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Transcript

The Execution Loop

Patrick: [01:17:01] Can you walk us through this idea of the loop, the execution loop, and maybe it's specifically... I don't think it is specifically just suited to bootstrapped founders or businesses. I think it's very generally applicable. It's an interesting combination of quantitative rigor, and acknowledging that you don't know what the future holds. Maybe there's some over the horizon vision, or goal, or whatever, but that you have to be very flexible along the way, but also be very rigorous. So not loosey-goosey along the way, like hold yourself to hard standards, and that there's this happy medium for the best operating cadence within a business. Can you walk us through this loop?

Jesse: [01:17:39] Let me talk a little bit about why we built it, because I think that's a very important piece of backdrop. So we started the business when we were 25. In the first few years, like most businesses, it was really fun. And then the business actually had real revenues in EBITDA. And then we realized we were waking up, more often than not, shit-scared that somehow the golden goose was going to go away. And we said, "You know what? We thought we wanted to build something long-term and cashflow, but let's just sell it. Let's get this thing into an exit." We grew up really fast. Glassdoor started popping up with very negative things about the culture. My wife was like, "What's up, dude? You don't seem that happy doing this anymore." And we really got to the point where we said, "Man, we're not enjoying this and our culture is not great. People don't like the culture." And it is a very common entrepreneur offense, especially in the first business. And so we started working with a coach, and we said, "What's what's going on here?" And there was a few things, we started doing this thing in the Conscious Leadership Program. There's this book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which has been pretty life-changing for me. And I'll just share a couple of the concepts and then I can talk about the loop.

So the first concept was types of motivation. And there's these five types of motivation, according to this paradigm, and it's fear, extrinsic, intrinsic, play or genius, and then empathy or love. And that's more about the human experience, not about a person individually. And these are all, again, these are fractal. So we might feel these all five of them in any given day for given different things that are going on. And in general, we're motivated by them. And you think about fear, motivation as like a chip on someone's shoulder, "I'm not great enough." "I'm going to go conquer the world." And you think of empathy and love as like, "Man, Mother Teresa, I'm going to make everyone's life a little easier." Extrinsic is money, titles. Intrinsic is my own thing. Play and genius, I think of like Buffet, where it's like, "Oh, I just love what I'm doing. I'm enjoying it."

And they talk about fear... They're all effective forms of motivation by the way, and there's none better than worse... Fear tends to leave a negative residue on yourself and other people. And it tends to run out on a non-renewable resource. It's the common thing where someone goes, "I got my number." And you get to your number and you go, "Oh, no. Now I want that other number because I was scared. Now I'm here and I've run out of motivation." And love and empathy, and play and genius, tend to be renewable, and they tend not to leave a negative. They tend to lift people up as you do them. And so we started learning about this and had this moment where we were like, "Oh my God, we've been, more or less, totally fear motivated for a very long time. And no wonder the culture, no wonder everyone feels negative"

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And the other concept I'd tie into this is the concept of context versus content. And this is just another paradigm, which is, oftentimes, some really bright people especially go, "Oh, do I like healthcare? Do I like marketing services? Do I like..." And I got to this point personally, where I was like, "I don't like marketing services. Why did I start a business like this? And I'm not motivated to keep doing it." And with the help of my coach, he was like, "You were fear motivated. You made some money, you sold a part of your company and now you don't feel scared anymore and so you're struggling with what motivates you." And we went through this whole process.

And the context versus content idea is, it sort of like, from where are you doing it? And there's people who are mission-driven, cancer-curing companies, but if they wake up every morning and they're coming from a place of fear, or they're worried about how they show up in the trades, or how much money they're going to make, you'll hear that they're not happy, their cultures are not happy. On the flip of that, you'll hear of like insurance brokerage, or some random commodity business isn't sexy, doesn't have a great mission. But the people doing it, the founder especially is coming from a place of wanting to make his employees lives great and wanting to help people get better in their careers, or truly wanting to help his customers. And those businesses are flourishing cultures, and all the great things.

And so that's the concept of context versus content, from where are you coming? And a lot of the paradigm of conscious leadership is just starting to first notice. In one moment, you're feeling fear, in one moment you're feeling like you want to help an empathy. And we looked at OKRs, which we'd been using. And we said, "Gosh, there's two issues with them we didn't like, in particular, in most of the goal-setting processes and systems." We said, "They seem very fear-oriented." They just felt like you got to set this arbitrary goal out there, and you're going to rush, rush, rush to hit it. And it's got to be a big jump up. And if I don't hit it, oh gosh, that's not a good thing. And the other thing we didn't like about it was it tends to... To us, at least, it seemed way better for a business you understand and know, to go, "I can improve conversion by 20%." but in entrepreneurial ventures, you don't exactly know what's going to happen.

And so the motivation behind the loop is, can you build an organization and a culture that gets all the benefits of entrepreneurial thinking and approach, speed, ambition, creativity, problem-solving, tenacity, all of these amazing things, and mitigates the things that tend to make humans' lives not fun, the fear of fundraising, the failure, or someone getting reamed in a conference room. And by the way, I don't know that it's possible, to be clear. ...

Jesse Pujji's Execution Loop

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