[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Dadio podcast. I'm your host, Rob Burnett.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: And I'm your co host, Brad Bickerton.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Thanks for being with us today. Brad and I are both ceos and new fathers, and on this podcast, we're exploring fatherhood and its connection with business. We are bringing our expertise, running businesses and trying to learn about being dads and seeing where things overlap and seeing where things completely different. Offer on today's pod, you can hear us talk about getting out, getting passports for baby, just being generally watching our kids grow. We're also going to do an in depth dive into going back to work after parental leave, and then stay tuned to the end for dad wins and dad fails. Brad, how's life in your world?
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Life is busy. We were saying before we started recording that most weeks I'm collecting, I'm meeting people, collecting anecdotes, and thinking about this pod. And I've got either some notes in my head or notes written on paper. And this week, I came to this pod that's saying there's a blank white page. And I know things happened in this last week. I can't recall. It's been a real busy week. No harms, no problems, but just sharing what it's like when business and life and chop wood, carry water all come together. And sometimes you're too tired to remember what just happened. How about yourself, Rob? How are you doing? How old now is baby Arthur? And how are you handling?
[00:01:28] Speaker A: And I. And this is our hobby, too, so it's sometimes hard to make the time, especially when we're now dads and ceos and all these other things.
Things are going really well. So Arthur turns four weeks old tomorrow. Not exactly one month, but four weeks old tomorrow. He's doing really well. A couple of anecdotes and kind of where we're at in our journey this week. So one is he's definitely getting harder.
Our first two weeks were, and you could probably hear it from how I talked to on the podcast. I think it was a combo of he was a pretty agree and continues to be a relatively agreeable baby. But also, you're running on the adrenaline, you're feeling good. And we really hit a couple of milestones, like getting out of the house, getting a workout in, going on a date night. We hit those milestones really quickly. And so I think we were kind of riding high. And now we're definitely getting to that place in parenthood where like, oh, this isn't like a thing we're doing for a month. This is a thing that we're doing for the rest of our lives. And so you get into the grind. So the good news is we're doing good. Nothing's fundamentally changed, but we're definitely getting into the grind of parenthood. And it's a little sobering and a little tiring. But also, first, don't regret it for a second. And we're still very happy and still doing really well overall. So, at a meta level, that's where we're at.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: My friend Robert, whose children are in college now, and I would give him kind of the same thing. Month one or month two, it's going fine. We're handling it. Things are good. And he goes, exhaustion doesn't set in until six months.
No, it's not. We're doing great.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Yeah. And I knew it was coming. And the other thing, on a little more practical note. So the big thing we did is, I actually just got back about 30 minutes ago from our trip. We did an overnight, first overnight trip with the baby. So we went to London. We're in Oxford, so it's about an hour train journey. And we went to the US embassy to get Arthur his us passport and register him. So he's officially an american now. Yes. Very happy about.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Well done. Well done.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: I'm very happy about that. He's a patriotic little american living in the UK, so that was a bunch of different exciting things all stacked on top of each other. So it was our second train journey. But as a lesson, it reminds me of Brad, of what you were talking on the last pod about having a flight canceled. So where we are, you have to take a bus to the train station, take the train into London, and then you have to take two different tubes, subways, to where we were staying for the night, then walk to the embassy from there. There was some blockage on our road, so the buses weren't coming, so we missed our train. The second train was, you know, we ended up walking 2 miles in the rain to the train station, got a later train, had to almost touch rush hour in London, which is an ugly thing to do when you have a pram in the tube.
But we made it, and we survived, and it wasn't that bad. We liked to walk. It didn't get that wet in the rain. It was fine.
And it was so much validation of all the little baby steps we've taken up until this point. It wasn't our first train journey. It wasn't our first time out of the house, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we had to go to this appointment to get this passport. So it would have been very easy for this to be our first thing, because it's the first kind of forcing mechanism of getting us out of the house. But all those little practice moments had us totally ready for it. And we were able to kind of go through the whole thing with a smile.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: That's great. And that's how you want it to happen. And then there's also this sense of resiliency, because every time you go out, something a little bit kind of goes wrong. And it gets rid of those mind gremlins of anything going wrong is catastrophic, and it's not. And you know that getting out of the house isn't catastrophic, and getting food somewhere isn't catastrophic. And being nimble, dealing with transportation issues, which always happen. Okay. We built in an extra 4 hours on this journey because we knew it could take that long.
Yeah. And you're just reminding me too, that we've decided to delay Theo's canadian citizenship until we're in Canada. Because it's just so much easier when you read the stuff to be in Nelson. Where on my passport, my us passport, and my canadian passport. Born in Nelson. And so as the father, hey, I was born in this city, and probably the lady knows my last name, because my dad was a dentist in a small town for 35 years.
So that's just an interesting side note, that both of our children will be dual citizens of commonwealth and us.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: You know what's funny, Brad? I forgot, I think I knew this about you, that you were also a canadian. But that's another thing we share, is I am also canadian. I was born in Toronto, so I am a canadian citizen. So we're working on Arthur's canadian citizenship.
Yeah, he's getting the hat trick. He's going, we're going for free.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: I love it. Yeah, I used to look up and see, because Commonwealth is actually another citizenship, but it turns out you can only get Commonwealth citizenship basically if you've lost your citizenship for some reason, and yet you still have touches to one of the former colonies.
Yeah, canadian citizenship is actually a really powerful and fun thing to have. And then also dual citizenship, which I've had my whole life, because both my parents were american citizens when I was born on canadian soil.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: That's the exact same scenario for me. I lived there for two months before we moved back to the.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Yeah, we can talk about some of the differences there. It's another thing I like about this pod is that we're not just stuck within one ideology, which would maybe just be the US and how the US healthcare system works, for instance. Well, you and I both touch base with the canadian healthcare system as well, and you with the UK. And we could say, well, here's the pros and here's the cons. It's something I like about that and this podcast, so we'll get more into citizenship and what to do with that. And my last little anecdote on passports is that we got Theo's passport, and the way that you do it for a three or four month old, and I want to ask you how you did it. You literally use your iPhone and there's an app and you put them on their back and you just wait till they happen to turn their head with their eyes open right at the camera. And so Sarah Beth got that. And the very funny thing about it is that that baby photo of him at four months old will be his passport photo for five years.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: It's the same for it. We actually went into a little quick photo place because we had to get us, Canadian and UK all at the same time. So we just let a pro do it. But they lay him on a blanket and it only took like three tries to get a good one. He looks like it's like a baby mugshot, but yeah, he's going to have that for like five years. It's going to be great.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: That's wonderful.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: The one other thing I wanted to make sure I touched on in this embassy trip. So there's this unique thing when you're in the UK and you go to the US embassy, and I'm sure it's a somewhat similar occurrence in other places, but us UK have such a special relationship. There are a lot of Americans in the UK, so there's a whole second floor of the embassy. It's just for us citizen services. So Americans who lost a passport, Americans working on a visa, us service members, and registering your birth abroad.
And so we were up there this morning for a couple of hours. There were probably ten or 15 families, all with small children, all getting passports, everything from. We were probably the smallest baby by a couple of months because Arthur's not even a month old, and next youngest probably three or four months old. But then you had five and ten year olds, a 15 year old, all getting their passports for the first time.
And that was cool for a couple of different reasons. But the most relevant for this pod, I think, is that it was very validating that, again, traveling early was good for us.
It only gets harder when they're bigger, when they have opinions, when they need to be fed by something other than their mother when they can run and move and do all these things. So everyone, all of those parents looked at us, a lot of other people look at us carrying a couple of week old baby out, and they go, oh, my God, you guys are doing great. The parents of, like, there was two different families that had five children. Those moms looked at us and go, oh, you're smart. You're so lucky you did this when you could just put him in a sling and you don't have to make sandwiches and run around and blah, blah, blah. So just anyone who's listening, who's a dad, who's a new dad, or going to be a dad, take them out early because it is easier in a lot of ways because you could just pop them in a sling or in a bag or in the buggy, and they're good to go. It gets harder. At least my evidence being like, five or ten other families who all looked at us in envy as we were all going through the bureaucratic process of getting passports for these kids. So that was fun. But also, the other fun thing in all of this is everyone. It was such a community. Everyone's like, oh, you're a kid. Yeah, we're all kind of like families of american expats, but everyone's like, oh, tell me your story where you live. Oh, how cute is he? Everyone's on your side. There's a whole community of parents out there that are on your side. So if you're trying to get out, just go for it.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: You kind of mentioned that last time, and then I also mentioned it on the flight we took to Miami in January that I never knew that it's just the eyeballs of other dads and could be an 80 year old grandpa and just kind of gives you the eyeballs. Like, I've been there, buddy. I got your back. And by the way, if you need anything, these are the eyeballs you look to. I never experienced that. Bachelor Brad didn't know what that was, or married Brad didn't know what that was. Now, dad Brad, look around like, oh, society is on my side. This is tough.
Well, you brought up some things that kind of riff off what I want to say in my updates for Theo. But Theo is extremely crawling mobile, so that was less than five weeks from he was trying to now go anywhere. I think he's done three stairs up on his own, so that's pretty good. Also super dangerous. And he wants to stand. He goes to anything he can go to. Kind of help him stand. And you can see that he's starting that motion of standing in the middle of a room, and he can't quite do it yet. It's not all there. So that's beautiful and terrifying in its own ways.
And then what I cannot recommend highly enough. There's a program called solid starts, and it's everything you need to know about food, including, they'll say, if you want to follow our program, and I think we got it on sale, it was $65. I think it's maybe 130. Normally. It basically removes all of the thinking you have to do about getting your child to eat little things like, okay, introduce only one potentially allergen a week, and you're going to introduce it on Monday, in the morning when you've got time in case something happens. And if it works, then again on Thursday, and then you kind of say, okay, dairy check.
Or another piece of advice is really good, is every vegetable or fruit that we give him will give him in two different ways. So let's say we steam broccoli. One will be broccoli steamed, and the other will be that same broccoli, same recipe, mashed. And so he's starting to learn these things. But I cannot recommend highly enough when you can buy yourself the wisdom of others solid starts food program. They should sponsor us. And by sponsor us, I mean just use them. And if they gave a discount, that would be enough of a sponsor. They're super helpful.
And two other anecdotes on my side. So we started touring schools, and I have to say that my skepticism about touring schools has been proven out. And if Sarah Beth listens to this one, she'll know, this is my opinion. But when you're talking about schools, which is now not called. Not, I think it's just called daycare, there are levels. And so we talked about them. Like, is it a Mercedes or is it a Toyota?
And there's a difference between a Mercedes and a Toyota, but there's no difference between a Mercedes and a BMW. Look, if you love your car out there, you might be super mad. I just said that. Take it as a metaphor. There's no difference between a Mercedes suv and a BMW. And the differences that you're arguing about are like this little 2%, 98% the same. If you want to quibble, sure, we can quibble on the 2%. And so that's kind of where I left this one school going. Okay, so in business, if it's a commodity, if they're all the same, it's service. And price. In other words, do they have the right hours for us and which one's cheaper? And since we have three schools, we have a Waldorf, a Montessori, and a Reggio Emilia, all within a mile of our house, all about the same price. It's which everyone lets us in, and that's going to be our next two years. So that was one of the, you have to think critically about, are there actually differences here?
And then the final thing to share just on our side is my very best friend, who has a six year old, came and stayed for the weekend. So it was our first time with overnight people. And my dad fail will absolutely come out of the anecdotes from this, but my very best friend, we've been friends since like 94. 94.
He just kind of sat down and he gave me the reflection of, Brad, you're doing well, but you don't see how much you're going through.
And I realized I had cognitive bias about how well I'm doing, and that is making it so that I'm not seeing how much that I'm doing or how hard it is. And the fact that I'm keeping my mouth above water is worthy of honor, even though I can kind of say, hey, I feel good and exercised this week. I look at it and, you know, first seven months of baby, I'm happy to get a B minus on that. And I worked really hard for that B minus. And so that was a good reflection from a friend. So that's my updates from Brad, dad, theo world.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Well, that's great. I hope you probably are doing better than a B minus, but I'm glad you got that chance of reflection. Why don't we take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about getting back to work, because this is ultimately a podcast about both being fathers and working.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Daddy O podcast, episode twelve. Rob Burnett and I are here to talk about what it is to be a father, what it is to be in business, what it is to be a leader in both of those fields. And today, in the meat of the podcast, the b block, we're going to talk about something that Rob has going on, which is returning to work. And he helps make the work policy. He helps talk to HR, but now he's living it. And he's about to start coming back to work after baby Arthur was born about a month ago. So, Rob, please intro us. Tell us what you know. Tell us what you're thinking. What's changed? Go ahead.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Yeah. So it feels like I have to talk about the fact that I've been on parental leave for the last four weeks and I go back for the first time next week and that feels big and it's scary. And even though I love my job and I love my work, it's so pretty sad to have to go back and not just spend all day every day looking after my child. It's been very fun. And so I have tried very hard to be very thoughtful about making this transition back to work. And so I figured I would kind of share how I'm doing it in the hopes that it inspires others to think about how they're doing it and maybe help some people. So first and foremost, as I said, I've been off for four weeks, or I will have been off for four weeks by the time I go back.
I recognize that a lot of people, most people have two weeks or maybe even less, especially in the states. And for the record, if that's your situation, I'm so sorry. That sucks. It should practically be criminal.
We need to figure out better ways. And I'll put this out as a challenge to any ceos listening to this. How do we figure out how to give our fathers in particular? Because they often get very short amount of times and that ends up hurting the mothers, too. I've got a whole thing about this. It just makes childcare the mom's responsibility and we end up not being able to help because we didn't even have a chance to learn anything.
So I want to make it clear that women go through the physical stuff and they are amazing and they should take care and they should get a lot of time off and all that things. But if we don't give dads time off, they're never going to learn how to take care of their own kids and therefore, mom's not going to be able to get off the hook and go, go back to work and do what they want to do. So that's my rant there. And I've got plenty of rants on that front. But if you're a guy and you only get two weeks or you only get a couple of days, God forbid, I'm so sorry.
That does suck. And we should figure out how to fix it. But if you're lucky enough to have a little bit longer time, it can feel intimidating to get back to work. And if you're a CEO and you're coming back to your office, it can feel like you can feel a lot of pressure to get back.
And so I just wanted to again talk about how I'm doing it with my wife, who, for the record, is a physician, a doctor and a public health researcher. She gets a year off to be upfront and transparent. Half of it's fully paid. There's another three months where we get some statutory pay from the UK, and then three months will be unpaid. And we decided to take that because we're in a position to do so. But that's very lucky on our end. That's generous, even for the UK, and that gives us a lot of freedom to make this happen. So that's the starting point to all of this.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: So what's interesting to me, parental leave didn't really make sense to me outside of it was an expense item that companies had to bear occasionally. And that's growing up. I was born in 81, and I think that story was kind of starting to no longer be true, but kind of how I grew up with it, especially knowing a lot of solo entrepreneurs with small shops, and they're constantly losing employees, women. And I've completely changed on that, of course, over the course of the 2000s, but now living it on the dad's side, I always thought parental leave was just kind of unnecessary, not unwise, just kind of, again, an expense center or cost. And part of the reason for that is, I think, the generation above us, that was actually true. And I've been at networking events or stuff when I'm talking to people about this podcast, and they say, well, my dad never did a single diaper and was proud of it. And if that's your culture, if that's what you're living in, if your father. My father was born in 51, though I'm certain he did do diapers. But the generation above us, it wasn't necessarily true that parental leave mattered outside because other women were coming in and helping the new mom.
And now that we're more integrated with the family, I want to be a part of it. I am insanely thankful that we both work from home, that I can help do stuff during the day, and not all ceos can do that, not all dads can do that. And as my career is changing, that's also going to be changing in the next couple of years. But for right now, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. But the second side of it is people younger than us, people before baby, also don't get it. The older generation doesn't get it because they didn't have to get it. And the younger generation, if you haven't experienced what it is to be a good partner. And in this time, it also doesn't make sense. So when we're talking globally about our society, there's huge swaths of people who. This is a null set for them. Like, why would you even talk about it? And then it just feels like a burden. But for the people who are living it, it goes well, of course you should do that.
This is how you keep and retain good employees. I have two law firm partner friends. I don't know that they give eight months, and you can use it any way you want in the first three years of your baby's life. And for every baby, you get those eight months. And so a really good friend of mine, he's like, we just took. And he'd been grinding it out to become partner, so he needed a sabbatical anyway. So I think he took four months off, and then, like, one week for the rest of the year, one week a month for the rest of the year, something like that. Actually talked to him last night, and he's on second parental leave. But now that he's full partner, he's like, well, I'm on parental leave, but I still get some hours in anyway. It's just to say that the places who really cherish their human capital, their people, they have extremely generous leave. However, I also tend to find that places where an employee is more fungible or more of a blue collar worker, they have the bare minimum by law. And it's sad that that does need to change.
Sorry, your rant led to my rant, but tell me some more about what your story is or riff off what I said.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Well, it's good to break up the rants. We're both good at the ranting.
Yeah, I agree. And I think that it's incumbent upon, especially the entrepreneurs listening to this. Right. People working for small companies figure out how to make it.
There's got to be a way. And I don't have an answer yet, but there's got to be a way to make it beneficial to both parties, right?
It's not a vacation at all, but it's not just a vacation or time off for your employee. I feel way more recharged on work after having a month away from it. And as we've talked about in other podcasts, as the CEO of my company, I feel like my company will come out of this stronger because my team will have practiced being without me. And even if things weren't as good as they could have been in the short term, they'll be better in the long run.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: You're correct. I call that stress testing the team.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Right?
[00:23:54] Speaker B: You come back and anything that they've taken off your plate that they did at a passing level now is off your plate for forever. You still have the job of teaching them how to get up to an effective level, an efficient level, but that's a leadership job rather than an individual contribution. But you can never really tell that unless you're gone for a significant period of time. For instance, if it's something to do with the accounting of your company, you have to be gone for more than a month so that somebody else has to close the books and be responsible to them. Right? Or hiring and firing. What if there's a hiring and firing decision that needs to happen? That's actually two rungs below you as the CEO, which is where I kind of say it's good to know leadership and culture and vibe. But two rungs below you, you shouldn't be knowing the hiring and firing decisions. Maybe you're informative, maybe you've got some wisdom and insight, maybe you can be counsel, but you shouldn't be doing it.
And most ceos, especially of growing companies, they're so used to doing it because there didn't used to be two rungs below you. There was just you and then there was one rung below you, and it was that way for a long time. And now there are just two rungs. But once you have three rungs of people, you're like, oh, I need to step out of this. And the only way to teach the team I can't help is be gone.
Yeah.
Okay, so you're excited to get back to work and you don't know what the team is going to think or say or do, and you've got a bunch of different people and lots going on.
What is hour one back at work for you?
[00:25:30] Speaker A: I'm looking forward to getting back to work. I'm not looking forward to hour one, I think day one. So here's my plan. And I want to do an in depth podcast about this after I do it my first week or two back. But my plan is a couple of things. One is I have not looked at my email since the morning my wife was in labor. Refused, and so I'm probably going to have, if I have fewer than 1000 emails to get through, I'll be shocked. Now, a lot of them will be immediately into the trash or redundant. I did have people take me off of any ccs before I went out, so I shouldn't be on very many big threads. But probably day one is basically going to be getting through my inbox and figuring out what the to do list is.
The other major thing I'm going to do, and I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to do it, is I've got basically a group chat with my managers of my different teams and I'm just going to ask each of them to schedule a one on one with me next week and schedule for an hour. Bring an agenda, walk me through what I've missed and what are the items that are now outstanding that need to be worked on and hopefully that by the end of that week and working with all of them, presuming all of them kind of bring me the right information, I should be able to get through the end of next week fully up to speed and ready to go. And the final thing I'm going to.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Do, I'll bet under you'll say I need two weeks. You'll need more time. I probably will, yeah. But that's good. May I ask a quick anecdote for you? But we're both wearing our whoops right now and our battery chargers are on. And just notice that I would like to see your WHOOP score next week compared to this week because WHOOP will also your stress and your sleep and everything because you had baby, but now you've been four weeks at home doing baby life is easier. And then what does week one come back to? What I will say on that for me, and before I get into my anecdotes of returning to work are it is easier to be a dad at home, even if I'm putting in 8 hours of chop wood, carry water work that is easier than the cognitive and the leadership burden of a company.
I just love to see if your WHOOP can actually give us data behind that.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think that's one thing you told me that I agree with, is being a parent is very hard because it's full on, but it's an entirely different cognitive load than doing a complex thing like running a business. Doesn't mean people who take care of children aren't smart and aren't doing very hard work, but it is fundamentally different. It's more full on. It's more exhausting taking care of a kid because you really can't.
Well, it feels more full contact 24/7 ready. This is much more intense in a way. I'm explaining this poorly, but it's a different stress.
The final thing I'm doing, I just want to make sure I get to it. The final thing I'm going to do from a kind of process standpoint as I go back is I'm likely going to leave my vacation responder on for another week because as I've learned, everybody loves to forgive a baby. And so if you leave your vacation responder on for an extra week saying, oh, I'm still out on parental leave, blah, blah, blah, here's a picture of my adorable child. Tide you over while you wait for my email response.
That will give me a full week. Because what will inevitably happen is people will have seen, oh, I'm back on February 20 eigth. So he'll respond to me on the 20 eigth, right? I'm the most important person. I'm his most important client, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm just going to give myself a week to catch up so I can exceed expectations because people will assume they won't hear from me till the week after next. And I can hopefully get through to people or have responses ready and lined up and ready to go.
So take advantage of that, everybody. Because the outside world doesn't know what your policy is. They don't know when you're supposed to be back, when you have to be back at work. And again, if you say it's because you're taking care of a kid, some people will be old school. Some people will wonder what the heck you are and why you're not prioritizing your business. But a lot of people will be like, oh, that's great. It'll buy you so much leeway and so much grace. And when you get back on that first call with your big client, you're like, hey, sorry I haven't been with you, but here's this cute, adorable child. It's been amazing experience. It inevitably buys you so much leeway. I can't wait for that.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: I like the idea. It's kind of a soft launch for a play or for restaurant, right? It's like we're kind of open, but not really.
I love that.
So just to share some of the recollections that I have from coming back to work and how I did things much worse than you and my situation was very different. But again, starting off with being a CEO coach, and I do more than just executive coaching, right? I get in the business, but the fundamental problems I'm working on with my clients are the hardest problems in their business. I don't ever get the easy problems, the black line problems.
Joe and Frank have been doing this work for a while and they need to be 5% better because we have 5% more work. I never get those. So in some ways, that's why I feel more like a CEO. Despite the fact I run a very small consulting shop, my work isn't a CEO, but my work is helping ceos. Where am I going with this? I was getting bored of chop wood, carry water as my month was ending, and I had up to two months with my co founder in agreement. But everybody had told me this truth. Brad, you're going to get bored and you're going to start fidgeting and stuff. And so this was July of 2023, and Theo was doing great, sarah Beth was doing great. And so my mind starts wandering, and I'm walking the puppy and this. And all of a sudden, I get into my office one day, kind of opening it up, just reading the times or something, and I get this little thought. I said, I need to get a pulse on the industry because entrepreneurship is changing.
What do llms and AI have to do with it? What's going on with the funding scope? What's happening? All these pieces that I kind of started putting together, I said, you know what? I just need to do a listening tour. That's a great idea. You know what? I'm going to post on LinkedIn. I want to take 50 meetings in 50 days just to listen to people. I don't care who it is. There's lots of people who've wanted to meet me, hear what I have to say, help them as with entrepreneurship. And so I go into the other room, honey, honey, I've got this great idea. I can do 50 meetings in 50 days. Here's why. And she looks at me and she smiles. She goes, that's a great idea.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: I know.
[00:32:10] Speaker B: I'm not coming back to work till Monday. This is Thursday. This is going to be great.
Well, the results of which are 50 meetings is a lot in 50 days. I ended up, like, capping out about 38. I'll tell you, some of the things that I learned on that, but not known to me, is that my co founder had been successfully poached by one of our clients to be their co CEO. So before paternity leave, we were two people. We had the kind of a halftime person bringing on, and we had two people in the wings. So we're kind of looking at by the end of 2023, going from two people for five years, then end of 2023, we're going to be five full time employees.
Week one coming back, that strategy got chucked out the window.
Concurrent with that, I'm taking all these meetings and I'm learning that everything that I had done that had been working for the past five years, how to get clients, what to charge, what industries to go after, all of that had shifted and it had been shifting over the year, but the real shift happened while I was gone. And so it was actually paternity leave. Gave that stress test of I would have kept doing the wrong things and I would have kept trying to hold on to my co founder, even though she had an opportunity to make career changing wealth and ability. If I hadn't taken that time off, it would have been way worse. And yet also coming back on the business side, it was like, I've got a baby and this is cool and he's a lot of work.
Oh, and my business needs a full pivot, a full retailering.
Okay, let's get to work, let's make it happen. And we're just coming out of that now. So that would be a full eight months to go through those stages. Because as much as Rob, you care about me having a kid, my mom cares about me having a kid, and my former co founder cares about me having a kid, the market does not care.
And so that'll be interesting for me to hear from you is once you touch base with the market again, you'll touch base with your team next week, and you'll touch base with random stuff and get together next week. But I'm wondering what the market thinks when you come back. Will they forgive you? Yeah, because you've got a baby. But did they move on or did you lose things?
You have a much bigger team than I do. You have 25, 30 employees. You shouldn't have missed anything, but you probably did. So we'll test that, we'll see, we'll learn, and we'll record it.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: For sure. And that reminds me of one thing I should mention, is that, so when I wrote the policy for our company about rental leave, it was three months. How you could use however you wanted in the first year.
And the only two other people who've taken it in our company just took the full three months because they were both mothers, they had to recover all that good stuff.
I decided partially out of fear that the market would move too quickly, and partially out of this is what I thought was best, is I decided to only take four of the twelve weeks. So I decided to, and I shouldn't say three months and twelve weeks interchangeably. It was twelve weeks. I decided to take four. And then my plan is to be a little bit more liberal. Throughout the rest of the year, taking a week here or there, less formally, but just I'll have to take some trips, see some family, things like that.
And so while I would have loved to take three months, I don't think it was appropriate. Again, as the CEO of a subsidiary, but a regulated business, a financial business with 30 employees and contractors, I didn't think it was appropriate. As much as I want to champion parental leave and how important this is, I don't think it was appropriate for me to take that much consecutive time off without checking in. I just didn't think it would work. I think the market would shift too quickly. I would be too far out of the loop. A month was about as long as I thought I could do. Still pressure test the team, still get a good step away from myself without being so far out of the loop that there was no coming back. So it sounds like we both had about a similar amount of time off.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: We did the piece that I want to honor you for, and I want to tell other dads out there, too, you're going to find your own journey. And for some dads, three months, maybe you're exhausted. Maybe you've been working for all this time. Maybe you just love doing the work of being with baby. Maybe you are going to feel more like the stay at home dad and work part time and mom's going to go do other stuff and that could change all. That's fine. But the piece that I really want to honor you on, Rob, is that you talked about how much consecutive time you could take off without dropping the rest of the time as yours owned, to be a father in parental leave. And if I could have waved the magic wand, and if 2023 was the same financial year as 2022 for me and my co founder and all that, I would have absolutely taken one week off a month for the rest of the year just to support Sarah Beth, to make sure that I had enough sleep and rest and exercise, that I could show up to both activities strongly as I'm gaining the muscle of becoming a dad and a supporting actor. Because this is new novel and it's a learning curve and it's a hard learning curve when you're gone. So I just want to honor you for understanding how much consecutive and then not dropping the rest of it. Well done.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Appreciate that. Yeah. And we'll see how much I end up taking and all that stuff, but I am looking forward to it. I want to make sure we hit on as well is my partnership. And the one other thing I've done is not everything I've done to prepare for returning to work has been about work. It's also been about so I wanted to talk through kind of what I've done with my partner Laura, to talk about, okay, I'm about to return to work and she's not.
What does that mean for us as a, you know, one thing I really want to do is be and the reason why I've done this podcast, right, is I want to be a very active father. And one thing Laura and I have had to grapple with is, okay, for the next eleven months I'm going to have to be working and she's not.
And it's almost impossible to ask me to be a 50 50 parent and a full time worker who happens to also have a high stress, high mental load job of a CEO of this financial technology company that's regulated all this stuff.
And Laura has a very promising probably, or perhaps a more promising career than I have. She probably has more earning potential. She's certainly doing better work in the world as a physician and public health researcher and she cares about it. But because of the way the world's set up, she's getting a year off and now she's in the middle of a PhD. It works out really well. It won't hurt her career almost at all in a way that some people can't get away with.
But it does mean that for this next eleven months, I don't know how to be a 50 50 parent with her and also a full time employee, a full time worker, and also maintain any level of sanity or time for myself.
We had to have a discussion, and it's one we've had an initial discussion, but we don't know how the whole year is going to look. But what we decided to do was this, which is we laid out our typical week, which is what do we want to do on each day? Let's create a schedule and let's set a baseline. And so this gets more complicated because my situation is so unique. I live in the UK, but I work us hours, which means I work 02:00 p.m. To 10:00 p.m. Which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is I get these huge mornings free to be with them. So we can take blocks to go to the gym or go to a coffee shop together and do a little work and read and relax. So we've set up our week on what we're going to do with those big mornings and then we've discussed how we're going to kind of do dinner and bedtime, and we've kind of laid all that out. And I think it was really important to have that conversation because it would have been very easy for me to dive back into work, get stressed, and just not be participating or.
I think I'm doing my share and what my share is, is yet to be determined. Right. It's not going to be 50%, but what is it? I don't know.
So I don't know what my share is going to look like, but I want it to be a fair share. And now I don't know what a fair share is when I'm working full time and she's not, but it's something greater than zero and probably less than 50% of all the parenting.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: It's also tough because we're coming into a different spot where we're starting to be able to actually have a schedule. I'm laughing a little bit about your thought that your schedule could possibly work because baby, again, is not sleeping hormonally yet. So babies early on, they're not following circadia close to earth rhythms. And so there's going to be good days and bad days that happen at two. And the baby doesn't know if it's 02:00 a.m. Or p. M. And so a little bit. Yeah, it's kind of rob plans. God laughs or maybe rob plans. Arthur laughs so that's a little bit funny. But then for us, it was actually our morning walk this morning was talking about, hey, we need to sit down and have some scheduling. I don't want to call it a list or a schedule. We're going to call it agreements. We're going to have this agreements of this part of the house and that part of the house and these days and that days, because what we've been doing in the chaos of baby is we've been potshotting it. We just, oh, I'm going to take care of this. And they're going to understand that I took care of that, and it's not working. The communication is breaking down. The first four months, that was fine. We were just hanging on, doing our best. But now that we're both back at work, we're both doing big things, and then the shifting sands of work or family or friends and everything, we need to have some agreements on how we approach the problems, not even the problems, just the work. And that one agreement that we're going to have is don't make up new tasks. Midday, midweek, mid sentence, and that was a big aha for both of us.
Brad CEO Brad I make up tasks all the time. I write them out, I accomplish them.
Brad father Brad I need to see what's going on in the situation and say in the agreements, where am I helping or hurting by being involved or trying to take over or waiting to get results? Waiting to be, am I supposed to be reactive or proactive here?
We need to have agreements and we haven't written them yet. That was the aha today. And I'm very much hoping that they lead to greater success.
[00:43:16] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's definitely something in our relationship where I'm a little bit more, both Laura and I are very organized, but in our own ways. And not to call out my wife, but she's much more kind of build the airplane midair, like, oh, it's 1030 in the morning and I want to get a workout in. I'm going to go do that. Whereas if I haven't thought about it like the day before and planned out my day, I just don't pivot that quickly, which seems OD as a CEO and tech entrepreneur, I should be able to pivot quickly. But I want to know, like, okay, I'm going to the gym these three days and we're going to do dinner out this night and blah, blah, blah. Now obviously with a baby, that there's a huge wrench in things. But to my mind and for me and actually for both of us, Laura acknowledges that this works better is if we have a set, what the week is supposed to look like. Now, if we wake up on the morning, we're supposed to go to the gym and Arthur's not having it, we can pivot, but we can't wake up and figure out what we're doing that day while we're in bed trying to figure out when to wake up, when to eat breakfast, where to go, what to do. And so we're proud of ourselves because we've done a lot of this work as partnership free baby, because it's just the work we've done on our relationship. Sure. And it's translated really well in the sense that these are the same problems that are going to get amplified by having a child. So we sat down and said, okay, here's what we think. We want the week to look like. It might all go to hell, but we've done it. And then the final big wild card here. And this is something I just more talk about because I'm stressed about it, not because I have any grand insights or solutions is the sleep. So the one thing that's made this month pretty darn manageable for us, and you mentioned my WHOOP, is I've been in the green almost every single day this month. But it's because we go to bed at like 08:00 p.m. And we don't get out of bed until like 08:00 a.m. So we're spending like 12 hours in bed. And when you spend 12 hours in bed and you actually fall asleep at like 08:00 which I can do because I'm a sleepy guy and I'm happy to get my sleep.
You can wake up for three or 4 hours, change nappies, diapers for the Americans, you can listen to the baby cry. I can talk to Laura while she's feeding him a little bit here and there, and I can still get more sleep than I'm used to. I can get 9 hours of sleep some of these nights. Now it just takes 12 hours to accomplish that. Now, all of a sudden, instead of going to bed at 08:00 p.m. You go to bed at 11:00 p.m. And you might have to wake up earlier. That's going to throw us for a loop. And that's where I don't know what Laura has talked about is taking on a little bit more of the overnight burden. We've also talked about over the next couple of months really buckling down on sleep training. We don't know what we're going to do yet. We don't have a plan. But just knowing that in our lives, that's going to be whatever we've decided to do, we're going to prioritize. It might not work, but we're not going to wing it. Those are things we've talked about. And Laura's been amazing about saying, like, well, if you're going to work, you do need to.
So, but that's what if I'm looking ahead for the icebergs headed our way, the sleep is the one that scares me the most. Because if we don't get that right, everyone's just going to be in tension. It's the foundation of everything. I said this in an earlier podcast, and this is the thing that I'm going to least be able to control going forward.
[00:46:42] Speaker B: And your sleep is now no longer your company or you and Laura's decisions. Right. There's another party in here who is in power dynamics, the person who cares the least, carries the most power. And just to anybody who's listening to this just think about it, right? Like, you can't get somebody who just doesn't care. And Arthur by design doesn't care. And so how can you and Laura create structures around that? And there's different methods that we've heard about and we've learned and we've kind of found our way through it. And it's imperfect and we always want to change it to be better, but it actually just works. And most nights when we're tired, it's the solid solution. And this leads back to, it's a phrase from a venture capitalist. It's well over the world. It's a normalized phrase. But Brian, he just told me one time about, as a VC, strong opinions loosely held.
And that's really my counsel to you, my friend, is for the schedule, for the sleep, for how you and Laura split 50 50 partnership, but not 50 50 baby raising. All that strong opinions come in. Be wise. Read books. Listen to this podcast. Listen to this podcast. Listen to this podcast. And in the moment, do not hold those. It's just loosely held.
That one's right out the window.
It took a long time to make that and a little time for it to go away.
[00:48:09] Speaker A: I love that phrase, and I've lived that a lot, actually. Have a strong opinion. Do your homework. It's not working. Pivot. Move on to the next thing, or let it go for that day and try again tomorrow.
Let it go today. We're supposed to go to the gym. It's not going to happen. All right, let it go.
Let it go. Go do again tomorrow to wrap it up, and then we can go into dad wins and dad fails.
That's my plan for going back to work. I wanted to share it with everybody before I actually do it. And then hopefully we're coming to the end here of season one of this podcast. We'll probably do the next episode about what it actually is like to be back at work. But if anyone listening has any tips or tricks for getting back in the saddle or any anecdotes or stories they want to share, email us at
[email protected] well, Brad, any final thoughts about getting back to work before we take a break and then come back in for the dad wins and dad fails?
[00:49:08] Speaker B: No, I think that was a rich conversation. I'm glad that we got to have it and that you helped me remember what my journey was like, because it's hard to remember when someone says, what was it like getting back to work? What month was that?
So thank you so much for helping and priming me and also just for your intention about going back and about it. Learned a lot by doing this. Thank you.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: No problem. All right. We'll be right back.
All right. Welcome back. We're going to wrap up today's episodes with our dad wins and dad fails for the week. Brad, do you want to go first?
[00:49:44] Speaker B: I'd love to go first this week. So a couple, three wins and fails. So the first fail, classic fail. Friends are over. And we did too much on Saturday, but everything felt good. It was sunny, the snow had come out. There's a six year old getting to sled for the first time. And we had a great time. Then we had a little downtime and then we went to a thing called junkyard social and had a great time. Then had some downtime and had some lunch. And then we know dinner would be too much. So let's do dinner at home. Let's make it easy. Steak, rice and a salad. Great. Makes sense. Except for Sarah Beth wants salmon, so that's fine. And then she gets time to do an hour peloton. She's in the middle of this training schedule. Everything's going great. And budy and I, we take a look at New York Times, a quick way to cook steak, and it's like a 15 minutes project. So we've got everything dialed. The salmon is coming in, the salad's already been made, the rice has already been made. Everything's done. We don't know what ended up happening, but these steaks took over an hour to cook. And along the way, Sarah Beth not only missed eating, but had to go right into baby window of going to bed. And that is just my fault.
There's no hiding from it. There's no nothing. If I had communicated better, if I hadn't tried a new plan for the steaks, if we'd noticed they were thicker, whatever. But in the end, it was my responsibility to get the meal done, get it done on time so that mom could eat before baby and I just straight up have to own did that one wrong fail on the half fail, half win side. I really loved what you taught me last week, Rob, about texting one through five for how baby is doing while mom is gone or while I'm out. And I've been doing that really well. And for those just listening or to remind you, one, baby asleep. Two, awake, happy and fine. Three, some form of fussy four, I need you five, emergency.
And it's really easy now for me to text a one or a two. And hey, we're walking with the dog, she doesn't know or she's getting her haircut or it's her night to teach. It's been really helpful and easy. So I want to thank you for that. The mistake that I made was I said this to her, that this is a cool thing to do, but I didn't really reinforce for her what the numbers meant. And so she knew that low numbers, good. But I said, hey, sweetie, how's this working for you? She goes, well, I thought a zero was he's asleep and a five is the house is on fire. And I went, okay, so that's the half fail part of it is got to get better at the communication. But what a great tip from you last week. And then finally the win for us. I was touching base on this in the b block is that we're starting to have a schedule that makes sense for the real world. And that schedule is I'm almost always up earlier than everyone. And now that the puppy doesn't have to go out for an immediate walk, otherwise he's a terrorist. My job is to come in kind of slowly, do my things in the house. But exactly at seven, I come and wake theo up. He now has a morning revelry and if mom wants to sleep in, mom can sleep in, that's fine. If she wants to get up and we all go for a walk, that's fine. No questions about her side of the equation. But now that there's that 07:00 a.m. Start period, we're starting to be able to have a schedule along the way of what he ends up doing. And so that's really good. And my little anecdote of just dad joy in it is if he's not quite ready to be awake yet, I come and sit him down and I read the New York Times out loud to him as my morning 15 minutes. So he gets to hear my voice and I get to practice being with him. And that. So that's all the combination of from fail at stake to win at reading the New York Times and waking baby up run the gambit this week.
[00:53:35] Speaker A: That's awesome. That reminds me to right now, Arthur's too young to even do the simplest baby books. He just doesn't understand them. And Laura Blesser is trying so hard to engage him with anything. Books, nursery rhymes, anything. And I have taken a more pragmatic approach, which is all he cares about is hearing my voice and being close to me. It doesn't matter if it's the New York Times or my book or a nursery rhyme. I'm going to be subjected to nursery rhymes for a long, long time. I don't need to start earlier. So I'll play my music, I'll read my own book out loud, all that stuff. Way better, in my opinion.
But that's awesome. Otherwise, fantastic.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: Rob, let me flip the script back to you. Dad wins. Dad fails. What's been going on this last week?
[00:54:23] Speaker A: Yeah. So I feel good because I feel like I've got proper ones this week for maybe the first time. So we're getting better at this podcast. So the dad, I'll start with my dad win, which I'm actually going to call it kind of like a win for all dads and a win for parents. It's a small one, but it's a win, and I like it. So I mentioned earlier in the podcast, I was at the US embassy this morning to get passport for my son, which was also a win as we got him a passport.
[00:54:50] Speaker B: So that's great.
Sure.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: And I mentioned that there were a lot of families there, so there was a lot of kids around, a lot of diapers being changed. And Arthur needed his diaper changed in one of the waiting periods. So I, of course, take him, and I'm walking around to the restroom, and when I get there, there's a family restroom, and then there's a men's and women's room. The family restroom is occupied. All right. I go around to the men's room. The men's room is not only occupied in terms of someone changing their son, but there is a second father waiting to change there. So I'm in a line to change the diaper, and I'm the third dad in line. And the way these restrooms were set up, if I can paint a picture, you kind of walk in and you can either go left for women, white right for men, and you can look through the door on either end and see the baby changing table. And then obviously, you kind of take a left to go into the restroom itself.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:55:52] Speaker A: So their baby changing tables are visible from kind of the outside. So there are three men in line to change their children. And I turn around and the women's room is completely free. There is no one there changing. So in order to get our son changed. So one, I thought that that was a nice win for dads of this generation.
[00:56:14] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
[00:56:15] Speaker A: We're changing diapers. We're taking responsibility. I hope that that is a very small anecdote that points to a larger trend of engaged dads. I think it's awesome. But also, it got me out of diaper changing duty because I was like, well, this is going to take too long. So I got to go back to Laura and be like, there are no women changing diapers and only men. So if you want him changed in the next ten minutes, you got to take him and take him into the women's room, which she gladly did, and we laughed about it. But I think that was a win. I think that's a win for two reasons. Then for my dad fails, I've got a funny one, and I've got a more serious one, so I'll start with a more serious one. It's still a little funny, but Laura and I have this thing in our relationship where you'd think because we both speak English, we'd communicate well, but you'd be surprised at how much a little accent and slightly different vocabulary make day to day chatting in the house hard when there's any kind of noise. So if Laura's, like, upstairs or we're in a busy room, I find myself often having to ask her to repeat herself.
Now, that's cute and fun, but now with a baby who cries, it's kind of gone to the next level, and I've basically been a bad listener. So it's gotten to the point where basically, anytime Laura says anything, I have to ask her to repeat herself. And she's rightly starting to get mad about it. And I'm trying so hard to listen to get the information that she's trying to convey into my brain, and I am failing at, um. And that's a little more serious because communication is important and it's made Laura a little upset a couple times this week, and I need to get better at it, and I'm scrambling to figure out how to get better at that.
[00:58:05] Speaker B: If I could riff off that for a second. I finally figured out one of the reasons I struggled to hear Sarah Beth, and the reason is because she's running out of air, and the last two words of her sentence drop off. And they're usually the point, especially if it's a chop wood, carry water.
Like, hey, we've got a lot going on. I know you're going to do daddy o in a minute, and the nanny's.
[00:58:28] Speaker A: Not quite here yet.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Can you make oatmeal?
Wait, am I making oatmeal for Theo or for you? Because the way we make it and the amount is totally just. It was a funny.
There's no communication problem. This is just purely, like, physiological.
The last two words are being said softer, and I didn't hear them. And so that was just another moment we had in the last week that like, oh, do better.
[00:58:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Anyway, I got to work on that. And then the more fun note is, again, as I mentioned, this is our little trip to London, 24 hours trip at a hotel. We thought we did pretty good. We packed the pram, just two backpacks in one small bag. So we're traveling pretty light, doing good, and we worked on like, okay, how many things we need to pack for Arthur? Well, he's never had more than like one blowout in a 24 hours period. So we're going to bring three changes of clothes and a bunch of nappies, and it should be fine.
He pooped through by like, by that, by yesterday evening, basically all three of his outfits. And we had just more blowouts than we've had at all. So we were down to the very last outfit that was kind of okay because it only had a little bit of poop on it and a little bit of spit up on it and all the cute outfits to go to the embassy out the window. And we did one last kind of final visit to a friend before we got the train back here. And we're like, if he does a blowout again, we're ho. Like, he's going to go in his sleep sack and a nappy. That's it. That's all we're going to be able to do. So we under packed on the clothing and had a heck of a disaster multiple times on the way out. But we survived. We made it. We're only a little dirtier for it. So that was our fail for the week. I'm packing extra clothes every time now.
[01:00:28] Speaker B: Well done. Well, those are dad wins and fails.
[01:00:31] Speaker A: Appreciate it. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks for sticking with us. If you're here till the end, we hope you appreciate the podcast. If you do, please like or subscribe. And if you have any dad wins and fails of your own. Any suggestions for the pod? You want to be a guest, email us at
[email protected] thank you, everyone, and.
[01:00:52] Speaker B: Have a wonderful week. We'll see you again soon.
Bye.
