[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the dad EO podcast. I'm your host, Rob Burnett, and along with my co host, Brad Bickerton, we're exploring modern fatherhood and how it blends with business leadership. Both Brad and I are new fathers, and we both run businesses. On this podcast, you'll hear about our parenting journeys, as well as from parenting experts, CEO's, and other business leaders. We're going to dive deep on being dads, business lessons, and the balance of work and fatherhood. We hope you'll join us on this journey. Please enjoy the show.
Hey, everyone. I'm Rob.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: And I'm Brad.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Welcome to the show. On today's episode, we're going to talk about taking an actual vacation, a little bit of homesickness. We're going to dive into one of Brad's famous frameworks, the CEO personal journey, and then stay tuned till the end to hear our dad wins and fails for the week.
Brad, good to see you. I got to see you in person for the first time in a long time, just a couple days ago, but it's good to be back on here. How you doing? How's theo? How's life?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Yeah, well, first off, going to see you was the first time ever in my life that I actually went to go meet a baby. I already know you and Laura a little bit, so I'm going to see my friends, but I was actually going to meet a baby, and they, you know, bachelor Brad didn't have to do that, didn't care to do that. And it was tons of fun. And I especially liked that. After being there for about three minutes, you guys are cooking breakfast, and you go, oh, here he is. And now all of a sudden, I am. I am understood to be capable of holding a child. That was. That was revolutionary for me. That hadn't happened before because it was.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: We're trying. We're trying to trust just about everybody. Withholding him. We want to be very good about just passing him off, taking the breaks, and just getting him used to being tossed around.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: That was tons of fun. The other thing is just the complete difference in five months. And I wish that I could have brought Theo to you so you could feel, not just, is he heavier, which. That's fine. That's weight. When I got Arthur, I was like, oh, he's so light. He's like, floating away. But also, Arthur is still growing those strength, those neck muscles and those body muscles, whereas Theo's a little bit more. He's, like, on your arm, and he's kind of hanging out and he's got the strength for it and everything.
My puppy seems to also enjoy when we're recording, running in circles after his tail. That's not unusual. Um, some other things going on.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say is, yeah, it's fun. We've got a, I've got a cousin with a one year old who was born almost exactly a year before Arthur. And that's really fun because it's literally just a time machine. It's like, okay, I know what my baby's going to look like a year from now. And it's very, it's very fun.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: That is fun. And then, well, the other side of that is, too, that our neighbors have a daughter and she's a year older than Theo and he's already bigger than her, so she's just really tiny and she's really subtle and quiet. Just these big eyes poking out under this hat, like, well, no, Theo is not going that direction. He's a romp and stomping baby boy. And we still do. We still do co sleeping after his first feeding in the night. And he's starting to, I would say sleep crawl, I think is the way to do it, but it's not subtle. Sleep crawl. And the other day, Sarah Beth and I was like, what do we do about this? Because his eyes are kind of closed, but they're kind of nice. But he's moving. I call it the torpedo move, where he just, he leaves mom and he's like rams me, and he's just. Because I'm the stopping place for him. And I wake up, oh, I'm getting torpedoed by my son's head.
And so he was actually up at two in the morning the other day. I said, well, all right, I'll take him because he's up, up, not kind of dozy, not foodie. And I put him on the ground and he moved so fast, I swear. And I know I was groggy, so that's maybe not fair. It felt like the exorcist. It felt like, this baby cannot possibly be moving this fast. It is somewhere between creepy 02:00 a.m. And Jack. Jack from the incredibles. And it's hard not to, not to want to neg on your son a little bit. To be like, like, stop being terror demon, baby, please, just please stop being demon.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Slow down a little bit.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Slow down a little bit.
And yeah, he just needed to, I don't know, get something out of his system or. I often joke that Sarah Beth's secretly injecting caffeine through the. Through the breasts, you know, because sometimes he has a little bit of mom's milk, and then. Whoo. Let's go.
So that was lovely. The other thing was, last week was spring break. As many know, Sarah, about teachers, one class at CU, and to my chagrin, that means we are on the cu schedule, even though it's only 3 hours a week. We are now indelibly on school schedule. And I haven't had a fixed schedule as an entrepreneur. Yeah. Since 2008 was the last time I had a fixed schedule because school didn't count. All that. And now we're starting to be these, like, okay, we're going to leave on Friday afternoon for spring break like everyone else.
But what I was very thankful for, first off, last spring break, same thing. We took a sprinter van to moab while she was two trimesters pregnant. And it was just beautiful, beautiful time that we got to spend together. So we got to reminisce about the year that's gone by for us and the things we thought and knew and believed and hoped. And here we are a year later, and baby's nine months old tomorrow. The second thing was, it was an actual vacation for me. We went up to a place called Gunnison, Colorado, which was a very quiet place, and we had a place to stay, and it was well provisioned place that we know the owners. And so it wasn't like a random Airbnb. It was just beautiful.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: And I really love Gunnison.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:18] Speaker A: I highly recommend to anyone who's never been beautiful.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: No, no. Gunnison's awful. Yeah, don't go. No.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yeah. What am I saying? Gunnison's terrible. Don't go.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Terrible, terrible, terrible. It's got 6500 people. If our entire listener group. Well, no, that wouldn't even matter. So the benefit for me was a much slower pace of life. And we did a digital detox best we could. And for me, this actually stemmed from what you said, rob, which was. It was hard. You were noticing that when you're holding Arthur for hours, you kind of can just drift back into instagram scrolling and that. That's not how you want to spend your time. Oh, yeah, I do. I do that with podcasts. Not that if you're a dad right now and you've got a baby in your arms, that listening to this podcast is bad, but it really helped me understand.
I tethered. I literally put my phone in an awkward place, off to the side. And really the only person who needed to get in touch with me last week would be Sarah Beth. Well, she's just one floor away and learning. Don't text me when I'm one floor away. Come find me. And I'm not going to be listening to a podcast. I will be able to hear you.
And really, this is something I've learned a lot in my life. It does take two or three days to just unwind those habits, those ways of thinking, whats going on and what a beautiful place. Gunnison in the spring, to be able to walk with your son and point things out. And then after his morning nap, he and I would always put him in the backpack and wed go mud track up to a place called Heartland Rocks. And really just being able to spend time talking to him was something that was really heartfelt for me. And into the wins and fails that I'll say later. But it also because he and I got closer by just being together so often that it was a lot easier for me to notice win and have the ability to put him down in a new place. And the huge win, well, I'll tell my wins and fails about that later, but there's a big one and any father will get it.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Well, stay tuned for it.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
The other's a little bit of the act of service. That doesn't feel like an act of service. But I gave Sarah Beth we initially wanted to give her two days of 2 hours of book writing, and I gave her six to 7 hours a day for four days until she actually got.
Cause there's a lot of pent up ness when you've got a book that's two thirds finished, some of it's editing, some of it's writing, some of it's this new idea, some of its research, and it's all kind of this quagmire. It's no longer that blank page, and you just rant, right, putting it, codifying it. And she got to the place where she'd really done her work and it started to slow down. And that's when you know that you're back into authorship, right. You got that easy stuff out of the way. Now it's time for the grind. And so I was very thankful that I was able to be with Theo to relieve her, to do something else. So that was huge. And then the third thing was, I did have one client call, and the idea that came out of that, that I really wanted to share with our community here is, what do you do when you have infinite possibilities of what you could do? In this person's case, it's where does he want to live for the next 15 years. And hes also a father and a CEO. And he didnt know. There were too many questions. Is it politics? Is it weather? Is it housing costs?
What are the factors? And he really just said, hey, Brad, how do I make a decision when I know there are bad decisions and I know there are good decisions, but im just lost in miasma of it. Its not analysis paralysis, its close.
What I coach on this is I coach what's called the exclusionary principle. Let's start off by the easiest thing possible, which is excluding dumb ideas.
And it is amazing how helpful it is in decision making.
[00:08:53] Speaker A: Just start by taking stuff, bad stuff off the board.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's amazing. I actually think of it as a pie graph and you just kind of, you're excluding things along the way. And it's really easy to take an infinite possibility and exclude 90% of those infinite possibilities as not worthy, not smart, not good for him. It's literally he could travel. He could live anywhere in the United States, anywhere he wants. Bottom of Florida, top of Washington state, Maine, California, anywhere he wants. And he started by trying to do the inclusionary principle. I want to include having a pool. I want to include good schools. I want to include this. I said it's too hard. Let's exclude the bad things. And this is similar to what Sarah Beth got to do with writing. Theres something magical that happens in your critical thinking when you just start doing the easy stuff first, then when you start getting to the medium of the hard stuff, youre kind of already wired for that thought process.
He gave me his homework just yesterday, and it was really thoughtful and good. And basically he narrowed it down to two spots in America that would work for him. One hes lived in before and the other one he knows very well. But he now knows why theyre in the inclusion side because hes excluded everything else. We can get into the inclusionary principle, how to make those decisions later. But that's all came out of digital detox. Good rest.
You know, exercised every day, spent time with Theo, and then right when a client needed me, I was so ready to be. Hey, I got this one with you. Here's a simple framework. Here's some simple homework. I'll keep you accountable next week. Let's go. That was last.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: Very good.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Congratulations.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Thanks, Rob. What about you? Updates and Arthur and Laura? And where are you right now? Because I know where you are, but the audience can't keep up with you.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So I am in Colorado, home for me vacation spot for most. So this is something I wanted to talk about on this episode because I think, Brad, you and I have come in here with what you like to call regular hard and what a lot of people would call easy journeys of fatherhood. We've got good partners, we've got a lot going for us, and both of our babies have been relatively easy.
And I think part of it is I feel a little bit fraudulent is the wrong word. But, like, oh, man, I've had such a smooth journey. There's so many people having it so much harder out there. Who am I to speak on the subject? And I definitely know right now we've got multiple friends who are really struggling in early parenthood with tough babies, some medical issues, things like that. And so, like, I want to shout out to them because they're really going through it. And they're going through it in a way that I can't even really comprehend. And I can't even begin to kind of scratch on this podcast. And so, like, this isn't helpful to them because they're going through stuff that's, like, so much harder and so much more like nitty gritty on the ground. And I dont want to tell their stories, but thats something thats kind of come up this week as like, were trying to support our friends and were like, oh, this is so much deeper that we havent even dealt with any of these problems. We dont even know what to say other than weve got you. Anything we can do to help, we want to help.
So, on the one hand, im feeling incredibly grateful and a little bit again, ive had a pretty smooth journey. But on the other hand, one thing Laura and I both came to the realization of this week is that we've already started to build into our personalities and our identities, the identity of a competent parent who can get out there and travel the world and do an international flight and go to a wedding with a seven week old and all of these things. And this week we had our hardest week of parenting. It's not a competition. It's not about who's harder, whose is easier. Other people have had it harder than us. Other people have had it easier than us. But this was our toughest week. And the biggest thing that caught us off guard was basically Laura got homesick in a way she's never gotten before.
And we didn't really know what to do about it because we, you know.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Can'T quite live there for months at a time for many years. So it's not like you're homesick because you're completely off the path that you've been on. It's just not home.
Right, exactly.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: And it hasn't been home for a while because we didn't travel here much last year because of the pregnancy, all those things. And when we're here, it's always been a little bit more vacation y. We're in the mountains of Colorado. What we do here is we ski and we bike and we've got a little bit less of a community here. Most of Lauras friends are at home in Oxford.
And it was really funny for me as a dad, and I'll try and bring it to my experience because for me, this is coming home. For Laura, it's not.
And I had been pushing my kind of opinion on the first couple of weeks of pregnancy was like, bring people in, bring in the tribe, get help. See, people use that as a way to protect against the downside of mental health and keep people happy and get help and get support.
And I think, you know, no judgment. It's on it. But Laura was a little more the opposite of, like, I dont know how many people I want to see. I want to be a little bit at home, I want to be a little bit away. But we ended up having a nice mix. And we found that actually seeing people was actually, on the whole, very beneficial because most people were very helpful. And it was great to kind of commiserate with other new parents or have help from family, things like that. And so I thought coming here, we were like, okay, were going to take a week away and were not really going to see anybody except for a couple of friends, including you. But we didn't have family come with us. We didn't have anyone living in the house.
And we thought, it's like, oh, this is going to be a great week away where we can just be the three of us and be a little quiet and probably a combo of baby blues and just some weird combo of circumstances. It just hit like a truck, this, this homesickness. And it really kind of shook the foundation of, like, oh, my God, can we do the life we want to do?
And it got down, right down to the core of it. And I think we both recognized, even amidst the emotions, that probably a lot of these emotions had to do with having a nine week old and not getting enough sleep. And so even through our, like, very intense emotions, we were able to kind of see that this is probably not the problem here is probably made worse by a whole lot of factors that don't matter, and we need to kind of get through this to the other side. Um, and so, yeah, I. You know, I don't know if there's a conclusion here other than we've had some really great, deep conversations. It's really good for us, because if I. If I can shout out my partner. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: When you approach those conversations with. With Laura, who's excellent. Do you have this. Do you ever drift into the. I'm trying to solve it. We've kind of figured out what the problem is. Now I'm going to try and solve it, even though in this case, it's not a solvable. I mean, technically, you could buy new tickets and be gone tomorrow, but that would be just as costly. Time, difficulty, money. So do you get into the fix it mentality, or are you able to hold space? And this is something you said the other week, which I really liked, which is be a calming force. Which direction do you normally go? Did you go.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm 100% on the let's fix it, which is classic trap.
But also, I found this time it was useful. Well, it wasn't. I think this time I was able to move away from.
I was able to move away from let's fix it. But I was also able to.
I was also able to step away from my own emotion because I actually got quite emotional about it because it's very tough to go to my home and for my partner to feel like I can't possibly be here. Right? Like, this is horrible. And I'm like, well, hold on. This is my home. Like, I love it here. And it feels very kind of personally insulting. And, of course, I had to try very hard to step away from the. The personal and make it more listen. I'm sure there's some underlying things that are problematic. It's harder to be up here. It's a little more isolating. We've got to focus on actually what's causing this acute incident.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: We've lived with our partners for a long time. We know the ebbs and flows and the normal and the. This is a little. The flavor of this ice cream is different, and it's okay. And that's not, I think, blaming or shaming, that's just calling out the truth. I think we make that mistake too much in society is that we don't want to blame or shame people. So then we hide the truth. Whereas the truth might be exactly what you said. High elevation, you know, away from home for a long time, not in a comfort space, not having all those people around her. That's a lot of things to be coming at her at the same time. And we'll work on the things we can control and we'll be present for the things we can't. And we will solve the things that are solvable, of course.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: And we've acknowledged that together. And lack of sleep, too, which has been really good because it makes it less personal. But I think the way, and I don't want to get too much into, you know, it's just, I think one of the things we talked about and one of the things I was able to do is turn it into, listen. Yeah, I do need to hold some space for my own emotions, even though you're the priority. And what I turned into is, like, here's what I'm afraid of.
Here's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that this changes everything. I'm afraid that I'm not going to be able to see my friends and family. Right. And I just need you to know that I'm afraid, too. And we need to get through this together. And I think that that helped frame it really well because it wasn't. You're bad. This is horrible. And it wasn't also me completely shutting up and just focusing on her and, like, buying us tickets back kind of thing. Right. Because we have to work through it. And I think there's a lot of short term benefit to just me kind of being quiet and saying, all right, my wife just had a baby. She's breastfeeding. She's. She's sleeping. I'm just going to pretend I don't feel anything and move forward. I think that probably happens a lot. But in this instance, I kind of felt enough emotions where I felt like I couldn't just put them to the side and said we had to have a conversation. And the good news is, I think the conversation went really well. We both feel a lot better and we've. We've worked through it by really engaging with the problem.
[00:19:30] Speaker B: But we'll find out in a couple of weeks when she hears this.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: And how much trouble. Yeah, how much trouble are you in for recording this? But I want to go back a couple steps from when you're talking about, because something else has been creeping in my mind, and you just helped me flash on it again, is I am now being identified as a dad. So nine months in and I feel like I have the identity of a dad as something that it's still a new coat, but it's starting to be a coat. I'm familiar with, and you're a little earlier in the journey, but there's this piece of it, especially with you. You've been so high functioning in sports, in, you know, you got a law degree because you chose to get a law degree, and you pumped up from product manager to CEO of a company all in about six, seven years. And so when you're coming into fatherhood, you want to be that same type of identification of. And I forgot what you called it, but, like, really good parents or pretty kick butt parents.
Jeff?
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I think. Well, and this is something I definitely wanted to make sure we talked about, is both Laura and I built into our identity the idea of kind of strong, independent parents. Right. I don't remember what your word I used. Right. But we were the parents who go out on day two. We're the parents who fly at six weeks.
And it got in our way because I think it was in general, it's been very strong for us to have that identity because it's gotten us out of the house, pushed us out of our comfort zone. It's allowed us to do a lot of things we wouldn't do. And I think not only are we doing it, not like we're doing it, and we're miserable, we like the identity. It actually feels better. We have better mental health because we're outside, we're exercising, we're seeing friends, we're coping better.
But Laura said, and I said, you know, Laura was homesick. And I was like, you need to talk to your friends. She's like, but I'm not that person. I'm the person who can handle it. And my friends are struggling. They've all got problems with their own kids.
How could my problems compare? And I was like, I said two things. One is we have to let go of those identities. We have to ask for help, no matter how big or small our problem is. And there's a. Someone online said it, but I loved it, and I couldn't. I can't tell you. Who I do attribute it to is if you don't ask your friends for help, you deny them the honor of getting down in the mud with you and helping you fix it. And I really loved that. I might have even said that on this podcast before, but I, like you, deny them the honor. Like, if you really are friends with someone, if I'm, you know, Brad, if you're. If you. If you need help, I don't want. I don't want my friends to hide their troubles from me. I want my friends to tell me their troubles and let me come help them. That's why I'm a friend. That's what makes great friends different than just acquaintances or other things. They want to get down in the dirt with you.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yep. And want to.
And I know you're hitting this again, and that's one of the problems with medical people, is their job and their soul is to help others, especially in a physical way, which that gives them so much sense of self and identity and jollies from the nurses and the doctors that I know that it makes it almost impossible for them to ask for that same help in return. And this is where we go to my framework of Brad prime. It's, how would I think about it if somebody else had this exact same problem set, was the exact same as me in every way except for their name was Brad prime, and my name's Brad. How would I think about that? Well, I would help them, or I would encourage them to go get help, or I would be with them on the journey, or I drag them into getting help. And it's easier when I just can separate myself between my sense of self and what I'm capable of holding onto and Brad prime, even though, of course, this is just like a mental thing.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Framework.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Framework. Two other little quick things. And I wanted to hear some more from you. But, um, so one of the pieces is everything that you were doing would have been just outside of your comfort zone if you were still rob pre baby. And now re identifying what does Rob with baby have? How much room do you have? Are you actually out of your comfort zone just by living your day to day life? And my metaphor for this on the business side is, um, I've helped a lot of people raise angel and, and other capital just as an advisor. And oftentimes they'll tell me, and they're not sleeping and they're not doing this. And then they'll always have, dudes will always have this moment during capital raise where they're super stressed out and they decide to give up nicotine. I'm going to stop smoking during this raise. I'm going to stop chewing during this race. I look at them and go, no, first off, stop smoking. Stop chewing. Yes. But not during a capital raise. Do not add that into it. After, after. And so for you pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and doing something like this, a year ago, this would have been an easy push out of the comfort zone, and you would have felt it's one, one degree outside of it. But then when you add in sleepless nights, the grind is starting to come together. Business, work, all that stuff. Your comfort zone actually has to lower, and you're kind of hitting face to face with, oh, yeah, I might still be the kick ass dad in the top 5%, but that top 5% doesn't mean I got back up to being who rob and Laura used to be. It's just closer to that.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: That's where we're. And I think that's. And that's what I want to hammer on because. Yeah, because. So, we struggled with identity this week because Laura's like, I can't admit failure because it's not my identity. And I struggled about what it would have been easy to come on this podcast and not talk about this week and just be like, oh, yeah, I read to Arthur this week, and he smiled, and he's doing great. We're loving it. And part of me wanted to do that and be like, my Persona, my identity on here is the dad who's crushing it. And this might not. To a lot of other parents, this might be like, that's Rob. What are you talking about? That's such an easy week. Like, this is your struggle.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Ha.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Cute. But I think what I want to get at is that we hang so tightly to our identities, and like you said, brad, my identity is the high achiever, the guy who pushes the guy who lives outside his comfort zone. I don't have a comfort zone. I just do whatever. And having to recalibrate and to try to be open and honest about it is literally why I wanted to do this show. And so here I am. I'm being honest about it. I'm being open on behalf of my partner, who I hope is okay with me talking about this, but I think it's really helpful. And, yeah, I don't want to dig too much deeper than that. I think that's a good place to wrap it up, unless you have other questions.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: But I have one more bit of it, because I happen to be married to a professional identity researcher, and it took me a long time to understand what that meant. And she coined the phrase, and really, she had to teach me the meaning of the word identity. And a great way to think about it is how you identify yourself. What are the identifications? Are you tall? Are you short? Are you a professional? Are you this? And her work and research is in our professions. How do we identify? But I just wanted to put that out there, that there's actually research in what is identity? And it comes from the root word identification. How do you identify yourself? What are the attributes. Oh, these are all my attributes. I don't need help. I do help others. I'm high functioning, and I hide mistakes and failures and problems because I usually can get through them on my own. So why would I even bother talking to people about them? And it's like, well, those are interesting anxieties for 25 year old bachelor. Great identities. Go ahead, live that best you can. But once you're married, once the Yumi and we comes in, once baby comes in, and then also the burden of leadership that you and I both consistently hold, it's like you cannot hold those identities anymore, but you can find new ones. And that's the really interesting thing about her work. And what I've been learning in myself is what are the identifiers that are meaningful for me, serve me in my path going forward. And oddly, one of them is a dumb, dumb father. Podcaster is an identity for me. I talk about this podcast most days with somebody because this is where I'm learning how to be a better father, and this is where I come to do that. It's the interviews we have and it's these discussions we have and that new identify as. When I say dumb dumb, I mean my job is to represent the audience. I am just as guilty of being a first time father and not knowing this as everyone else. I am not coming to this as an expert, and that's a really helpful identity for me.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: Well, this has been a good, powerful session. I like it. I hope everyone's enjoying us, because this is, yeah, this is why we're doing it. So why don't we take a quick break? And when we come back, Brad, we're going to talk about the journey of a CEO.
All right, everyone, welcome back.
For today's episode, Brad is going to talk us through a framework about the CEO personal journey.
So, Brad, why don't you take us away?
[00:28:12] Speaker B: Thank you very much. It's a fun framework, and I'll tell the longer version of the story today. But the purpose of this is, especially in any growing business, whether you're big enterprise and you're going to, you're acquiring another company or whether you're starting off, you as a CEO will go through a journey yourself. And one of the questions I ask every week of any CEO I coach is, what have you learned about being a CEO this week? And it's a very powerful question because they have to think back what happened in the week, and that they also have to say, brad, I'm being intentional about growing in my position, and that's why you are growing in your position as a CEO. It's a CEO's personal journey.
So that's the framework writ large. Here's how it came up.
I was co founder of a company. It's actually up and fail. And the CEO and I was general counsel, business development guy, and I met with some rich guy, and rich guy had taken over his family 20 years before his $20 million company. He took it to 200 million. Woohoo. Great. Ten x and a $20 million company.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: And so he's going through and he's educating the CEO on what he needs to do and says, okay, this is what I want you to do. Write a list of everything you do, top to bottom, organize it and what's most important, and then maybe four things down, make a big red line, and anything below that, delegate. And everything above that is you.
And we walked out of the meeting. That's kind of interesting, except for this guy came into a company that already had 20 million in sales. Like, he had staff and processes and things. We looked around like we have the two of us and a guy who drives a truck.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: There is no, yeah, there's no room to delegate.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: No room to delegate. And since most about 65% of my founder, my CEO's have been startup people, they know that, right? So there has to be more room than just segregate out the red. Above the red line and below the red line. Okay. Stage two of my creating of this framework, I'm helping at a, it's called Travelport Labs. It was an accelerator. And there was this really smart CEO. His name's Hamed, and he was also the CTO. So classic, classic problem set, CEO and CTO. And he comes in and I'm giving him free sessions, and he's super thankful for it. And he's scheduling them and everything. And then one time he says, hey, can we do the session at 08:00 a.m., okay, fine. I'll drive 45 minutes to do an 08:00 a.m. Free session with you. Why not? I get there and he's ten minutes late, and he's just dragging butt. You can just tell he's exhausted, and he's trying to pay attention. And I'm talking about first revenue and go to market. And I say, hamid, how are you doing, man? He goes, I'm exhausted. Like, yeah, I know you're an accelerator doing this, because that's not why I'm exhausted. Why are you exhausted? Well, I was up till 02:00 a.m.. Pushing out code because I promised that I'd push out code every single Thursday, every week of this accelerator.
Okay, Haman, I get that, but which is more important for the organization that you sit here with me today so we can build a go to market strategy, get our team together, find our product, market fit, or that you meet that pushing out code? And he goes, I mean, I just can't not push. He just couldn't get there. I just can't not push out code.
And he says, you know, Brad, I really love being the CEO. And I go, what do you love about it? And he talks some things and things. Well, Hamad, let me tell you what a CEO actually does.
A CEO actually does just four things.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:28] Speaker B: And three of those have been written about a lot. And I figured out the fourth one along the way. The first one is creating and clearly communicating the company vision. Why the hell do you exist? Why should anyone care why you exist? As the vision, clearly communicating it is why should anyone else care? You're going to be work on this every day as a CEO, whether it's the communicating it or figuring out what's next or why we exist or what's the purpose.
Number two, for startups, it's not run out of money for scaling companies and enterprises. It's hit your numbers. A realistic capital plan. And while, you know, a 700 person urgent care clinic has a CFO who's got all that coming together and they've got their CRO, in the end, the buck stops with you, CEO. Is our capital plan realistic? Are you making money? Are we making money? How much? What are the bands? Do we need to get money on the side? Debt, equity, anything like that. Buck stops with you, helped out, falls with you. Number three, a trustworthy and stable team. Some people just throw the word culture there, but it's a trustworthy and stable team. And that's a real hard one, especially during a growth, because can you trust that rob will do what Rob said he would do? Can you trust that when your sales guy comes in, he's sandbagging? These are all trust, but are they worthy of trust? And so you want them to be trustworthy, and that doesn't mean they're super high functioning. That doesn't mean you're crushing it in every way. But as a culture, as a team, they're trustworthy and then stable. That's the other side that the CEO always, always the stability of the team comes down to you. And if you have unstable team, and that doesn't mean you didn't go through a reduction in force or riff. And that doesn't mean you didn't make some bad hires. But if everyone's running around like chaos, you can't point to other managers and say, you're not doing your team right. Look at, you've got people moving in, moving out. They're toxic. They don't like each other. They say they're going to do this, then they do that. It's like, well, yeah, it's not. If it's not stable, that's on you. Those have been written about all over the place. I just know how to talk about them. The fourth one that I invented was something called pathfinding. And this is a longer conversation for later, but it is your job as a CEO, too. I like to think of it like the Oregon trail. If you get to Denver and there's three trails you can take, you don't take the whole company down one of the trails because you get an itch. You personally go down that trail because you've got the time, you've got the perspective, you know the goals. Down one trail, there's bandits and bad guys. Down another trail, it's treacherous ground. The last trail is really long way around. And you've now gone down these different paths. You've talked to experts, you've gone to conferences, you've thought about it. You've been, you read books, you've talked to your coach. And when you finally know which path works with your team, your job is to come to the team and say, I have done the pathfinding, and this is the next path. And then your c suite helps you figure out how to gear up the company to go down it. That's pathfinding.
So I say this to hamed, and he goes, yeah, I like all of that, except for the having to raise capital, talk to staff, or hire and fire people.
And you're laughing, Robin, as you should be.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: Yeah, because I think it's a classic example of everyone, really. I've had it a lot where people want the title. Like, I want to be CEO or I want to be CEO Coo. I want to be director of business development. And I want that because I want the title. I want the prestige. It's like, do you actually know what that is?
[00:34:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: Do you actually know what your day to day job is? Because I love this stuff. But a lot of people do not love this stuff.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: No. And they want a lot. A lot of people want the CEO's job to be the super, their version of the job. So CFO's actually, they think, they think.
[00:35:04] Speaker A: It'S like I'm the best sales guy. So I'm going to the CEO and I'm going to be the best guy at sales. Yep. No, that's not the job.
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Hey, I'm the Coo. You know what a CEO's job is? It's a super Coo. It's like, no, not that either.
So those are the four parts of the, and we now call those redline work. And so that comes back to the tale from this guy's red line. It's like, well, now we call it redline work. And then every CEO, every industry, you're going to have like one or two other idiosyncrasies for you. My space PhD people, they're like execution, right? In the end, execution of putting a satellite in space is on my shoulders. Like, okay, yeah, you have PhD in rocket science. You're allowed to keep that one.
[00:35:44] Speaker A: Yeah, you go do that, you go do that.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Second, and this isnt a growing thing. So thats, first off, you should be able to look at your organization say if all I did was that 40 hours a week, and I mean 40, I dont mean 60, I mean 40 hours a week, I did communicate the company vision, realistic capital plan, trustworthy and stable team, figuring out whats next pathfinding, would that be the highest use of you in the organization? Could you pull in the most revenue, the most margin, the most beat your competitor long, fast, slow, whatever? And the answer is, yeah, eventually that can be a whole encompassing job that's a really crazy distance away from other jobs. But you don't start there. You're not going to pick somebody up, wave a magic wand, give them the CEO title, and then put them into those four categories plus the fifth or 6th that they invent.
But there's also, in growing companies, there's other work that you're doing that doesn't fit in that category, but still kind of needs to be done by you. Maybe you're also the CRO, the CMO, the CTO.
Maybe you have to get up and speak, right? It's just a part of, you know, your job. And so we call those the blue line work that require your executive function but aren't redline work. And this is something that eventually you should be able to delegate and that other person should be more competent than you are, if for no other reason than they do it all day and you do it some days.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: And that blue line work is like key work for like managers or people in a growing company, right?
[00:37:07] Speaker B: Yep. Yep. It's, you got to do it until you can finally afford somebody who, this is their jam, this is their love, or they're just as good as you at it. They do it. Maybe it takes them 40 hours, takes you 4 hours, but they free up your time to go do redline work.
And then the last thing is black line work. Black line work is really easy to describe. Inbox outbox.
Anything that categorizes inbox outbox is black line work. And that's the first stuff to be delegated. Oftentimes in companies, it's booking your own flights.
Oftentimes it's filing this report on the 15th of every month. And so we always try and organize these things for the CEO and we try and do it in groups. So the group actually sees what the CEO's doing and the group usually helps them force stuff out of blue and into black and get rid of that cognitive bias. But the reason this framework is called the CEO personal journey is it's a personal journey for you to start removing the black, start codifying and changing where the blue go, handing those things off and starting to live in the red. And that's a journey that takes time. And in startup land, I would say about 40% of my founders end up opting into, I don't want to do the redline anymore. I'm happy to be just the CTO, not the CEO CTO, CRO. And on the case of Hamed, he quite literally switched job titles with Andrew. And now their company, it's called Stay 22, is doing like two, 3 million a month in revenue.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Awesome. They had the same framework.
[00:38:37] Speaker B: Go ahead.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: I've seen a lot of founders who should be the CTO or the CRO or the CFO or the head of product who hold onto that CEO title for ego, but they don't want to do any of that work. And I think that's the biggest. I remember when I, when I was an associate of Tech stars, there was this classic example of this founder who was awesome as product, but he wouldn't let go of the company, but he just wasn't, he wasn't a CEO, and he didn't want to be a CEO except for the title, because he couldn't let it go. He couldn't be founder and head of product, he had to be CEO. And that company is out of the business.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: And that's why the framework works so well, is because it subtly gives them the authority to say, wow, this is actually what CEO is. And I don't like it. And then if I meet with them every quarter or every week, whatever, you kind of keep grinding on this framework, grinding on it. Eventually they say, Brad, stop grinding on it. And they're not going to fire me for pushing them on what they don't like because they eventually wake up and realize what you just said. My personal journey as a CEO is to stop being a CEO or my personal journey of being a CEO is I need to double down on this redline stuff. I need to learn it. I need to get better at it. When somebody says what have you learned about being a CEO this week? You say, I learned this about capital plans. I learned this about creating stable teams. I learned this about pathfinding, that if I don't tell my staff I'm pathfinding, they get confused.
And that's fine. Either way, either personal journey is going to be yours. But how do you do it?
That's where you need help and perspective. And so yeah, that's one of the first frameworks I almost always run through clients with.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: If people want to learn more about this and dig into it deeper, what are some resources they can turn to?
[00:40:22] Speaker B: I get in trouble for this all the time because I'm supposed to create marketing material that shows these things. They just end up being too complex for me. But actually redline, blue line, blackline and a couple other frameworks are on deltaawesome.com and you can find them. It's in our resources, which is the top right hand corner. It's near the about us and you can download a simple framework that just puts through what I just said into real people language.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: So for everyone who's listening, Brad is too humble to brag for himself. He won't even put a commercial in these shows. But Delta awesome is awesome. And Brad has got amazing frameworks. So if youre a CEO or this is stuff that I talked to Brad about before I was CEO and as I grew into that position and these are the things that I started to work on and think about. So go to deltawesome.com dot check it out, give us some feedback. And if you want to dig into it with Brad, im sure id be happy to work with you.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: Thank you for the kind words, Rob. Yeah its lovely to be for me in a job that is my obsession. And this goes back to the Anthony Franco interview that by the time this is out, it'll be last week's interview. And for me, making the world make sense and be better for people is my driving force. It's my motivator and what I love is that I'm now learning to do this in my identity as a father. I don't exactly know how to translate red line, blue line, black line into fatherhood.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: I think fatherhood is a lot. It's a lot of black line work.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: It's changing diapers and changing clothes and carrying and dropping off and picking up.
And thats probably why it drives us insane a little bit, because theres not a lot of pathfinding Preston.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Theres not a lot of thinking about involved, almost no critical thinking. Thats the whole point of black line work, is no critical thinking. And just to hit this real quick, because sometimes people try and stratify employees into these, and you should. But remember, the black line employees are your bedrock, your base, and they can be the highest compensated people in the company. Theyre just not invited to the executive thinking branch. My friend Laura, she bills $1,200 an hour as a white collar criminal attorney, and she self identifies as black line only. She comes in, there's a really complicated case in her inbox. She works it for nine months. It finishes, and then a new one shows up. She's like, I'm a black line employee, $1,200 an hour, right. So just know that it's not hierarchical. We don't do top middle bottom. We do left middle right for red line, blue line, black line. Less people get hubris about it.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: It's about finding what your zone of genius is. I've started to use that term. Or what you're good at. I've got, I've got employees that are fantastic at one thing, but they want to be something else, or they want the title of something else. I'm like, but that's, you're not good at that. You're not a manager. You're not good at that. You need to stop, because I can't. You, you need to be happy with this and go deeper on what you're great at.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: And you can make really good money when you give up what you're bad at. And that was the same thing with Hamed, right, because he still, as the original founder, as original CEO, he is still the highest stock compensated person in the company. And he now no longer has the burden of CEO eness. Andrew took that on, but he still has the benefits of that, of having a really good CEO. So he doesn't have to do it, but he gets the benefits.
Last thing. Back to fatherhood. I think you're right.
It's, at this stage, there's not a lot of critical thinking, but as we've been interviewing more fathers with kids under ten, over ten, and soon we're going to be interviewing fathers with kids in college, it'll be interesting to me to see where that modern fatherhood idea of, I guess I'd say blue line work comes up where you need to be ahead of your child or you need to be with them in something. And really executive function and critical thinking skills, not too important at the pre toddler age. That's fine. But I'm excited for more interviews to learn how, when, and if that changes.
[00:44:09] Speaker A: Me, too. I can't wait. So why don't we take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll wrap up with our dad wins and fails for the week.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: All right, everybody, welcome back. And we're here at the backend. And as always in our c block, Rob and I just get to talk about our wins and our fails. The things that we are expressing to you that you've probably done or if you're really lucky, we're going to help prevent you from doing. Also, on the wind side, it's just sometimes nice to acknowledge that sometimes we do things right. Could be our effort, could be happenstance. But let's start this week off with Rob wins and fails.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: I'll start with my fail because my fail is not really about being a dad, but I'm just really grumpy about it. If you're listening to this episode and you haven't listened to our last episode, but with our interview with Anthony Franco, you got to go listen. I think it's our best work yet, but when we recorded the first block and the last block of that, I didn't have this mic turned on, so my audio is bad, and it is just eating me alive because I like that episode otherwise. So please forgive me, please go listen to that episode. We're really proud of it. And then on that win, it was a big one this week. I can take zero credit for it, but it's a big win. Arthur slept through the night, what? At nine weeks, which was wild. He went to bed at 08:00 and he woke up at, like, 630. It was awesome. And it was actually kind of annoying because we woke up multiple times the night being like, is he alive? What's going on? Uh, and that was two nights ago. And, of course, last night, he woke back up at 04:00 like he normally does. So, you know, it wasn't permanent, but we got got that one night of full sleep, and it was so glorious. And so now we've gotten a taste and we want, we want more. So we're really hoping that Arthur keeps it up. But that was like, huge win for this week. Really happy about it. Really helped us out. Got some sleep. Um, can take no credit for it. Nothing I did to make it happen, uh, but it was awesome.
What about you, Brad?
[00:46:08] Speaker B: So I came back from this digital detox vacation, and so the winds are big. I spent time with theo. I. I slept like an adult. My WHOOP is not mad at me. And then, um, sarah Beth and I got to have really rich conversations and get through some kind of just the junk that picks up in a family and a time. And so going on a long car trip just allowed us to reconnect in that way. And the nice thing is going into that then for the week, I just, I knew what I was doing. I knew my job was be with Theo for everything besides feeding. And even with that, as we're weaning, start taking ownership of feeding him along the way because he's still not too keen on the bottle. So those were all wins. The biggest win was at the end of the journey. We went to visit my folks and my stepfather just got a brand new hip. And we wanted to stay away because we thought we were an agent of chaos. Well, it turns out that it's difficult for a 77 year old to get a new hip and have be his full time caregiver, be a 73 year old, my mother. And we didn't see that till we were there because we were trying to stay away, give him space. But if I could do it over again, the fail part of it is if I could do it over again, we would have been there right away to help out. The win win was Sarah Beth noticed this, I noticed this. We started talking about it, and almost instantly we said, brad, you need to stay on for a couple more days. But we then had to figure out the logistics of it, which, of course, Sarah Beth, one who takes the biggest burden because shes going to be with Theo alone now. We ended up picking, the choice we made was I drove her and Theo home, and then I drove right back on a Sunday. And that was actually turned into a win in a lot of ways. I got to spend time with my stepfather, who I like, like to spend time with. I got to cook and clean, chop wood, carry water, and I got to see you, Rob and Laura. So those were all like this mixed bag of wins and fails. But it was really that moment of leadership that I got to apply where my family says 90% of life is showing up, and I got to find a way to show up without anyone being hurt. And it was a net accretive.
The loss is actually interesting. It's. I did some back to back stuff last week, one of which was in this new opportunity that I've been seeking and these new certifications, and it was pretty frustrating for me. And then right after that, you and I had an administrative call here about Daddyo podcast. Now, this work thing is potentially incredibly lucrative. Could be the rest of my career. And this is a hobby podcast that we would love it if we could get enough money to pay for editing, right?
[00:48:39] Speaker A: To cover our bills.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: To cover our bills.
[00:48:41] Speaker A: We lose money on this right now.
[00:48:42] Speaker B: No way you lose money on this. And we're thankful and happy to do that. But the fail part of it was I now realized I wasted six months in something that will never inspire me.
This can inspire me. This probably can't make money. That's fine. But one of my disciplines is when things cannot be excellent and inspiration is a piece of excellence. When they can't be excellent, it's time to let them go. And it was finally being calm enough, being quiet enough, but then having my wife look at me and say, this is the way you act after these phone calls and this is the way you act after these podcast sessions. And I went, oh, yeah, I failed to notice that four months ago when it was clearly obvious. So that's a, that's a Brad fail. That's a delay of game. That's a frustration I brought to the family. And when it was pointed out she was right at the right time and I am adjusting course. So we'll see.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Well, I hope that I'm. I hope and I am glad that these little sessions bring you joy because they certainly bring me joy. And I hope if you're listening, you're enjoying, you're having fun, you're learning something.
And we appreciate you listening this long. So thanks for listening to this episode. If you have any questions for us, please email
[email protected] dot. And of course, if you like what you're hearing, please like us. Follow, give us a five star rating. Go to YouTube, follow us there. Subscribe all of those things. They're super, super helpful for us. We really appreciate it.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: Thank you, everybody. Have a good week. Bye.
