AI Sprawl Is Killing The Joy of Business

I don't want to do AI. I don't like it. I think it's cool in what it can do, but it has made life really, really difficult in business, and it's made business not even enjoyable to me in a way anymore.

And it's made the environment worse.

Yeah, don't even bring that. Yeah.

It's made the tooling required, like—

Yes. I look at my friends who are so in AI right now, and they've been doing it for so long, and they're like, now I have 50 agents doing it. I'm like, But then why are you working so hard still? I don't understand. And I think it's just like AI sprawl. I think I heard that term recently.

That's a great term. Welcome to the Soul Proprietor Podcast. I'm Curt Kimpton.

And I'm Melody Edwards.

Each week we dive into the ethical questions that keep entrepreneurs awake at night.

Whether you're building your own company or exploring life's big questions, you are welcome here.

Hello, Melody.

Oh, hi. Hello. Hi, Lo.

Did I just surprise you there?

You did. I was staring at my screen and got distracted momentarily, even though I just pressed record. That's how quick my brain is.

When I said hello, the record said 3 seconds was on. Sorry about making you wait for 3 seconds. I can understand how ADHD would be like, 3 seconds? Are we even here still right now?

That was a prime example of it. That's crazy how quickly I went into an altered a different place.

I have so much to cover with you now that you're back from the Philippines and Japan. And I saved everything for the mic here. I have no idea what you did in Japan. I have no idea what your trip from the Philippines to Japan was like, nor your trip from Japan home, except for last time we discussed the fact that you had a nonstop flight. Can you like give me the rundown?

Yeah, let's do a quick recap. So I got back on Friday. It is now Thursday. And I have to tell you, which I mentioned a little bit before this, it's really hard for me to come home. It's hard for my family to have me come home. Like, we've gotten used to not being together. And do you know, we barely talk to each other? Like, I'll text my kids and like my husband, but not even every day. When we're apart, we kind of just have this routine where I tend to check in, but It's not killing them if I don't.

And they may or may not check in at times. I will say my son says he loves me more, like more than he ever does when I'm away. He's much nicer to me.

So you're like, fill your travel schedule so that you can get the words of affirmation.

Yeah, to get those words of affirmation. Well, he's 17, so there's that. So like, I'm really a melody when I'm traveling. I'm not wife, mother, Even business owner, I guess I was on this trip, but I really feel like it goes back to the, an early version of me where I was just a traveler, a wanderer. And I kind of just like tucked myself right back into that. And so when I left the Philippines, that was really hard. I had gotten used to hanging out with Denise every day, all the time. We didn't even hate each other at all or get annoyed with each other mostly.

Was it like a 24/7 situation?

Yeah, we were just hanging all the time. We get along very, very well. We have an unusual relationship and Think of her as like my sister, my employee, my mother. I would say she thinks of me the same, probably. And we've talked about it. But leaving, I was like really nervous about Japan because I forgot that like most of the travel— and I think I might've mentioned it last time, but a lot of people, like I'm following vlogs and blogs or whatever, and I'm watching Insta stories, but like about Japan. And I forget, a lot of people don't travel. Like, they're making things for people who maybe don't travel a lot, who are not well-traveled.

And so I start to think of myself as not being well-traveled. And I get anxious and nervous, like I'm going to mess up or something. And then I got there. And it was like really the same as always. Like, yeah, they didn't speak a lot of English there. And yet I survived and did fine.

Do they have enough English signs?

Weirdly, they do. I was surprised. They have a lot of English signs. At least in Tokyo, that's where I stayed. So, but also, you know, I had Google Translate, but I feel like I never quite got used to using it. Like it was one time I went to, one of the things I did when I was there on the very first day, I went to a Korean bathhouse, which is like men and ladies are separated. You have all of these different like kinds of rooms, like the sauna, the steam room, the one that's ancient. And then you have like women who just scrub all the dead skin off your body.

Right.

Wait, I'm so sorry. And I don't want to make this weirder than it has to be.

It's not weird at all. It's normal.

Okay, well, my normal and your could be different. You know, that's the thing about normal.

Your American normal is different. That is true. Yeah.

I'm American normal and I'm like Curt normal, like your neighbor's house and normal is different. But like in a bathhouse, you like—

This is a naked bathhouse, but women and men are separate. Like you're never around the other sex.

And you're— everyone's just walking around naked.

Yeah.

And people are scrubbing the dead skin off of your body.

That's something I paid for, yes.

Oh, okay. So naked's free, scrubbing costs money.

I mean, it still costs money to go into the place, but yeah.

And then you walk into saunas and sweat. And then I would assume there's other places like cold plunge or something?

Cold plunge, hot plunge. And this is not like a beautiful spa or something. It's really like an old building with old facilities, but like totally clean and fine. And the reason I'm okay with it, Curt, is because when I lived in Morocco when I was younger, they have hammams there, which are also public baths. Not a lot of people back then had like bathrooms the way we have now. And so, I mean, they did, but also they— part of the ritual of being Arab or Moroccan is going to the hammam, which has like a cooler room for like children and pregnant women and babies. Like, adult babies.

Adult baby? Wait, what?

Like me. Like Americans who—

Oh, like a wimp.

A wimp, yeah. Because it's still pretty warm, but then the next room is very warm. And that's like to get your skin— like, basically you're scrubbing all the dead skin off your body, and you have a lot of it. Imagine all of the years that you've never scrubbed your body of the skin. It's crazy. And then the next room is the hottest room, and that is like, ugh. That is like— I can't stand there for more than a few minutes. Some people do it the whole time.

I got used to this when I was in Morocco. It was a part of the life that I really enjoyed and I miss it so much. And a Korean bathhouse is very similar to that, except it has more things to do.

Okay. I mean, thank you for sharing this with me. I'm just trying to imagine if my confidence, like, could I do it?

You could. It wasn't like I went in the first time and was like, I'm gonna do that. It was more of like a personal challenge to myself long ago when I first did it, 'cause everybody said you have to go to the hammam. And I got scammed the first time I ever did it. The girl who brought me charged me like $20 when it was like 50 cents to go in. I didn't know. But like, I really missed that ritual in my life. And you're with— the other cool thing about it is you're with— like, in America, we don't see all bodies.

Like, you don't see your parents naked normally.

Oh, heck no. Heck no. Heck no.

It's not normalized. And when you're in the hammam or in a Korean bathhouse, you're seeing all different kinds of bodies, old, young, Like pregnant, not— like, it really gives you perspective on especially American women. We really struggle with body issues here. It gives you a lot of perspective. It's not like you're staring at other people the whole time, but you're like, I'm not like that abnormal.

So if I was to go in there, I'd— all sorts of people would like feel like they have to live up to another standard. I should probably keep saving people from having to see this amazing chiseled—

For sure. But they wouldn't care. Like, they're there to take their bath, right? To do their ritual.

It's so interesting to me. That is so cool. So—

Oh, the point was that was the hardest experience to translate the whole time because everything was in Japanese and Korean and not in English at all. And then I would try to take out the Google Translate and there was a very big lag between what I was trying to say and what she was trying to tell me. And when I went in, I was nervous because I was like, I don't understand any of what she just tried to tell me, even though we tried to translate it. And then I just kind of figured it out and it was fine. And everybody knew I wasn't supposed to be there, that I didn't understand what the deal was, and everybody was kind. So it was great.

That's cool. Well, I want to ask you about karaoke, but we can't go from this yet. Like, did you leave there feeling something new or different?

Oh yeah. You mean Japan or the bathhouse?

I was just starting at the bathhouse.

Yes, I felt amazing. It's been 8 years since I went went to a hammam in Morocco, 8 or 9 years. So that was the last time I had probably like a very full-body scrub. And you just never feel as clean as you do when your whole body has been scrubbed of all the skin. And it's just like a different kind of clean. And it's so normal for them. Like, these women, they scrub lots of people every day and they don't care. And she's just like, flip, go to your side, except in— Korean, I guess.

You went to Japan for a Korean experience. I love it.

So that was like, I had like a lot of ideas of all these things I was going to do when I was there. And then I got there and of course I was tired. You may have remembered last week when I did the podcast with you, the second we recorded 2 episodes, I almost fell asleep in the second episode. I had such a huge crash.

I felt so bad for you. And you had to hurry and get on a flight.

It was all good. Like, okay, when I was at the Manila If you ever go back to the airport in Manila or wherever, they have the best massage place there at the airport. I had like 3 hours I had to wait, and it was a while, but I went like knowing that I was gonna probably be waiting. And you can like buy a pass, but I got the best massage of my life from this woman in the airport massage place. It was awesome.

I did a lot of So when you got on the plane, you just fell right asleep, huh?

I felt great. I don't know. It was only a 4-hour flight. I think I did sleep because I got there at 4:30 in the morning. And then I shipped my luggage to my hotel, which is something you can do in Japan. Like they have a place where you just go and you pay. I think I paid like, I had 3 bags when I left, 2 when I started, when I went to the Philippines. And then I got so many things to bring home from other people that I had to buy another bag, so I came home with 3.

And it was great to be able to just ship them to my hotel because I couldn't even check in until 3 or whatever. And then I went to a digital art museum that I have been wanting to go to for as long as I've known about it. And then I think I did a bunch of other stuff that day too. It's hard to remember.

So when you landed at 4:30, you shipped your stuff to the hotel, but you didn't go to the hotel. You went, like, You started hitting it.

Yeah, I just, I went for a walk. I kind of just walked around, but it was so hot and humid there so early in the morning. Interesting fact about Tokyo, I've never heard this before, but there are just so many, I guess, cicadas, and that's the noise. It's such a strange noise to hear throughout the whole city because they have a lot of trees in different places, and it was just so loud. At least I think it was cicadas. I can't think of what else it would have been. And I stayed at a hotel that was like, it was pretty cool. Like you could have any snacks or drinks all day.

It was included. This is going to be controversial for my foodie friends, but I did not eat in one restaurant when I was there.

What?

I know. Well, first of all, because it was really chaotic, like the restaurants were very First of all, I didn't know how to order because they had, like, vending machines to order from or ATM-type things.

I'm dying here. You didn't go get sushi? You didn't go into a sushi restaurant?

No, I didn't. But—

I don't— like, how can we even be friends? How can we be friends after this?

But the other place I went to get my sushi and stuff was the 7-Eleven because their food choices are exceptional. And I had heard this, everybody says, go to the 7-Eleven. You have to go see what's up there. And people were right. It was— A crazy food scene there. They had so much stuff.

What the heck? Now, when I was in Philippines, I saw 7-Elevens that were pretty impressive. Is this— this is totally different than that even?

I feel like Japan has a different way of doing it. It was all fresh food and so many different options that you could just have. Yeah.

7-Eleven, same logo in the Philippines, same logo, totally different vibe. Like not a convenience store vibe. To me, it was like a general store vibe. But like, like, you know how like QT— do you guys have QTs there or something?

No, but it is. It's like a 7-Eleven is a gas station vibe here. And there it's more like—

Fresh kitchen.

Yeah, they have like more stuff. I think I might have lied. I might have eaten at one restaurant, but you have to remember I was there for 3 days, like 2 and a half days, really only 2 nights. And I also did not have a stomach my whole first day and a half.

'Cause why?

'Cause I just wasn't like, I felt a little sick or nauseous and I just wasn't hungry.

So I guess just to help me get on the same page with you here, when you say I was in Japan for 3 days, the way I translate that is I'm in Japan for 3 sushis. Like, I don't know how, and I know I'm American and I know—

That was the one fear I had, Curt, is like every place. Well, 'cause I was like, I was in a place where there was a lot of restaurants. Like a lot. But they were— I couldn't understand what anything was there. And I guess I could have taken my AI and like done a quick thing. I just wanted to find like a sushi restaurant, if anything, but I was so exhausted by the noise, by the— just the— there's so many people everywhere. It's like a really exhausting city in many respects. Like, I went to buy some souvenirs on the last day, and everybody said, go to this place, Don Kahooty or something.

It was the noisiest place I've ever been in my life. It was huge, but like every single aisle had at least 5 different noise machines yelling at us to buy things. So it would be like music with Japanese words yelling at me to buy whatever the product was under the thing.

That is not what I would have expected out of Japan.

Oh my God. So noisy.

I expected quiet, subdued with very nice Flowy garden music playing in the background no matter where you're at.

That would've been lovely. No. So I had to get outta there. I didn't even buy anything there. It was too much. And then I found the dollar store, their version of the dollar store, to buy my nieces some sticker books and things like that. It was a great experience, but all I cared about was going to these 2 digital art museums because I love those kinds of visual sensory experiences. And they were— the first one, I've kind of been to one already that was very similar.

I think it's in Vegas. It's called Art and It was definitely modeled or a sister of the main museum in Tokyo, that TeamLab Borderless. But their second museum was amazing. It was like your feet go into water and then there's like koi fish swimming all around you, but they're not real.

Do they nibble your feet? Do you have fish lips on your feet?

No, they weren't real fish. They were digital fish that looked real.

Oh, I'm sorry. Like it felt. Okay.

But then they would crash in like splashes of color in the water. There were light features that they had where it was like, it was mirrors on the floor, the ceiling, everywhere. And so the light show was insane. They had a flowerarium, which is like a planetarium, but it was all flowers in the atmosphere. And then the flowers would be shooting down at you. It was beautiful. And the music, it was just my favorite.

Sounds amazing.

It was. I love those experiences. The last thing that I did though was the morning I was leaving, I went to the oldest temple in Japan maybe, or at least in Tokyo. And I hadn't slept the night before, so I just went at like 5:30 in the morning and took the subway, and it was already so hot, and it was beautiful. It was really cool to see it without a lot of people around. It was already open. They were doing prayers inside. You could donate, and then they had these things where if you put like a donation in, you would get this round tube that had a bunch of chopsticks with numbers on it in it.

And you'd shake the tube until one of the chopsticks fell out, and then you'd look at the number, and then in front of you there's 100 little drawers like in this wooden cabinet. And then whatever the number of the chopstick said, you'd open the drawer and then you'd get a fortune.

That is so Japanese too. Like they have these little fun little curios, like gamification of almost everything. It seems like that's how I think of it too.

Well, and they must make a ton of money. I only had 2 coins. I did it twice. I would have done it like 100 times because I loved it so much and it was in English and Japanese. So that was fun.

So was buying stuff hard? Like, could you just use your credit card? Everything was fine.

Well, I had a lot of cash that I had taken.

So you had Japanese cash, I'm assuming.

Yeah. I had transferred the money, but everybody had said that you need cash there. And I would say like Tokyo is pretty easy. There were places I needed cash, but most of the time I could use my credit card and it was fine. And I don't regret not going to sushi. I know I should regret that.

I am like, I'm trying so hard to get over this right now.

But it's also because I had sushi in all of the— flew Japan Air. So their meals were like intense. Also.

Oh, really? Oh, that's cool.

Did I send you a picture?

No, I didn't see anything.

Oh my God. It was beautiful. And it was so many different colors.

Airplane food? We're talking about airplane food?

Curt, yes. It was a different level. I've had some great airplane food. They do Japanese food very well and it was just exceptional. But like, because I was eating that food, I didn't have a stomach for a lot of other things. So that was part of the problem. But like my breakfast, I'm sending you a picture of my breakfast bento that I would get every morning, all 2 mornings that I was there.

I'm watching really steadfastly.

It would just appear in this wooden box. Whoa.

The box is pretty.

It was beautiful. Like you'd carry the handle inside and open the box. And then there's something missing there, which is like a little miso mug. So there was like miso soup. It was just really good.

Mel, this isn't food. This is just 2 bites of food.

No, it was so much food, Kerr. It really was.

I don't have anything there for— yes, I do. There's a water bottle in there. Yes. That is— those rice ones are 2 bites each. Each of those bowls is 1 bite.

That's not true. I promise you, it looks like a little, but it was so much. And I know, for anybody who is a foodie, like this is Denise's— 'cause I do love food, but like I don't have a good stomach for it a lot of the time. And so Denise was always thinking, and my whole team was like, where are we eating next? What are we eating? Where are we gonna eat it? How? Like, and I was just like, guys, we just talked about this 4 hours ago.

That was the thing about the Philippines for me is that when you think of America, you got burgers, steaks, a Bloomin' Onion, even though I know that's supposed to be Australian, but I think of like American food and there's like, like I can list a hot dog. I think once we get like 5 items on that list, you've exhausted it in the Philippines. And I kind of feel like Japan's going to be the same. They have no less than a billion dishes, like all of them. And they're all traditional this and traditional that. And they all know them all. And they list them off and they throw them out there and you're like, dang, like I had to be there for weeks and weeks and weeks to even like be able to speak about their dishes because it's like memorize this long, long list of stuff.

Yeah, it's so much. I'm sending you my last picture of food because you'll understand by this one For sure that it looks like small bites. They're actually like—

That's a legit meal right there.

And do you see how many different things there are there? Yeah.

Holy mackerel. That meat is just like, there's sauces on everything.

It was amazing. Yeah, it was really good.

And they're all different. And every single one of those looks like an experience. This is the, uh, I can see it's on an airplane here. So, oh, is that caviar on that one? At the top?

Yeah, I think it was.

Are you kidding me? So again, I'm not one for fancy stuff. I see some okra that I'd probably be pushing to the side, but like, this is legit an experience.

It was an experience, and I wanted to have that experience on the plane even though I didn't want to eat all the things. I tried every single one of them. And I also had a moment, Curt. Are you good with chopsticks, Curt?

I was at the Taiwan airport and I saw somebody eating soup with chopsticks and I was like, and I tried, I tried my very best. I just couldn't do it. And I'm watching this guy succeed like crazy. So in that sense, no, but compared to any of my American friends, it's kind of a point of like pride for me. I'm pretty good with chopsticks.

Well, somewhere along the way I learned how to do chopsticks wrong. And so if I do it my own way, it does work and I do get to eat the food. I was being coached into how to do it the right way. And there was one moment of zen. Maybe you've experienced this on your bike where like you're suddenly in the flow. There was one moment, maybe like 3 bites where I suddenly got it. I understood chopsticks. It was perfect.

And then like I put them down and when I did it again, I had lost it.

Oh no. You fell out of the zen.

I did. I don't know why it's so hard for me, but it does work. But I did make a point of buying the children's chopsticks for myself at home so that I can do it without, you know how they are.

Oh, that's so good. Are you pulling them out at your meals?

No, not yet, but I have them if I need them. A friend had taught me a trick where you like take a rubber band or a hair tie and you put a piece of paper in them so that it acts kind of as a spring so that you can do chopsticks without needing to actually do it.

See, to me, the trick is this. You got one chopstick that never moves and you got one chopstick that's always moving and it's as easy as moving a pencil. You just use the pencil against the piece that doesn't move, and it— once you get it to that, it's just so simple.

Or it's like saying to somebody who's never run a business and has no business doing it, it's easy. You just like learn all the things about business and then you just run a business.

But like, to me, like, if you can do this, just push it up against the one that's not moving and you're doing it.

Yeah, sounds easy. I don't know why I can't do it the proper way without Such struggle.

And this podcast, this audio podcast, if you just do this and this and this, then, then this will happen.

He has taken a pen and it looks like he's just writing, but he's trying to illustrate a point. Yeah.

I'm writing my food into my mouth.

Yeah. Wow. I didn't know you were such a foodie that you were mad at me too. I haven't even told my foodie friends yet.

I'm not so much angry as I am disappointed. I just feel so—

I don't even feel bad about it.

I feel so bad that you are in the motherland. I just think sushi's so good.

I love sushi. Oh my God, it's my favorite.

Okay, so that's so crazy.

Also, I had some on the plane. I had some in the hotel. Like, they had it at— sometimes you could just go into their snack room and there'd be like sushi, and they had a lot of cool things there.

So you at the hotel were able to eat Japanese sushi?

Sometimes they had it. They called it like snacks, but really it was more like you could get a meal out of that room.

Yeah, and you know this about me. I think our listeners know too. I'm happy to eat the same meal every day. And when I have sushi, I always think to myself, I could eat this every meal every day, no problem. And I know that there's a lot of people who are like, oh my gosh, I don't care how good the food is if I have to eat it twice in a row. Like, I always look forward to leftovers. Like, I'm the kind of person who just very much likes stability and stuff.

So, I don't know. I've really lost my stomach over the past year or two for food, and that's really a problem. Because I want to enjoy food. I want to eat it. But like, when I look at it, it's just not the same.

I would love to look at food and not feel appetized by it. Because when I look at food, it's like this friend going, come here. I want to hang out with you. Please put as much inside of you as you can. And so I'm just curious, like, like, I think my body would look a lot different if I didn't try to eat food every time I see it.

I think people don't even understand this. And I actually finally figured out what this is called. I don't remember what it's called, but if you look it up, I have such a disconnection between my appetite and my brain, basically. Like, I don't know when I'm hungry or not hungry. I've always struggled with that, but there are times when I will feel so hungry and I'm almost angry because I've not felt it.

It's called hangry. They gave it a word.

Yeah, hangry. But most of the time I don't feel hunger. And so I've read it's like a psychological thing. You have to like retrain yourself to feel that connection, which I don't know if I've ever really felt that. But it's something I have to do because like today I had a protein shake and it's 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

Oh my word. Okay. So a protein drink is what I drink with my breakfast. But like, to me, even when I'm not hungry, I'm hungry. I'm looking for food and it's my relationship with food combined probably with my metabolism. But to me, food is what you eat when you're happy, when you're sad, it's your friend and it goes in your taste buds and it goes, I'm gonna just snuggle up with you, you know? And you're like—

Yeah. I used to have that relationship when I was younger. I think, uh, food was definitely comfort for me. And I've also wondered if it's because with window cleaning, I would go all day without taking a break.

That is true. You get in the truck, you go clean it, and like, I won't see food till I'm done.

Exactly. And I got to the point, if you do that 20 years and you get to the point where you don't even notice anymore. I mean, that was the norm. And so anytime that I've lost weight, it's when I start having to eat a lot more food.

Whoa, that is interesting.

Well, your body can get really stuck. It can feel like you're starving it and it won't move. It just won't move. And so I want to lose weight. That Korean doctor told me like, you know, get rid of your belly.

That Korean doctor had absolutely no filter.

I loved him, but like, obviously I want to be healthy. I want to be able to have good joints and all that kind of stuff. And the biggest problem for me is being interested in food enough to prepare it, to eat it. When I start eating it, like I'll look at it and I'll be like, mm, I'll force myself. But then once I start eating it, I'll be like, oh, this is good. Because again, that disconnection. So I have a lot of hard work to do.

Yeah.

I know it makes no sense to most people, but I know there's a person or two who would understand this.

Well, as of our recording, and this is a big subject change, and I promise not to go down this rabbit hole too deep, but I just like, just to kind of give you guys an idea, Dolly Parton passed away 2 days ago, I think it is now.

I can't even, Curt. I can't. She was like my Mr. Rogers.

I love Dolly Parton.

Yeah, who doesn't? Literally everybody in the world. Loved Dolly Parton.

Yeah. But it turns out that her favorite food was potatoes. She loved potatoes.

Interesting.

And so at dinner last night, we did a little Dolly Parton tribute and we all said, how do you like your potatoes? So we gave a bunch of examples, top 3, we had everyone had to pick their top 3. So some examples are French fries, boiled potatoes, twice baked potatoes. Gnocchi was one because we were actually having gnocchi for dinner last night. I mean, there's so many, I get potato salad, like When we went through it, like there was like, I think we came up with like 20 examples and everyone had to pick their top 3. And can we bring sweet potatoes in? No, that's a yam. Let's keep those out. So we had this fun game and in that game I was like, I love shredded hash browns. I really love tater tots, man.

I'm a big fan of waffle fries. And now I'm starting to like have fights inside my head because I'm like, you know, does potato bread count? Because I really like potato bread. Spud nuts are good. So then I'm thinking to myself, I think you just love anything that's caloric. Turns out that Dolly Parton and I have something in common. I do love potatoes. And do potato wedges count as French fries? Because my son was hoping to be able to get 2 for 1 on that. He's like, can I say French fries and get potato wedges? And I said, no, you can't have both.

Yeah. So, well, that's the thing about making up the rules, isn't it? You can just be as strict as you want.

I love that you and your family did that in honor of Dolly. I heard that they're going to make September 25th, Dolly Parton Day. I hope they do.

9/25.

Well, it's—

I mean, not that I would want her to pass away on a specific day, but that would've been so appropriate.

Oh, you know, Curt, she brought so much joy to people because even though she was like, obviously struggled in many, much of her life, she had a lot of things happen. Love of her life died, I think a couple months ago maybe, or, and she just brought so much positivity into the world.

And philanthropy and just so kind. I went to the Dolly Parton show when we were in Nashville at the huge convention. I went to her like little stadium show where they had people on horses doing this thing. And oh man, like, I think it was called Dolly World.

Yeah, probably was at Dolly World for sure. Yeah.

Anyway, it was such a great dinner show. You just go and they serve you dinner and the food was good food. I mean, I love all food. There were potatoes in it, I'm sure. I can't remember all that. I just remember walking out going, I am so happy that we did this. And I You know, I would not have expected the amount of rivetingness that it was to get— you know, Dolly to me is more like comfort, but this was like just absolute fun.

She is like Mr. Rogers. I feel like the person who could do no wrong. And, you know, they just opened, I think, a museum in her honor like this month, or it's happening this month or next month. But I just— I feel like the world couldn't— we can't lose Dollies.

But you know what? That's the thing. We have to churn everybody through. You have to leave your mark and then you only get time. Actually, you know what? Let's transition into the part of the podcast that we wanted to get to because you only have so much life and you can complain all that you want about how much more so-and-so should have lived or you need more time for blank, whatever. And one of the things that we talked about in our last time that we were talking podcast was about how you're changing your goals, your rocks. And for people who don't know what rocks are, there's the EOS system, uh, by Traction, by, was it Gino, Gino Wickman?

It's a book.

It's a whole philosophy of running your business operating system, he calls it. And I mean, we're just gonna simplify really crazy here, but part of it is we pick things that we're gonna do over the course of a quarter by department, by leader. And we do our regular jobs, the stuff that has to get done day to day in our job, and then we push initiatives forward. And at the end of a quarter, we hope that we've gotten at least 80% of that done.

Well, even beyond that, I just want to back up. You start by going through your year and creating like a 3-year plan and a 10-year plan or whatever. But then the 1 year though is how you break down those quarterly goals. Like that's how you're supposed to get them.

Yeah. What we have found about a quarter is that we have no idea what's going to happen by the end of a quarter. So we already know we're going to probably shift by the end of the quarter, but at least we try to like be really intentional, lay it down. And then every week the leadership team has what's called an L10, which is just short for level 10 meeting. Actually, that's just short for a meeting that's so good that it's 10 out of 10. That's supposed to mean, and you meet every week for 90 minutes and you spend the first, you know, 30 minutes of it going through the numbers and the, you know, rock review and stuff. And then you spend the last hour solving problems, solving problems. IDS, as we call it, issues.

Identify, solve, discuss.

So you had talked about going from a quarterly rock, like, uh, perspective to a monthly rock perspective. And just to freshen everyone's minds, do you want to talk a little bit about what you guys are doing?

Well, yeah. So I've thought of this actually probably 2 years ago in that with AI, I had heard a lot of things like it's going to be moving so fast. You're going to be doing more in a quarter than you would have ever done in a year eventually. And then that made me think like, we can't have just quarterly. It's so slow. It moves so slow. It's also like quarterly goals do. It's also very hard to stay on track for a whole quarter.

It is.

I can't agree more.

Yeah. We have been successful maybe 2 times in all of the years that we've used this system in actually accomplishing some of those goals. But of course you're guessing, you don't know how long something's going to take, but the other problem with it Is if something might have been simpler and it's a quarterly goal, you're going to stretch it out because you have more time. And so I just feel like at this point, with how fast business moves, how much change is happening, like we have to switch to monthly. And so that's what we're trying to do. Also because I want to hold fire under the feet of my people a little bit more. We get really lackadaisical when it's a quarter. It feels like so far away.

And also because I've been out of the business a lot, I feel like we kind of got away from some of those. Like, we didn't even have quarterly goals last quarter, I think it was, because I was out. And I just was like, you guys just have your L10s just to make sure things are on track with solving the problems especially and having that cadence. But we didn't really do quarterly goals. And they still accomplish stuff. But I feel like you end up babysitting a lot. It's disappointing. Like, the focus is usually the day-to-day, I've found, in our company.

People are focused on what's in front of them. And the whole point of this is to focus forward. And it's really, really hard. And you need a leader who's going to hold people's feet to the fire. Am I that person? Usually not. What about you? What's your experience?

My experience is when I first discovered Traction, I was like, you know what? What I'm doing right now is not working. So here's someone who's got a lot of momentum behind them. People are talking a lot about Gino and this book, and wouldn't hurt to try. It sounds good. So we have one of my leadership team people, it doesn't matter what I say, she always pushes against it to start. That's always the way it's going to go. And And when I first rolled this out, I didn't know that about her, but she's like, this sucks. It's a terrible idea.

It's not allowing for people to think like regular humans. And then over time she just was like, let's go along with, I'm a team player.

Let's do it.

And we did and she did. And I guess it just became our thing and we all just assimilated to it. And the whole thing I brought out, and I know this is what brought the rebel out in this particular employee, it was like, Look, I don't know what I'm doing, so I'd rather do it exactly as prescribed and then change it if we need to, rather than just coming outta the gate saying, I'm gonna tailor make this. Because look, let's start with what is proven and then change what doesn't prove for us.

Ken, I have to tell you, I never was successful with traction. I tried for years and traction came from scaling up. Like that's kind of how those systems evolved. And Scaling Up has similar systems, but they're a lot more flexible than that. So I still use the L10 format. I still use a lot of parts of what is in Traction, but I use a more flexible version of it. Back in the day when I was trying to implement Traction, and it was like, you're trying to fit me into this like little hole that I am not going to be able to be successful in. So when we were most successful, we had somebody who was running it for us every week.

And they helped us go through the, every quarter we'd have a whole day where we'd meet, we'd go through things, we'd figure out what the next set of goals are, look back, look forward. Every year we would have 2 days where we met and just went over everything, which wasn't enough time. It felt like it would be, it never was.

Well, the other thing about meeting about a whole year, like that's one thing about Traction that stuck out to me is like we would always meet and do yearly planning, but like it's garbage by the end of the first quarter.

Of course. Yeah. But when we did it with Sam, it was really successful because she's an implementer, an integrator. She was guiding us. We were being held accountable to her in a way. And once we took over, it got a lot harder to stay on track. Every once in a while, I'll pull myself up by the bootstraps and reorganize everything and say, OK, this is what we're doing. But it requires some level of personal like accountability.

I mean, it does for everybody, including me. So, if I'm not in it, they're still running those meetings, but it's not the same as when they're being held accountable to me.

Well, you know, part of Level 10 is that you have your visionary and your integrator, as you'd use the word integrator. So, integrator is the person who sort of makes it happen, and the visionary is the one who sort of keeps things fresh and innovative, but then like isn't allowed to directly interfere with all the people who are trying to make it happen. So when we rolled out the L10 meeting, it was actually brought up that I, as the visionary, need to have my same-page meeting with my main integrator, but I didn't actually go to the L10 meetings. And we did that and we had some success. But since then, my integrator has gone another way, has left the company. And for our company, that was actually, I think, a good thing. It was good for me. We've certainly paid a bit of a price and There's not to say that we don't miss him because there's definitely some things that only he could do, but it did connect me more to the company.

And there were some areas where, you know, the integrator I had hired was just not cut out of the, maybe the cloth. So having a different integrator could have maybe given us a different experience. Either way, I have sort of taken the role of being a visionary as much as I can to the extent that I am, but then also trying to back it off as hard as I can in order to actually lead integration part of the meeting. Well, in doing that, and I'm talking about for years, like, you know, my integrator left about a year and a half ago, maybe now. I've tried my very best to implement as an integrator. So in doing so, what I did was we have our weekly kickoff meeting and every weekly kickoff we talk about what happened last week, what's happening this week, and what my progress on my rocks are. And so once a week, everybody gets in there for half an hour and we would hear about Last week, this week by department and their rocks progress. That was Mondays, Monday morning.

Tuesday is leadership meeting, talk about rocks. So we go through the rocks, talk about what the progress is on it, make sure that we know where we're at. It's fine to have a rock on hold. See, the way we dealt with the whole problem with the monthly is we essentially had monthly rocks. It's just that the dates you're putting on your rocks are sort of in a specific order and the rocks that you're focused on this month are, they're actively either on track or off track and the other ones on hold are being revisited as we change months and we're trying to figure out like how to rotate them in. So that worked for us fine, but I still saw, even with all this accountability, still kind of frustrated that we're not, you know, 80%, according to the book, 80% rocks is good. That's considered very good. But I felt like we hardly ever hit the 80.

And frankly, I always felt like I didn't even understand the rocks well enough. People would say, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. And then when X, Y, or Z was delivered, I'd be like, this is not what I envisioned. So now we also have all-hands meetings. That's once a month. That's where everybody in the company, same as our weekly kickoff, but everybody in the meeting gets together and we go through our mission and values. We talk about rocks and how progress by department. And so what happens is, is I notice something.

Now I've noticed this for a long time. So what I'm about to tell you, like I would say at least a year I've noticed this, or probably much longer. As soon as rocks start getting discussed in weekly kickoff or all-hands, even in leadership meeting, if it's not your rocks, You're answering emails, you're, you know, other people are just totally not focused on it. And so what happens is people start going to meetings that feel pointless and become numb, especially people who aren't even reporting on rocks. Even people whose departments are reporting on rocks, if they're not the actual presenter, a lot of times it's just not like, I already know all this stuff, so I already know about this rock. Or the idea was to try and connect the company. These goals should be like glue, like, hey, I'm working over here, but it matters because all these people in other areas are working on these things and they all come together and there's a master plan and that feels great. But it doesn't do that because It's so repetitive that people are like, oh yeah, they've been talking about that for weeks and weeks and weeks.

I don't, you know, whatever. Let me know when it's done. And they won't even know when it's done because they've tuned it all out. So when you do finally tell people stuff's happened, you can talk to them. Like, I have leaders in my company, like I'm thinking of one in particular that would like message me and be like, hey, do you know when we're going to roll this thing out? And I'm like, dude, we rolled it out like 2 weeks ago. Oh really? Because like, how does it work? Dude, we've been talking about this, like all these meetings. You're a leader in my company. And—

Curt, I relate to this. I do.

So I've noticed the checkout. I'm going to call it the numbing checkout, air quotes here. I've noticed that for well over a year. Then I was in a meeting and my rebel employee was like, you know, this company's just turned into a bunch of checkboxes. That's all we freaking do. And there's never enough checkboxes. The moment we're done with our checkboxes, we have more checkboxes to do. And If I can't get all my checkboxes done, you're like hounding me for it.

And it's just gotten to the point where I used to do stuff because I wanted to and it was fun. And now I like feel like I'm just a cog in the machine, just expected to do checkboxes and it'll never be good enough. And even if you celebrate it, it's like, congratulations, next checkbox. You know, like it doesn't feel good. And I was like, huh? And I started thinking about, well, I've noticed people checking out. And I also realized that this rebel employee who would give your whole heart and soul to anything ever I placed in front of her, she's been trying to get my attention about this for a long time, but I like, okay, what do you want? And I think that's one of my struggles with this particular employee is that she's really good at poking holes and she's actually good at finding solutions, but she can only do it so much because part of her job is finding solutions. So it's like, do I do your job and my job? What'll happen is it'll often be this friction of like, I'm a burr under your saddle telling you what doesn't work, but I don't have a solution for you. So it really just sort of like started coming together where I was like, man, we've been fighting like crazy and this AI stuff has really increased the velocity of things.

Like you talked about goals being a lot faster now. Well, now we're producing more than ever, faster than ever, and checking off boxes at a faster rate, but it doesn't feel like it's actually benefiting anyone. Like, it's not like anyone's life got better. We're just moving faster.

It's just like doing business before. I mean, it's the gap and the gain. We really are so focused on the gap and we keep thinking we're gonna catch up. Maybe like we fool ourselves into believing we're gonna catch up. We will never catch up. It's frustrating.

And so I think that that is what sort of like just drove us like, look, we have been focusing so hard on going at breakneck speeds so that we can do what we need to do as a company. And one of the things that I've been really focused on lately is getting the rails in the company to be able to handle the speeds and the velocity of everyone moving. And I felt like, you know what, now it's time for us to say, we've got the rails for people to move on. It is now time to go walk around the cabin. We have got to walk around the cabin and get connected again. So my focus, like I talked to our leadership team this week, And we still have to have quarterly rocks. There's no question. And I think that's another thing is I had to sort of like, I've been thinking really deeply about this.

We still have to go at breakneck speed if we want to remain relevant. Like that isn't a negotiable. Okay. That's the unfortunate part. Like the speed isn't necessarily what we're doing for fun.

It's what we're doing to survive. Yeah.

Survival. So that can't change. Therefore, rocks can't change. We still have to knock off a bunch of stuff. But let's move out of survival mode and let's pay attention to the fact that there's a baseline of normal, and then there's we as a team. One of the things that happened in the velocity is that people would start brainstorming with Claude instead of each other. People would start doing projects without even confirming with anyone else in an adjoining team that is going to be affected by it because I can't bother them. I need to get my head down and get to work.

I was guilty of this as well, by the way. And so what I have done is I've killed the level 10 meeting and I am going to be changing how weekly kickoff and all-hands works. And here's what I'm going to do. Quarterly planning still will happen. So that's going to happen towards the middle, end of September so that we can be ready to go in October. Those rocks are just as important, need to be rolled out. It's going to happen. There's no getting around it, but it's going to be more of an email format with all-hands/weekly kickoff sort of discussion of something that they can reference, but not so much as a, like, presentation.

Just like, this is the big picture, what we're trying to do, and this is our plan on how we're going to get there. You're welcome to see all the other departments. It's going to be in your inbox and you can check it out. Here's maybe a graphical representation of it. And then from that point forward, everything is going to change. Reporting on rocks is no longer going to be a company-wide thing. If you want to know the progress of a rock, we have this dashboard that I built.

I was going to ask you, like, how does— is the dashboard a part of this?

Yeah, it's all still there. Everything's tracked in real time. Everybody's goals. Actually, even now I've got it set so that like, as you just do your work, your goals start to show how you're doing on 'em. I mean, my dashboard's so freaking awesome and people would die if they saw my dashboard.

I want to see it. I need to.

And it's gone so far since we last talked. So that transparency's already there. I don't need to worry about a meeting giving transparent. People want it, they can just log into biz.responsivebid.com as an employee and they can see everything about the biz. I have one-on-ones with people. They'll report on their rocks there, and we're going to report on rocks on our one-on-one basis. And really, one-on-ones, as I laid out, they should all be positive. It should only be like, this is the good stuff that's happening.

It should be coaching. The way I think of them is it's like, what do you want? Like, how are you doing? What's going on?

Yeah. But if it's a bad thing, like I'm blocked or I don't have resources or something, no one should be waiting for a one-on-one on that. So I told him like, If you need resources or you need to become unblocked, that is something that I don't want to hear about in a one-on-one because it should have happened in the moment that it happened, whether it's a Slack message or an email or whatever.

2 questions. One is not as simple as like, can't your agents do this? Can't your agents just get those quarterly goals done? Like, that is something that is probably going to be coming soon, wouldn't you say?

Well, I'm thinking about some of our specific rocks and While we're using agents to do them, it's with human guidance.

Well, and then my second question is something I've thought about, is that I don't know that the people, even though they lead the department, let's say, and they're in charge, I feel like it may be better for me to have a project manager whose only job is project management to be the babysitter of some of these things, because what happens from my perspective is I will let somebody be taking care of their rocks or their whatever. And my brain, I'm thinking about a million things. So by the time I come back to it and see that it's still like way behind, like, I don't want to babysit anybody. I don't want to be having to check in with them all the time about these things. Oftentimes people get kind of stuck in their muck of the day. Like every single day they're getting stuck in these things. Rocks take a backseat. So, I've often thought, like, I feel like that a project manager whose only job was to move these things forward and hold people accountable would probably be a good idea.

Although, tell me what I'm missing.

What I would say to that is that, I mean, literally my dev leader, he is the project manager of the dev team. So, in that sense, he's orchestrating all of the tickets and the initiatives and what's going through in our epics and our projects and everything. So, he's reporting on I said that these would be done by the end of the quarter and by the end of this month and next month and whatever. And I'm orchestrating that and here's where it is. So in that sense, that, that's exactly how it works. But I couldn't turn that over to AI.

For that department though.

For that department. Now for marketing, I mean, I could hire a manager for my marketing manager, but—

I'm thinking a project, one project manager who's just checking in, helping people get what they need.

That is sort of the problem. Okay. What you're talking about is sort of the root of the problem we're trying to solve. So the root of the problem we're trying to solve, let me finish laying everything out so you can see the contrast real quick, because I've got my dev project manager, I've got marketing manager, I've got product manager, and I've got customer success manager. And all of those people, which actually I'm getting ready to add a QA manager, and QA is going to be sort of the link between product development and customer success, like kind of a hub. But anyway, for quality assurance manager, there'll be more and all of them are using AI in their jobs for sure. But the rocks they're committing to are, I will have, like, we just rolled out a new customer check-in rollout. So David used a bunch of agents to build for him this really cool way to check in with customers at regular intervals to make sure that they know about new features and that they know who their coach is.

They can set up a meeting with their coach. It's really cute. I was able to help him with it and it was really fun to watch. Lots of AI involved, but ultimately David needed to orchestrate what it was, how it worked, how it was integrated with his team, get his team integrated onto it. One of his rocks was getting that out. He got it out and he's got lots of time to spare. Great. So all sorts of, you know, we got a new Facebook ad and campaign that we're going to roll out and we're trying to get this many new demos coming in through marketing and signups.

So all of these numbers are owned by people and they will continue to be owned by people and they will continue to report on those things specifically. They're going to tell me why stuff is on hold in the future. We're going to archive the things that are completed, the boxes that get checked. And we're going to be talking about the active rocks that are in play and what, you know, how it's going and what they need, you know, how they're going. Those things won't happen in a level 10 meeting. In fact, they won't happen in front of anybody, but anyone in the whole company can check in and see what's happening every department rock-wise. And that's cool. We also have a way of all of our meetings getting transcribed and automatically adding context around all the rocks, where they're at, and new feedback that's come in from even meetings that the person who has the rock wasn't in.

That's a good idea. I'm going to do that.

So from there, what do we do with our level 10 meeting? Well, instead of 90 minutes, we're going to have every other week, we're going to have 2 different kinds of meetings that rotate back and forth, flip-flop. The first meeting is called the win meeting. The win meeting is just where we get together and we do go through current rocks, that are in progress and what is rolling out. So these are what's in progress. This is what the whole company needs to know, how it's going to affect all of you. These are the launch dates. This is the things that's going to affect you. And your team needs to all know about this and be able to speak intelligently about it.

So the company is winning in these ways. So it's designed to be a 15-minute meeting that can roll into 30. But the first 15 is probably going to be just like, because ultimately every 2 weeks you're probably going to only roll out about 15 minutes worth of stuff to say, even though you're working your butt off. But that's just how it works, right? So the other 15 minutes is we as a leadership team with AI, we have completely disconnected from each other. So we're going to talk about wins and then we're going to talk about what's going on in your life. Hey, so-and-so, you know, we went and got a paddleboard. We're now doing paddleboarding as a family. Like, We did not build any of that in previously.

And when you're moving at breakneck speed, it feels like trivial conversation.

That's like supposed to be the very first thing you do in an L10, give, share your win. You just let it go.

Well, I guess we let it go, but they call it segue and it's 5 minutes in the 90 app. But for us it was always like, hey, I'm chatting with this customer online right now. It's been pretty cool. He's, he's having a good time. Like always business, like stuff like that. I'm talking about like—

I did personal. I wanted to know Yeah.

Here's what's going on in the business, what I've pushed forward, and I'm educating you. And now I want to tell you that my wife and I are celebrating our anniversary and we're going to go to this place and I'm so excited for it. And I know she's going to be so surprised kind of thing. Like we're building all of that in, which didn't exist. Then on the other weeks, what we're going to do is an hour-long meeting of what we're actually terming a brainstorm meeting. And yes, I know IDS is issues discussed and solved. I think That's actually what it is. So we have an agenda.

It's actually built into my dashboard where we can just constantly throw issues in that we want and we can sort 'em in whatever order we want when we're in a meeting. And the idea here is, is that previously what would happen is we'd get so locked in on rocks and what was blocking us and stuff, the rocks always ran over and we never had any time for IDS. And what we're doing is we're blocking the brain. The brain is talking about wins and getting to know each other. And then the other meeting is all about like All right, we don't care about your rocks. I'm not even gonna be bothered with what your rocks are right now, but I see this list of 15 things have been added. Which of these you guys wanna tackle as a team, as a leadership team? And we can walk outta this meeting tackling 1 or 10, as long as we're using our time wisely and we stay in this brain space. So we'll walk outta those meetings, you know, hopefully.

And that's what they said they missed. They said, with the AI, everyone's always brainstorming, collaborating with AI, but we're missing all the extra perspective of what's actually happening in the company, in the different departments. And that's the whole point of having smart leaders. Yeah. So now to get to your point, can AI or a manager do what it needs to do? Well, it moves me to a role in my one-on-one.

Wait a minute. I meant a human project manager. You know that, right?

Yeah, but you had said agent.

Yeah, before I was like, why can't your agents just do it? It was tongue in cheek, but also that is what people are saying they want to do, right? I think we're talking about something where agents are not going to solve some of the problems that we have, you know, in terms of company cohesion and Leadership.

So the thing is, is that while everyone is using agents as like workers underneath them, right, they have to step into the management role of their department and make sure that work is diversified amongst the humans and the AI as it needs to be. But most importantly, we've got to get back the humanity and the connection and the culture that we as humans are trying to do. And it was really easy to get out of it, but to sort of have that snapping awake, like, Do you like the relationship that you have with your employees that you have now versus what it was like 2 years ago or a year ago? And the answer for me was no. I mean, just to look all my leaders in the face and I said, I don't particularly care for the connection that we have now versus what we used to have. And I think that we went into survival mode and we did what we felt we had to do. Now what we need to do is we need to say, this is the new speed that we operate at. Let's get back to where we were. And frankly, we're in a good spot because I don't know if we could have done this a while back now that we have the rails underneath us to do what we need to do infrastructure-wise and foundationally and systematization-wise.

But we can now, and I'm really hopeful. But by making rocks not the center, and I told our company at all-hands meetings on Tuesday this week, I said, you will no longer come to all-hands and learn about rocks. You'll never hear about a rock again at weekly kickoff. But here's what we're going to do at all-hands. We are each going to be able to share what we've done last month personally in our own lives. And we are going to have one game instead of doing our mission values read. We're going to have one person present about one mission or value statement about what it means to them, just to have them define it, not the company define it. Someone just get on and define it.

And so instead of spending time going through all the mission and values and then going through the rocks and going through this like checklist thing where you get to the end and you're like, boom, boom, boom. And we're going to be able to have people share what, you know, we're winners. So we want to hear about wins. And Weekly Kickoff will be similar, but Weekly Kickoff has a question of the week that they're going to answer, which we talked about that before. It was kind of fun. And then we're also going to have a dad joke presentation. Now, we had a mom joke presented last week, and admittedly it was better than any of the dad jokes that I personally have shared. But now it's a little bit of a competition between the guys and the girls, dads and mom jokes.

So Now what we do is we rotate them and you come into the weekly kickoff, we get, we finish the meeting off with a dad-mom joke. So that is sort of my feeling of swinging the pendulum, you know, focusing on accountability. One of our mission, our values is accountability is our anchor. Authenticity fuels transparency. And I felt like by making my rocks always the center of attention, that, you know, that which gets measured will is destined to improve. I've actually found that that which gets repeated over and over again is destined to be ignored. And that's crazy to me, but I've watched it. I know it's true.

Well, of course it's going to happen because we are humans and we can only hear things so many times. And you just are like, I heard this before and you clock out and you don't listen to the rest. Even if something changes, it's like typical human behavior. I like that. You made me think back to when I used to have my window cleaning company. And I remember I'd bought these cards that had weird questions on them, like, if you could fly or be invisible, which one would you choose? These kinds of questions. And it was one of the favorite parts of our Monday morning meeting is I'd have one employee pick out the question, and then the rest of us would answer it. And it was always silly and fun, kind of like the same in the way of what you're doing.

And I don't do that stuff anymore.

Well, who has time for it? We gotta move 20 times speed.

Well, and it's like, but why? We're not— I don't feel like it's really moved us forward. Like, I think we all freaked out about the AI and how it's affecting us. I have, you have, you have to because you're a software company even more than I have to. And then we kind of got distracted because it's very distracting and it's like always moving faster every day. And we're trying to ask other humans to keep up with this. They didn't ask for this. Like when they signed up to work with you, there was not AI.

And honestly, when the treadmill of relevance started speeding up, I think that I also found myself like, I didn't ask for this.

Oh, I say that every day.

I remember A.C. Lockyer famously said, for those who don't know him, he, uh, Softwash Systems, he's like the father of softwashing, like the godfather of softwashing really. Anyway, I really like AC a lot personally, but when COVID happened, he said, I choose not to participate in COVID. And I remember thinking, but you have to, it's mandated. And that never really made sense to me. I'm pretty sure he still had to wait in line to get into the Home Depot or whatever store he was waiting to get into for social distancing. I'm pretty sure he had to wear a mask in certain public spaces. I'm pretty sure He was not allowed to have employees do certain things, right? Regardless of whether he was participating or not.

I feel like AI, I took the approach of like, I'm not participating in this AI mayhem. And then I found myself going, it was almost like a rubber band. Like I withheld, I withheld, withheld. And then when it snapped, it was like, now you got to catch up.

Yeah, but it never stops. The catch-up never stops.

Yes. And so that treadmill of relevance, I do feel like we still have to run it, but You basically have to figure out what is sustainable.

You have to get disciplined in a different way. I've been thinking about this a lot because I think about this part. How do I keep us relevant? How do I keep my employees still moving forward, understanding how AI works and can support their job without them either over-focusing on that and getting lazy or under-focusing and doing a lot of manual labor still, because that's the norm. And my job as a leader is I have to figure that out for them, but also for me. I literally didn't ask for this. I don't want to do AI. I don't like it. I think it's cool in what it can do, but it has made life really, really difficult in business.

And it's made business not even enjoyable to me in a way anymore.

And it's made the environment worse?

Yeah, don't even bring that Yeah.

It's made the tooling required— like—

Yes. I look at my friends who are so in AI right now, and they've been doing it for so long, and they're like, now I have 50 agents doing it. I'm like, but then why are you working so hard still? I don't understand. And I think it's just like AI sprawl. I think I heard that term recently.

That's a great term.

And it is AI sprawl. Like, we have more tools than we need. We have more AI, but Not always the right AI. And I think we have to get disciplined about like what we're using it for and how we're going to use it. And—

Did we just turn this podcast into a one about AI?

It always comes back to that because that's like where most of our problems exist right now. You don't hear us talking about how amazing it's made our company. Like we're making so much more money. We've tripled our revenue with less employees. No, I don't hear anybody saying that. And it's sad. It's like we've been tricked. And I want to get back to the humanity.

It's why I went to the Philippines. It was a great decision to go and be face to face.

So glad you did that.

Me too. And the cool thing is, I don't know if you're the one who told us that you have a parking lot. Somebody had told me they have a parking lot for things that we're not going to get to, but we still need to like—

Oh yeah, someday maybe.

Yeah, we have a parking lot. So we were just Putting all these parking lot things on the sticky note mirror. And it just felt like being tactile, being in a room with people, having that back and forth, like, I miss that so much. I really do. And I think I want to figure out how to have the humanity back in my company without just being in bunches of meetings all the time and feeling like people—

Yeah.

Are going off on tangents because that's what happens with AI too, is like we're going off into— we start a project and then it leads us to a different project and the original project kind of gets tossed aside. I just, I want to get back to like core, we take care of people, we help people, we support them. And I'm going to try to do that, but I don't think it's going to be easy because I think about AI All the time. I listen to podcasts about AI. I go to conferences about it because I don't want us to be left behind because we will. Our companies will fail without it. I don't think that's a lie. I want to believe it's a lie.

I don't think it's a lie. And it might— it's not going to be now, and it might not be in a year or two, but it's going to happen.

Yeah, there's a lot to figure out.

So I like your idea of what you're doing with your changes. My company is way smaller than yours, my internal team, so I feel like we can do our L10s, but I think we need to bring a little bit more joy into that experience because I don't even want to go. Like, I accidentally missed the one when I was— I got the time wrong the first time. And then this week I was in the wrong Zoom room because we had been in a different one the week before and they switched it without telling me. So next week I'm in my own L10. We all lead different people lead it. But my goal is a reset based on everything. Like, I spent time this week putting together a big document that says— took all the conversations, all of the, you know, voice notes I was taking while I was having personal conversations, and all of our meeting transcripts, and then really got to like the heart of what are we trying to do here and where are we moving forward.

2. And now I have to take that and get back to, okay, well, what are our monthly goals now? But that's boring. So boring. I don't like that part of business leadership.

Funny how it doesn't matter what you like, you have to do what you have to do.

I guess I always feel like there's some other way that if you work hard enough to find it, there is another way. And for me, that was like not doing L10s, like not being in them and not working for 2 months. But that also wasn't fun. So I need to find the fun, Curt.

Well, I'm glad that you are doing what you feel needs to be done. I think the important thing here is that you're identifying and moving forward on the things that you need. And I think that's what I would press forward. I felt like you were moving one direction. We've got to get faster on the rocks, got to do more rocks. And here I am like, all right, got to take the focus off the rocks. We got to, you know, and I don't think either one, you know, Depending on where your business is at, there's always going to be a bit of a pendulum swing. And I think that would be my message to the listener right now is like, what are you doing in your business right now? Assuming that you're a business owner, and are you intentionally focusing on where you need to be? And the thing is, is that getting down in the trenches is the easiest thing in the world to do.

Like when you weren't eating and I wasn't eating on the truck and the window cleaning, you wake up, you got jobs you got to go do. You go into those jobs till you can't go anymore and you're done. And then you go home and fall asleep. And It doesn't leave a lot of room for looking intentionally, but I was so deep into the building and survival mode and like just trying to like put numbers on the board that I completely lost track. I mean, that question hurts. Do you like the relationship that you have with your team better today than a year ago or worse? And basically all the way around, it's worse. That sucks.

Yeah, that really does. I think one thing I am going to take away from this is injecting a little bit more fun, even just, you know, like in our conversations that we have every day as a team. I want to do more power hours again with my team, just being in a room with them because, you know, virtual is hard. But being in a room where we're working on our projects, but we're together at least, like that's something that feels more human. We do a coffee hour every other week, I think 30 minutes. It's not an hour, it's 30 minutes, but we do games. I have, what is it called? Jackbox TV. Yeah.

And we love some of those games. They're so fun. They make us laugh every time.

Do you like Fibbage?

Love Fibbage. Yeah.

Fibbage is my favorite. I know they've got, there's the art one.

They have so many, like Fibbage is my favorite, but I've done a lot of Fibbage. I like the art one. Like when you've got a group of people together, that art one can be very fun. But just like, we'll check in again. Like, we're in the last quarter of the year, which is crazy.

Come on now. Give me my—

Well, when people hear this, it'll be practically the last quarter. And I like that we're moving. We're not waiting till the end of the year to change a direction, right? We both are doing something where we're making a change, not based on what time of— because there's no better time than now.

Well, welcome home, Melody. It's so good to have you back. That hiatus? That we were on was, I think, you know, I missed you, but I think it was good for you.

I needed it.

I think that what you did in the Philippines was good on so many different levels.

Yeah, I think so too. I also think people don't even probably really recognize we were on hiatus because we had great podcast episodes every week from Jean Verne. I didn't even talk about— I hung out with them.

Oh my God, did we not bring that up?

We did not.

You sent me a picture. You texted me a picture that you look like you're out to dinner with them is what it looked like.

Well, we were in my suite at my hotel. Oh, okay.

That's a really nice suite you're in.

Oh, it's a great hotel. It's a weird place and I love it. But yeah, they came down. It took them quite a while to get there because it was pouring, of course, but they made the effort. They came down and we just hung out for like 2 hours. And I have to tell you, meeting people face to face is everything.

Yes. Ivan and Genever are absolutely amazing at their work. And I would have loved to have like broken bread with them, sat with them and just talked to them and gotten to know them more.

Yeah. I think just getting to see some of the people in person that I've built relationships with, or even matched with clients over the years, that's the most fun thing to me, just getting to know people. And it accelerates your relationships a lot more than online does. So thank you, Ivan and Jean Verre, because obviously we could not do this without you, nor would we.

No chance. No chance whatsoever.

No, we appreciate you both so much. Well, Curt, thank you for talking to me about quarterly stuff and travel and all the things. But wait, you usually end the episode, so do it the way that you do it.

I think I just say, uh, I don't know, good talking to you. I don't know. Let me, let me just say this though, before we go. One of the things that I really love about this podcast is it gets me to think and allows me to have a place to be able to think about things that I just don't feel like I can just sit down and talk to other people about. And it allows me to verbalize a lot of things inside. I hope that as people listen to today, it would just mean the world to me if they were able to sort of in their own head start to articulate some things in their own life that they're like, yeah, I can relate to that. And maybe they disagree with the things that we're saying, or they, you know, which is totally cool.

We can dream.

But to be able to say, I'm so glad I have the mental space to be able to just go down that road and think about it because that's what will allow for the change that we need to make in our lives. And ultimately, there's some things that are nice when they stay the same, but almost everything in life has to change.

I agree. And if you guys have any good tips on how to run your company better in a more fun way, please reach out.

Oh, I'd love that. Especially with our new format in our company. Heck yeah.

Especially for a virtual company since we both are virtual.

Yes. All right, guys. Well, we'll see you next week at the Soul Proprietor Podcast. Bye. Thanks everybody for joining us at the Soul Proprietor Podcast. It has been an absolute pleasure having these discussions with you. If you wouldn't mind taking just a few minutes to rate and review us wherever it is that you listen to podcasts, it would mean so much to us. We really do read each of these reviews and it gives us the opportunity to get the word out to more people.

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