opposition. Although to be honest, they’re usually on the path to something good at that point, once they start arguing with the data, they’re usually on a path to some meaningful insight, you know.

[00:57:20] They’re on their way to acceptance.

[00:57:22] They’re on the way acceptance, but notice, acceptance as obvious. Right? So then there’s the challenge that they’re like, well, yeah, we kind of knew this already. Well, no, you didn’t quite know it. No, no. You’re missing the point, right? It’s not exactly what you think it is. And related thing, you know, maybe this ties back to the teaching thing and mentoring.

[00:57:41] Internally, just very fast on this. We have a culture that I make it abundantly clear that do no work for which you don’t understand. In other words, you know, if you get six paragraphs into a blog post, and you’re not clear in the context, email a manager, email a friend, call somebody, and what’s really strange and kind of sad.

[00:58:02] It doesn’t matter the age range of who we bring it as an employee. It takes them months to actually believe that we mean that because people work in cultures where you really can’t do that. You really can’t. You really can’t be halfway through deliverable, call your boss up and say, I don’t really know how to proceed.

[00:58:19] So what people do they write around the truth? They kind of try to do something that’s not really fully baked. Right. Because most company cultures don’t really allow you to admit ignorance. They allow you to ask for help, but that’s not the same thing. Right. And market research kind of fills in where you’re really missing knowledge, right?

[00:58:44] So you’ve gotta, you know, this little continuum, I guess, of ridicule, violent opposition and acceptance is obvious. That’s kind of the path our clients go through. And yet at the same time they’re hiring us, which takes us all the way back to like, we deliver bad news to good people. You know? In that video we got up is there’s a quote in there from Frederick Douglas that I use at the end that I’ll paraphrase it, which I shouldn’t do, cuz it was an amazing human being.

[00:59:10] But I just don’t remember the exact quote off the top of my head, but it’s like without struggle, there is no real progress. And so the way I think of our clients is they’re gonna struggle when we give them the truth or we deliver that bad news. But it, but if they’re good people, which most of them are, they wanna see change.

[00:59:29] They’ll change. It just, we have to hold our guns when they’re like trying to attack the data or say it’s not true, or a senior leader comes in and it happens on almost every project. There’s some guy or some woman who just falls on this vector right. More often than not the ridicule or violent opposition.

[00:59:50] And more often than not, it’s based on their experiences with the marketplace, their personal experiences. And you know, that’s valid, but at the same time, if we’ve come in and told you, we talked to 200 customers or a thousand, and they’ve said X, I think it’s time to listen. And obviously this all works out in the end and clients are happy and, and ongoing relationships are established, but yeah, who’s our biggest enemy? It’s the client, frankly.

[01:00:17] That’s definitely an interesting problem to have. And it probably means you guys have to, you mentioned earlier superpower being the ability to learn new things and then teach those things. It’s really what you’re doing. Right. You’re learning things about these customers’ markets and then teaching it to the customer.

[01:00:34] Yeah. Right. In a way that they’ll accept, just like all teaching. Right. You can’t just shove it down one pathway, you have to kind of find a way to make the message land.

[01:00:44] And I’d like to say we’re successful all the time, but you know, we don’t run a Microsoft or Google. Right. You know, they can ignore us and, that’s fine, you know, I don’t have any problem with that. And I’m not even saying that one market research study says everything about everything.

[01:01:00] I mean, you know, a market is a complex confusing thing. But yeah. That’s our biggest challenge. I mean, we have competitors too, and we have market forces and we have all the things that everybody else has. But if you ask me to think who’s the enemy we deal with it’s people inside the client actually.

[01:01:16]So, I wanna talk then about your driving force, right? So if you’re common enemy is what you fight against, you’re driving force is what you fight for, right? So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fight to save Gotham. What is it that you guys fight for with Cascade your mission so to speak.

[01:01:31] To tell the truth, that’s it. To tell the truth, we figure out market truth and we want to tell it to as many.

[01:01:38] I say this to clients all the time, early in the stages of a engagement. Like, I mean, we have a sales team that’s bigger than me, but if I happen to be on a sales call I’ll say something like, you know, we’re happy to tell the truth to as many people as you’ll ask. And that’s it.

[01:01:55] I mean, we learn truths about the market and will tell as many people, and usually by the way, that means people inside the account under nondisclosure or whatever, it’s not like we’re telling the world, you know, secretive things about accounts. I mean, just to be clear of course, but like, that’s the end goal, is make sure as many people inside that company know what we’ve learned as possible.

[01:02:18] This might be a little on the philosophical side, but how often do you run into the postmodern mentality that there is no truth or that truth is my perspective or my truth versus your truth instead of the truth about what’s going on and does that cause problems with essentially getting that acceptance of what’s going on?

[01:02:41] No, it’s a great question. And I could see in certain industries or verticals, it would have some play and be an issue. We work with tech. This is a data centric.

[01:02:54] Data driven business.

[01:02:55] Data driven, fairly logic, I might even say low emotional IQ at times. You know what I mean? Like kind of industry. Right? And I think that, that limits the amount of that kind of conversation, you know, I think most of these companies believe there is a truth.

[01:03:13] They may just be ridiculing the truth we’re bringing because they believe a different truth, but it’s very rare for them to feel there’s two truth. At the same thing, but I could imagine if we were aligned with different verticals or different market sectors or segments as kind of who we serve, I could absolutely see that happening. So I think it’s a fabulous question. It just, I don’t think it affects us though.

[01:03:36] Doesn’t affect you guys cuz of where you’re at. Yeah, that makes sense. I just know that because it’s been a huge change over the last 10, 15 years is that the postmodern sort of, I don’t know what to call it other than maybe a theology, that truth works.

[01:03:51] You’re right. It exists. It absolutely exists. I mean, the idea that all truth is relative dah, dah, dah. I mean, I think the combination of being in tech on top of doing business to business work more than business to consumer just makes that much less of an entity. Now, that said the same companies we work for.

[01:04:13] I think if you looked at how those companies are wired internally, culturally. You know, the, the kind of cultural values they espouse and what they aim for might fall more along the lines of what you’re talking about. But when they bring us in to tell them truths about the market, I think that’s a different dynamic.

[01:04:34] It’s more a fight of which truth is gonna end as a capital T. It’s not all of these are small T truths and they’re all equal.

[01:04:42] Yeah. So I wanna talk about something very practical then, right? And we talk about this, your hero’s tool belt, and it’s like, every superhero has awesome gadgets like their batarangs or their web slingers.

[01:04:52] Or we talk about throw earlier his big magical hammer that he can swing around and fly with. I wanna talk about the top one, maybe two tools that you couldn’t live without in your day to day job as the CEO. Right. Could it be anything from your notepad to your calendar, to your marketing tools, something you use for product delivery, something you think is essential to getting your job done every day?

[01:05:07] Okay. Couple things in no particular order. My Kindle library, which is like 1300 books in counting now, which I know sounds sick and sad and wrong, but remember, I like to learn. So I go in there a lot and search through stuff and, okay, what did this book say about that? Or what did this, you know I don’t so much keep a journal, but I keep a lot of fairly detailed notes about what’s going on.

[01:05:27] So I use bear for that. And so that’s an app I’m in and out of, there’s an email app called super.

[01:05:33] I haven’t heard the app called Bear.

[01:05:34] Yeah, bear’s pretty good. I’m kind of looking at a tool called Obsidian now that’s a little bit more complicated, but actually in a good way. So, I might switch over there. Superhuman is a fantastic email client that does all kinds of amazing things for processing email at speed.

[01:05:50] It’s just amazing. Honestly, I love that app. And cuz I’m an owner of a small business. I get a couple hundred emails a day and I gotta find a way to churn through all of those. And Superhuman got a bunch of capabilities that are really, really strong. Go ahead.

[01:06:05] Is obsidian that note taking app that sort of like connects all the notes together and like weird App.

[01:06:10] Yeah, exactly. And one of the reasons I’m using it is that I guess this is relevant. Cause what we talked about. So, you know, back in, I think it’s fair to say that the last presidential election challenged a lot of America didn’t matter where you voted. Let’s just leave it at that. So if that statement is true my MO based on everything I’ve already shared, this should surprise no one.

[01:06:30] I was like, okay, I really wanna learn about presidents. So back then, shortly after that election, I said, I’m gonna read a presidential biography on each us president. So I think it was about a year afterwards. I’m now up to Roosevelt, just got done with McKinley, which unfortunately was one of the worst biographies I read out of the set.

[01:06:47] And so I needed an app to give me a good network map of all the notes I took from all my Kindle notes. And obsidians what I’m using it for. So I can kind of organize that by topic and things like that. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, the other thing is, this doesn’t so much sound like a superpower, but I call a lot of people.

[01:07:06] I mean, I know that doesn’t sound like one, but gosh, in virtual companies, people hide behind messages and email. I mean, you are very likely to get a phone call from me. If you work here, not in like a weird way, not like, Hey, what are you doing? You know, but I call people all the time and I tell staff like call people.

[01:07:25] Like call people, right. Pick up the phone, you know, you can solve problems that way.

[01:07:31] For one of my customers will like send me a text message or send me like a message in one of our things. And instead of responding to it, I’ll just call them.

[01:07:41] Right. No, I’m big on the phone. You know, it doesn’t have to be a long conversation. It can be very short. And I think as a leader, there’s also a lot of power of feeling like you may, you know, this is actually a question I never asked the staff. So, maybe I’ve succeeded at this or not. I’d like to think I have, feeling like your boss or your grand boss or your great grand boss or whatever can call you.

[01:08:07] And you forget what their title is. Like. You’re just having a conversation about whatever the business thing is you’re working on. And that’s what I really try to break down with staff is like, when I call you, like, and this is also something, you know, I’ve had staff join the company.

[01:08:21] And sometimes not everybody I’ll call them in the first couple weeks and they’re like, hi yeah, I’m working on like, hold on, I don’t need you to recite everything you’re working on. I just called to see if you need any help, you know, or if you want to talk, you know, and that’s so rare, like they’re used to like their boss calling and like, they have to list out everything they’re working on immediately.

[01:08:44] Right. You know? And I’m like, no, I need you to feel like you can talk to me as if I don’t have a title, because if we can’t have that kind of relationship while you still know I have a title I’m gonna miss out and you’re not gonna tell me things that maybe I need to know, and you’re not gonna be available for the kind of coaching or mentoring maybe you need.

[01:09:03] So I don’t know how we ended up on that. That’s probably my fault. But anyway.

[01:09:07] That’s the phone call is being a tool.

[01:09:09] Yeah. Yeah. The phone being a tool. Yeah. I think it’s a superpower that we hide behind all the electronic communication. And those are valuable and they’re super great.

[01:09:19] They are, they’ve allowed me to work from home and work from remote locations and I would never, I’d never give them up, you know, I’m a big work from home fan, but you gotta pick up your phone and call people and you just gotta do that.

[01:09:33] Yeah, absolutely. And, and I really like the idea of doing that myself, I run that way in my company. I call people whenever I can mostly clients. But we do we do like a weekly meeting with our staff and things. So it’s very useful to like get in front of and talk to the people that you’re working with.

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[01:11:15] See you there. And now back to the hero show.

[01:11:23] Well, I’ve only got one more question for you and it’s about your guiding principles, right? So one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up this interview, I talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you run your life by and run your business by maybe something you wish you’d known when you started out your your first company.

[01:11:43] I don’t know. There’s just one thing that’s leaping to mind it, you know? I think most people have a few different principles, maybe I’ll just say this one, cuz it’s the one that I think feels like the most relevant, especially given what we talked about is I’ve never been able to find the quote for a while now, every once in a while I can find it again.

[01:11:59] I need to just bookmark it and save it. Churchill said something once that was like the most powerful thing in the world is the spoken word I’m paraphrasing because it’s created empires and torn them down and it can do it in an afternoon. It’s bigger than armies. It’s bigger than anything else.

[01:12:17] And I’ve always really tried to think a lot about what I’m saying and who I’m saying it. And that’s particularly true when it comes to sales. It’s particularly true when it comes to our marketing and what we’re saying to the market. You know, we’re big fans of saying what we don’t do, just as much as we’re fans of saying what we do do.

[01:12:36] So at the end of the day, it’s maybe just recognizing that you know, you have a lot of power in what you say to people to build them up or destroy them in an afternoon. And some people, I think either don’t believe that, or they believe that if they make that mistake, they can use the same words to fix the problem.

[01:13:01] And I don’t believe that sometimes when you break the vase, you can’t put it back together again. And I think if people were more passionate about their communication, Whether it was saying what they intended and whether it was the right time to send it and whether it was even manipulative or not, you know?

[01:13:23] And I think if they thought a lot more about that, the world would be a much better place. And I think all you have to do is look at social media to believe that. I mean, I joked with my business partner the other day. I said, you know, the reason why we haven’t heard from any other foreign civilizations is because they all killed themselves off.

[01:13:39] And when we go to those planets, I’m just joking. But when we go to those planets, all we’re gonna find is data centers filled with hashtags. That’s what we’re gonna find, you know? And that’s it don’t be anything last, just data centers and hashtags, that’s it. And I’m really passionate about that.

[01:13:55] Like the whole company knows I’m like extremely passionate about us communicating effectively, and that’s not just to get a deal. That’s also to say when we don’t want to deal and how to serve people correctly. And I think some of that comes outta teaching. Some of that goes through personal strife as a kid and recognizing that things were challenging and the right things needed to be said, and being asked to grow up a little quicker and but deep down, that’s a huge driving principle for me. And and if I see poor communication, I call it out in the same way.

[01:14:28] I refuse to use emojis and like shorthand when texting and other things, because I’m like, we progressed past hydrophic thousands of years ago. We don’t need to go back to it.

[01:14:40] But that’s true.

[01:14:42] One of the things I always tell my son, cuz he’s he’s like 13 or just about 13, is that communication is one of the few superpowers that you have complete control over developing.

[01:14:52] Correct. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You don’t need a toolbox for it. It’s just your mouth and your hands and your brain and that’s it.

[01:15:03] You can learn it and you can master it and you can get better at it. You know, I was listening to Dr. Jordan Peterson the other day, talking about the whole concept of the pen being migthier than the sword.

[01:15:12] And he was like, people think that there’s like a battle, like the pen and the sword. He’s like, there’s no competition. The pen beats the sword every time, every day in every way.

[01:15:20] That’s the Churchill quote. Yeah, basically. I mean, he was talking about the spoken word, but he meant the same thing.

[01:15:24] Right? Like, the pen is brought up and down civilizations quicker than the sword at any point in time. And the other thing I’d say on that is that and I’m a case in this too. I don’t to this day write as well. Well, you know, the audience can be the judge. You know, I think I’m a better verbal communicator than I’m a written communicator to this day.

[01:15:47] But I have worked really, really hard to get really good at being a good written communicator at a level that I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten to before. And I have bad habits like everybody else, but the thing I would inspire people to do is be good at both. It’s super rare to find somebody who’s even like an A at one and a B at the other, the whole planet is filled with A’s and F’s and they stop there.

[01:16:12] They’re like, yeah, I write well, but I’m not good verbally. You can get good as a verbal communicator. You could give a speech someday. Don’t stop. You know, even, if you get to A and C you’re gonna be better than like 97% of the planet, you know, and it’s gonna be a superpower you can live with your whole life.

[01:16:30] And I wish I’d become a better writer sooner because I would’ve loved to have had that experience, but it’s I don’t know, maybe that’s a good thing to end on because that’s a, if you’re sitting there trying to grow both, I think you’re gonna have a really good successful career. And maybe even a pretty good person.

[01:16:48] It doesn’t matter what you do, right? If you’re in a job, if you are trying to build a career for yourself, if you, you know, I was like, you could be the dishwasher at the local restaurant or the CEO of a big company working on your communication skills will make you better and more valuable to whatever you’re doing.

[01:17:03] Right. Right. One last funny anecdote on that is that this is at the start of COVID and everybody had gone home and all of our tax sector clients had gone home. And I had a client say to me, and he meant that tongue in cheek, but he also meant it seriously. He said, I had no idea how dumb some of my colleagues were till we all had to send emails to each other, you know, because all of a sudden the complex discussion that was happening in a conference room, there’s a colleague who has to lay out a complex argument in email.

[01:17:34] Is completely incapable of doing it right. They could walk into their boss’s office and convince them to do something right. And and that’s just going from verbal to written, but the converse is also true. You have people who are very good on the writing side and they just give up on ever being able to communicate verbally in a way that shows impact.

[01:17:54] And, and I don’t think so. I think you can really aim for both, you know, maybe not an A and an A, but an a A and a B.

[01:18:01] I’ve gotten really good at both. It’s taken a long time, right. And thousands of interviews like this one and learning to be a good communicator myself and learning to tell stories, which by the way, one of the secrets to communication, if you’re listening to this is practice and learn how to tell stories.

[01:18:17] Absolutely.

[01:18:18] That’s how we are born. Right? We’re a story born people. And so if you learn to tell stories, my cheat sheet for that on an afternoon or evening when you got free time, sit down and watch standup comedians. They’re master storytellers, instead of just laughing at their jokes, take notes on what they’re doing.

[01:18:33] Right.

[01:18:33] And you can learn a lot about storytelling from them.

[01:18:38] So well that is a wrap on our interview, but I do finish every every one of my interviews with a very simple challenge. I do this to get help access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own. So the question is simple.

[01:18:50] Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story on our show? First person that comes to mind for you.

[01:19:03] My sister’s not far enough along on our entrepreneurial journey. She’s kind of been doing some like popup kitchen stuff and things like that. I think she’s gonna be a really good owner of a food cart in a restaurant someday. That’s not her profession right now, but it’s her passion.

[01:19:20] So Lori would definitely be one. Gosh, trying to think of question. And somebody that owns a business basically, or it could be anybody.

[01:19:35] Looking for someone who owns business tech can tell a story about how they got there.

[01:19:39] Probably Dan. Dan Cox, he owns an outfit called Exo Advisors and he’s got a really good story, actually, a really, really good story. So Dan, it’d be good. And yeah, I’d probably stop there. I’d have to think about more. It’s a good question.

[01:19:53] Why do you think Dan should come share a story with us?

[01:19:57] Because Dan really understands well, I’ll use his phrase, but he would use it better than me. He understands how you can make kind of your greatest contribution to a company and to an organization because he has done a lot of work with churches and with businesses. And I think he’s got a really interesting lane with how he goes about it.

[01:20:19] He’s got a tool set and I think the tool set’s good. I don’t have any problem with, his tool set, I think it’s great. But a lot of it comes down to Dan and I think Dan really understands how people are wired. He helped me a lot in our business. When it came to kind of some questions about where staff should be and the kind of responsibilities they should have, and by the way, that’s short sighting, what Dan can do.

[01:20:39] That’s just the place where he helped me at and did some stuff beyond that. But I just think he’s got a really good sense of that, like where you can make your greatest contribution to a company or an organization or even kind of at a life level. And I think you’d have a lot to share about that.

[01:20:55] So I think he’d be a good guy.

[01:20:57] Well, we’ll reach out later and see if we can connect with him. Maybe we can get him on the show. But you know, in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. So our analogous to that as we close, is where can people find out more about you?

[01:21:08] Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey, Sean, we’d love to work with you. And I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to reach out and say, Hey, we need some help with our marketing.

[01:21:17] Well, if you’re a B2B technology company that’s definitely in the center lane.

[01:21:21] So, you know, and I kind of described that earlier. So that’s who we work with and you can go to CascadeInsights.com. You could also email me at Sean. S E A N@cascadeinsights.com. And I always offer this and I sincerely offer it. Yes, the company needs a certain type of client. But I also know the entrepreneurial journey is an interesting one.

[01:21:42] And sometimes you just want to talk to somebody who’s been out there doing it. So even if you have no interest in acquiring your services and you just got a question about like, what’s it like to grow a professional services company or do the kind of work we do or anything like that, you know, don’t hesitate to drop me an email.

[01:21:57] I’d always be happy to chat. Because remember, I like to learn, I like to teach, so I’m always happy to talk to anybody on anything, but the company. Yeah. B2B technology company before you fill out the form. But other than that you can reach out to me for just about anything.

[01:22:14] Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Sean really appreciated just hearing your stories and your insight from the company that you’ve run.

[01:22:20] Do you have any final words of wisdom before I hit this stop record button?

[01:22:23] Read stuff you disagree with.

[01:22:26] That’s a good one and one that I think more people should do. Thank you very much, Sean.

[01:22:31] All right. Thanks again.