Mental Models from a Shrink for Entrepreneurs

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0:26[Music] thank you this is a special episode because it's with my dear friend Peter schallard and right before this episode I was thinking about our relationship and we've had some magical moments just some magical moments some crazy stuff has happened um we've been to Lithuania together we saw Carl Lagerfeld basically on the floor uh next to us do you remember that no what do you remember so in Lithuania he you know we were speaking at a conference Seth Godin was speaking at a conference and Carl lagerfed was like sandwiched in there and he went up on stage and he basically well number one he tried to convert everyone to

1:12Catholicism and then the second thing he did was he was he was like I'm gonna wait and he just basically like laid down on the stage while like 10 000 people were watching him the largest stadium in Central Europe it was the yeah it was the largest business conference in Europe like period it was a it was a massive Sports Arena um I but but wait I think you're thinking of Jean-Claude Van Damme oh that is who I'm that is who I'm talking about you're right yeah how could I forget yeah it's funny yeah the fact that that uh it was John Claude Van Damme wasn't even

1:48the strangest part of it all but yeah he lay he told the crowd that the world was going to end and he and he laid down on the stage and did breathing exercises for a while um totally get that you might misremember because it feels like a dream yeah so I wanted to bring you on the show because you're you're the shrink for entrepreneurs and I feel like I've got a few stories with you but I feel like you've got just hundreds thousands of stories because you're working with a lot of some of the most well-known people um but before we get into that how do

2:21you define what a shrink for entrepreneur is yeah well thanks for having me I'm excited to be chatting um shrink for entrepreneurs is you know my my background I'm a psychotherapist by training my I and I am an entrepreneur sort of my first but is well I am an entrepreneur when I started I wasn't my first business was a brick and mortar therapy practice um and so what what I did was was kind of long very long story short build a specialty I'm working with Founders a lot of uh a lot of Founders in Tech a lot of venture-backed Founders helping them with with psychology with therapy

2:55and then uh as you and I have discussed you know what I kind of ended up doing was taking the world's greatest life long MBA program because by working with these people I got to learn as much from them as I was helping them with their psychology so I've been at this for best part of 14 years now and it's been the world's greatest MBA that I was paid to take and so now I get to talk to my clients not only about psychology but business strategy as well and and literally every single entrepreneur I work with has the same story about what happened right before they met me which

3:28is oh I went looking for a therapist I knew I wanted to do you know some therapy some coaching I knew I wanted to optimize my thinking and behavior and um and then they just have this weird experience of talking to someone who just completely doesn't get it right like there's this sort of it's almost like a civilian attitude of just not knowing how entrepreneurship works that you know unfortunately most people who specialize in therapy they just they couldn't be further away from the the coal face of Entrepreneurship and they just don't get it there's this gulf of misunderstanding um and so yeah it's uh kind of world's

4:03greatest Niche that I that I stumbled upon um and and okay so walk me through how you actually help people like me yeah so um well first of all I generally meet people like you the morning after the darkest night of the Soul so I tend to think about like any type of therapy is you tend to reach out and get started when things are very very bad um so I meet a lot of people in crisis there's a lot of uh you know over the last decade there's been a few VC funds that will have me on speed dial for when a Founder that they believe in and they

4:37want to lead a company kind of has one of those crisis situations where if it goes badly they might end up not they might end up not being the right person to lead the company so I'm usually a resource that's put in to help the founder accelerate their personal growth and development when the company is such a rocket ship that it's like you know doubling every couple of months in size it's a it's the founder is waking up every day to a totally new business because of the scale and the speed at which it's scaling and um yeah and there's and and their job as CEO is changing so rapidly that like you

5:12know it's totally reasonable for anyone to kind of get some Whiplash from that so what I help them what I help Founders do is accelerate the rate of their development as operators As Leaders they're interpersonal skills their ability to do really great investor relations and I do that by helping them really iron out their cognitive biases and blind spots so you know any areas where a limitation in their thinking is causing them to not see the truth of what's going on and this is where this conversation can get really fractal right because we could talk about thousands of different examples um but a good one for a Founder who's

5:50really winning is like being a being a foil for their hubris right it's really easy for people who have quick wins to get carried away um and start to believe that everything they touch turns to gold and lose lose their kind of psychological calibration to what the actual result is what what's going on in their business and they might be winning when they start feeling that way but they may not notice it when they stop winning right when the when when when problems start occurring and so part of what I do is increase provide this like radical hit of self-awareness for entrepreneurs by being somebody that

6:27they're talking to who's like objective who's outside of the Fishbowl who's helping them see reality for what it really is so pretty pretty abstract but hopefully that makes sense could you yeah I I wanna I wanna take a few minutes to selfishly get you to coach me right now let's do it therapy for Greg let's go how are you doing Greg how am I doing right now amazing I'm in Charleston South Carolina and I you know running I run a holding company so I run a bunch of different startups so that's like a you know a roller coaster on steroids there's several roller coasters at once right

7:03several rollers are one so sometimes it's helpful for me just to like take a step back and just extract myself from the situation and like go somewhere like Charleston and sort of uh rebalance myself so that's what I'm doing right now rebalancing and it's been awesome I feel awesome to answer your question I feel great nice and uh what is it that you think you need to focus on when it comes to your thinking and behavior to really crush the next 12 months what what type of Greg do you need to be for this holding company you've built I would say the most important decision that me and many Founders can make is

7:39ignoring the noise it's so easy to chase shiny objects especially if you're running a studio and a holding company because the world is your oyster so what I'm trying to get better at is you know we for example yesterday there was the Apple event the brightest of shiny objects and there was a listen there was a lot of really cool stuff that's gonna like transform our businesses but at the same time like do I need to be like stopping what I'm doing and watching it and spending the whole day just kind of you know digesting what's happening like probably not like you know I probably can take a Saturday morning catch up on

8:15it in a more Leisure Way and that's probably more healthy for my well-being well-being than sort of being really really oh my God I need to go stop everything and rethink everything while it's happening right on yeah so what you're talking about is a real important key to mental health um it's it's a it's a principle of agency and volition that um one of the big things that can change out like relationship to stress overwhelm our ability to focus isn't even really about what we do right like you might watch that keynote start to finish but it's about being in control of the choice so that you're the one

8:55with the agency that it's not Tim Cook deciding that 10 a.m Pacific on a Tuesday or a Monday or whatever is uh is when Greg stops work and focuses on this it's about you to having like you having the agency you being the one who's in the driver's seat because even if you're tactically getting distracted by the bright shiny object at least you're choosing to you've got a thesis about why not's right to do that right so you don't need too much therapy you're doing it right Greg you're very smart staying in chat staying in charge and deciding these things is important because you know the Apple event's like a big one

9:28and it only happens once or twice a year but I think you know these social media platforms can be really dangerous for entrepreneurs because they'll look at you know they'll look at a tweet that they're just scrolling on the phone while they're sitting on the John before they start working on on a given day and they'll see something really interesting that's one of those bright shiny objects and it can feel like oh this is game changing information for my industry and whatever they intended to do that morning's out the window now because they're going down this Rabbit Hole of like learning but the rubber is like and

9:59this is what I kind of want to find out from you is how what is the rubric for deciding like I think you're someone who would have a really in interesting answer to this because with a holding company ostensibly you are looking out for really interesting New Opportunities right how do you what type of criteria do you have mentally at that earlier stage when you find yourself getting sucked in and getting curious and seeing the possibilities like are they like green lights and red lights for you mentally about like do I lean in do I go further do I do I look into this thing because uh if you do that all day then

10:34the stuff that you're the mature companies that you're that you've got opportunity to scale are you know going to Wither on the vine right you can't do it all so how do you decide a few things one is or if you're listening to this and pulling up a coffee cup it's an empty coffee cup and why is it an empty coffee cup well number one I love coffee but number two I only go on Twitter while I'm drinking coffee I call it the coffee framework so I drink a coffee in the morning and a coffee in the afternoon and while I'm drinking those coffees like I'm allowed to go on

11:05Twitter that's when I do my tweets that's why if you look at you know most of my tweets they happen between the hours of 9 and 10 30 a.m Eastern because that's when I'm generally having my first coffee and I allow myself to basically be like take it all in just go wild go like it's an all you eat all you can eat buffet for Twitter in the morning and in the afternoon when I'm you know if I'm on the John so just you know I like I I'm gonna want to pull out my my Twitter and I just try to refrain from doing that and it's just about

11:40setting these systems for yourself so that um you know I always say don't let push notifications push you around um and that's the second thing which is I don't know why 99.9 of people do not have Do Not Disturb mode on at all times like Do Not Disturb mode should be the default should not be you're getting buzzed every single time something happens in the world all notifications off by default off by default like what are you doing you know and I try to do this so I can actually have like the time and space to like think about okay like what do I want right now what is

12:18good for my businesses and it takes me from being on the defense to being on the offense really quick and this is something that I've been doing for like six six and eight months and it's it's really really like it's literally transformed my business that's incredible what so when you do have something that I'm just turning this into an interview less of a therapy session when you do have when you do have something that you really like when you have an idea when you have the very beginnings of something you think you want to pursue as an entrepreneur how do you know internally like I'm curious

12:49about your psychology how do you know internally this is something good that I should look like that I should explore versus like you know those very natural mental dialogues we have where we're like that's a distraction I've got to stay away from it so I don't know man I built like an intuition and you just gotta trust your gut like there's a reason why we have our guts you know and there's a reason why we feel certain things I'm laughing to myself because I was chatting with my co-founder her Theo yesterday and I was like and I quote we should do X I'm 100 sure it's gonna work

13:23and then he's sitting there like 100 percent like what are you are you on crack like the 100 how are you sure that if we're gonna go build that product or do that thing that it's 100 chance and sometimes you just gain so much conviction based on your gut that you just need to you need to follow your gut and yeah I would I wish like like in my 20s I followed my gut sometimes but I I really followed other people's guts I would be like okay if um Kevin Rose from dig is building a video startup I need to build a video startup or you know Kevin Systrom from

14:01Instagram is starting you know a news app I should build a news app and now I'm kind of trying to like ignore as much as possible and with the hopes that the stuff that I create becomes way more uh you know as Seth Godin puts it remarkable something that you'd make a remark of I mean this is one of the most kind of common cognitive biases that can trip up entrepreneurs who have like got something and they're running with it right is that that imitative desire that's driven by starting to like form a peer group what a lot of people who are starting out don't know is that it

14:36actually gets worse the more successful you become because you start to feel that you're sort of at the table with some of these amazing people and so a lot of entrepreneurs the more traction they get the more success they they create they start to pay more and more attention to what their peers and also the people who are just a little ahead of them who might have pretty big profiles like what those people are doing and what they're reacting to and what their insights and their mental calculus is about like the next big thing hence Kevin Rose is doing a video app you've got to do a video app right

15:08like a lot of that that effect actually becomes harder to resist the more kind of experience that you get until you get a level of maturity I think an intellectual maturity out the other side of it where you learn to put those things aside and that's one of the big things that I'll try to help entrepreneurs really focus on is this idea that people like Kevin Rose to use your example you know other like a level players doing really interesting stuff they're reacting like their insights their strategy that they might be like building in public right and tweeting about or whatever that stuff comes from their reaction to like primary sources

15:46of information so they see things happening in the world and then they go and build something because of it and then they talk about what they're doing so a lot of entrepreneurs pay attention to what these people are saying about what they're doing and they get that imitative desire and one of the ways that you can fix this cognitive bias is by focusing if you are going to consume information on the primary sources so that your intuition your instincts are reacting to the same information that these people like Kevin Rose are also reacting to because you're you're more likely to form a unique point of view if

16:22you're looking at what's happening in the objective world and thinking what can I do with that like what could I build with that rather than looking at hey what are these people doing right in how are they reacting to the real world to reality because there's a you know there's a Plato's Cave allegory there right if you're looking if you're just watching where they where the other people are moving to you're not seeing what it is that they're moving toward right like what their reaction is so um yeah there's a there's a terrific opportunity for entrepreneurs who you know who can figure this out to to trust

16:56their Instinct um and you know and and that's the path that you're going to take to develop a unique point of view that's going to be that's going to build a product that look at my 6 see it or fail like when you say you're 100 certain you should get after something the way I read that is you're 100 certain that it's going to be really really interesting right like it could be a really big win or it could be like a spectacular learning experience you're 100 certain of like a potent outcome exactly and that was actually Theo's response he started laughing and because he knows how

17:29ridiculous it is to say something like that and he was like okay so what you're really saying is how do we win even though we lose which I think was a really interesting way of framing it what do you what he means by that is okay crazy founder CEO of guy uh you know I understand that you're have got a lot of conviction um but this feels like a zero to one a zero or one thing like it's either gonna really be successful or it's gonna fall flat how do we make sure that we if it falls flat that we still learn because in the holding company model in the

18:03product Studio model learning is all also helpful because you can basically say like okay I learned this you know how to do Twitter ads or whatever and I can apply that to even though we spent fifty thousand dollars on Twitter ads and it went nowhere we can actually apply that to another one of our business right gotcha yeah yeah that's an inch we were jamming about just recently um when we hung out I think there's been a really big shift that you know with the holding company you're at the front of of like needing to the strategy of getting after getting after opportunities where there's obviously a

18:36win but then failure is like an actual of the win like a real concrete win because I think we're coming out of a period this is what you and I were chatting about of like big investing and technology companies a lot of hype kind of reached its absolute peak in 2021 where and you know in in that VC model it's it's like go big go go big or go bust that like you you want to be swinging for the fences a lot of people with shooting at crazy Big Ideas where there were 100 percent certain it was going to win or be an absolute massive failure right and uh when there's enough

19:12Capital floating around the system you can like rinse and rip you can you can you can take those shots but now there's an opportunity for entrepreneurs to to I guess like chase after ideas where there's an opportunity at really big success but even taking another fork in the road is like a different type of success right like trying to build a really big scalable company but if it doesn't go so well you accidentally build like a small cash flowing business that runs itself um these types of Dynamics I think we're going to see more and more of yeah I think so let's talk about VC versus

19:46non-vc a little more so and it relates to your whole idea the idea that like people are sort of following other people and copying other people what's that book uh the medic Renee Girard um yeah yeah I don't know everybody every every everyone in Silicon Valley knows the name of that book but I can't remember it right now yeah I mean the point of that book is basically that like people buy things that other people buy to self-identify and when you think about Venture Capital that is a business that is a like it's all about Trends and it's all about following what other people are doing so if crypto is hot

20:25people are going to invest in crypto if now VR is hard hot people are going to now invest in you know the new Apple Studio companies built on top of that Apple reality Pro or whatever they're calling it so like I don't know like two weeks ago the metaverse was dead now the metaverse is back is the metaverse gonna die you know what I mean so it's like you're just con VCS are just investing in companies based on these Trends and and what it ends up hap what ends up happening is you just see influx of companies that look and feel very similar that are attacking a space and

21:00one of those are going to win or a few of them are going to win and then they're gonna have outside's return the problem with that for for entrepreneurs is you end up following what you know you end up catering changing your business to be in one of those spaces so I just wanted to like that's just an observation I've had encourage your thoughts on that and then my other my question to you is like what percentage of your the people you work with are bootstrap versus VC and how do those like are those similar entrepreneurs do they have similar challenges can you talk more about that yeah I I'd say

21:34about maybe third a third maybe 40 of the clients I work with in general uh a bootstrap is um I love them I think that um like there's some bootstrappers out there that'll that'll turn you green with him right like the the types of businesses they've built the lifestyles that they enable um it's a you know it's incredible and it's a lot you front load the effort it's a lot harder when you start a bootstrap company and you're not getting no one's offering you Awards you're not getting written up in crime no one knows you exist right that those early years are like all grind whereas and I think

22:10this is what is so compelling and what was so compelling about the last decade of like crazy Venture Capital like froth and growth is that yeah like you stop feeling like a winner as soon as you get a meeting at like a major fund right there's all these from a psychological point of view there's all of these proxies for Success that are immediately accessible or short-term accessible along the path which is like a really long path to building a successful business that actually makes money right that like creates value in the world that convinces strangers to pay money at a at a good margin for that value being

22:46created that Journey could be like five ten years long but when you go down the VC route you can immediately start celebrating because you're getting written up on Forbes 30 under 30 right like you're at this you're at the pre-seed stage and you're booking meetings with really big investors you're telling your friends you're you're getting patted on the back for that let alone like getting to your actual first round of fundraising where a lot of like a lot of naive entrepreneurs feel like they've won they they pop a bottle right on the night that they that the funds wire for their seed stage not understanding that

23:18they're now obligated to a bunch of investors to work their ass off to build something that has a spectacularly High odds of not working out right like they now have a contractual obligation to grind really really hard um and a partner who's done their part because their part was writing the check and providing the capital and now it's all on you and so psychologically you know we I I talk a lot about this Dynamic that I call the action result gap which explains like a lot of uh human behavior right when there's a gap between taking an action and getting a result it becomes difficult for us for

23:54human beings to do those things right like there's an obesity epidemic the reason that so many people struggle to be in really great shape is that to get in really great shape you have to take the action of like working out eating salads and the result doesn't really kick in for like three weeks right if you like work out every day and eat salads every day three weeks later you'll maybe two weeks you'll step on a scale and be like huh and you'll get a result and there'll be that like dopamine serotonin experience of like wow like this is working I'm getting sexier this is cool but those two weeks

24:25are really hard for us psychologically right because of the gap between taking the action and the result whereas a donut has no action result Gap you see it you eat it you take a bite you immediately have that chemical experience right your your brain is bathed in these exciting neurotransmitters you've got fat you've got sugar you're enjoying yourself no action result Gap so it's a very compelling thing to do this is all an allegory for Venture Capital right when you can get high off of booking filling your calendar with meetings for your pre-seed company when you close that precede round right you haven't built a successful company you are not at the

25:03ultimate result but you've lined up all these literal results these little proxies for the things that you ultimately want that's that feel really emotionally compelling and that's why people get sucked in at a psychological level it's highly motivating because trying to build a successful business to a billion dollar exit over 10 7 to 10 years is really hard and that's the biggest action result gap of all but closing your next round is like in front of you in the next 30 days right and so it it gives us these kind of guard rails neurologically to go focus on to chase those highs that we ultimately need to

25:37inspire action so bootstrap is a bootstrap is a monks man they they have like a lot of mental discipline because you have to really have a vision you have to believe you have to be able to see what is possible and pursue and like live through this action result Gap um I think the cool thing about it is that like on the other side you get maximum freedom I think most entrepreneurs have like share a value of Freedom they they want autonomy and and bootstrappers are the ones who figure out that you can have it if you sacrifice it to begin with right because you're you know you're severely

26:17constrained when you're starting out you're you're using your customers to fund your business you're making promise like a lot of amazing bootstrappers started with the model of delivering services so that they have immediate cash flow up front and then Building Products that like creates some scale uh you know with the margin that they make and so like you know that Rick that's a lot of work that's like you have it you basically have a job for working for your customers so that you can build a product and a business that can put you out of a job one day um so yeah long journey big action

26:51result Gap but a lot of cool stuff on the other side if you can handle it and it's tough because you're like I just quit my job at Google making three hundred thousand dollars to go start an agency doing services and now I have like 20 clients that are you know emailing me all the time and texting me all the time and this doesn't feel like Freedom you know and I get that right like and you're making less so you have to be you have to really really believe in in what you're doing and and be true to the path and and also like I see a

27:22lot of bootstrappers that like will leave a company like Google start bootstrapping and then like three months later I see like they change their LinkedIn to like now they work at Shopify it's like no you have to this isn't something that you can just try for 90 days or 60 days and expect a result this is something that you have to have a serious time scale like I don't I don't know if it's five years but you know at least 12 to 24 months of like hey I'm gonna go and build this thing it's going to be bootstrap and I need to hit this goal of 20K mrr or

27:57whatever it is in order for me to continue quick Interruption from me if you're listening to this on Apple podcast or Spotify or getting any value you need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the where it happens podcast YouTube channel I promise you the experience is richer more interesting so if you're getting any value just stop what you're doing open up the YouTube app go to the website and press subscribe at where it happens on YouTube and if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed what are you doing go go press subscribe thank you enjoy the rest of the show yeah totally and I think that you know I

28:42think every I think every entrepreneur to some degree is like motivated by freedom and a lot of uh a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the high autonomy environment of just like going and raising money getting Venture funding behind you actually creates that freedom right that like so this when you've got some operating capital in the bank what most early stage Founders discover is they have this huge amount of autonomy there's not like a ton of supervision or scrutiny right like your investors if you have them they're not like micromanaging your time but that's really dangerous too because you're in this totally isolated state with a ton

29:21of money that other people's money that you've got to figure out how to build something with there's a purity to bootstrapping where you don't have that fake kind of Freedom right because you realize you're like oh man I've just traded my job with one boss at like Google aware of for a job with 24 bosses that I'm deeply accounted to accountable to and they want things and they want it to be fast and quality and cheap all at the same time and they're like blowing me up about it and I don't get paid to set meanings anymore um so it it does feel a lot like that

29:51isn't freedom but it is the you know I think fundamental principle that everyone needs to understand is that nothing of substance or lasting value is created without somebody like experiencing the discomfort of like putting the work in and making it happen so yeah it takes a little while to get to that to get to that place you mentioned before around you know people filling up their calendars with VC meetings and you know raising these pre-seed rounds and and people thinking like great like now I've made it I had a call yesterday with a Founder who's raised 600 million dollars multi-billion dollar uh valuation company and he's

30:32trying to figure out what to do like he here's a like you expect once you have hit unicorn status and you've got hundreds of millions in the bank like you're good and it's like no like you he if anything he's like even more stressed trying to figure it out I have a you have a client with a with a a company with north of a two billion it's a two point something billion dollar evaluation who um yeah has there's like problems that exist there they have a liquidity problem I have to be careful about how I you know frame this to give you like the light touches while protecting their

31:05privacy but you know the business is is big and successful but it's not quite hitting the metrics it needs to to have a successful IPO and it's too big to buy right there's no player in that space and that vertical that can come along and like acquire it and give the founders a Payday so guys worth hundreds of Millions on paper and um you know like struggles to come up with a down payment for a house in a major city and like in in the big cities in North America it's it's wild he's worth hundreds of Millions on paper but like you said on paper like to me like

31:39there's a bunch of Founders that right now that are worth a lot on paper that are going to have crazy headwinds like within the next six to nine months because they're gonna have to recap their companies and that the founders are they're gonna realize wow this Venture thing this is not as attractive as I originally thought because if you the other thing is for most Founders who take Venture Capital especially at like the series BCD and E stage these boards could fire you at any time so imagine starting a company raising 600 million dollars doing this for 12 14 years and you know recession hits not even like

32:26you know you did your best this is an outside externality that's happened recession hits and they're like okay thanks Peter it was great knowing you here's like a 12 month severance package you you know you'll have your stock but like we're gonna go and recap this company which basically is another another way of saying like we're going to change the ownership structure of this company um you know and uh like see you later like that's a reality it's a tale as old as time yeah happens all the time versus you're bootstrapping and it's like you are the captain of your ship yeah I think uh I think I think a lot of I mean

33:08to sum it up to put a bow on what we've been talking about I think a lot of people start out the Journey of of Entrepreneurship motivated by Freedom right that's what they ultimately crave is that autonomy that sense of being the captain of their fate the master of this all and then they start thinking about what's the best way to go about this and you have to be really really careful if that's you what types of strategies you start imitating because if you start chasing after like proxies artificial versions of that freedom like the freedom you think you have when you raise and see capital or like you know

33:43whatever then you can really quickly end up in a place where freedom is the last thing that you feel where you where you wake up every day you know stressed obligated with this enormous pressure upon yourself to you know to go and perform um because yeah that's that is what success looks like for a huge number of and we're talking now about champagne problems right like about the top one percent most successful people in that ecosystem that is what success looks like and so yeah I think I think I love that you're kind of banging this drum out there in the world because I think bootstrapping will always be hard

34:18because it's like a front loading of the effort right like you're taking the hits you're taking the knock to your freedom at the start where you've got to just you've got to find a way to sell the services do the work manage the clients do unscalable like unsexy things to pay the bills so that you can like like I think it's totally feasible to spend twenty percent of your time in your first year of Entrepreneurship as a bootstrapper building the product that's going to one day liberate all the rest of your time right like it can really be you might spend eighty percent of your time just doing fee for service type

34:50work if you're just starting out that you know my journey was exactly that right like I built a therapy practice trading my time for money and for a long time it was just a journey of increasing my prices like if I want if my lifestyle want if I wanted to have any upward Mobility I was like guess I gotta charge more and you know after several years of doing that and succeeding to the point that my rust was booked and I had this great network of entrepreneurs referring me business and you know that I I looked around and was like I don't know if I can keep doing this for the rest of my

35:22life I've got to find something that scales um what can I do and that was when I started just like tinkering and iterating and playing with ideas and it was really hard because I would do it online like Friday afternoon right like a time that not many people want to go to therapy and when I when I had some free time in my schedule that was when I would build and play an experiment but I mean for me it was like you know I was living in New York City I was it's not a cheap place to live it was like 90 90 95 of my time was FIFA service so that I

35:54could build something that could make money you know without me being the central engine in the machine I want you to talk about what you built with commit action but I also want to let you know that when you told me about commit action probably like I don't know 12 years ago or something when when did it start yeah I mean that would have been when I was like having the idea that it became you know like the yeah the very beginning yeah when you told me the idea I was like in my mind I was like you are crazy like why would you do this thing

36:25you know you're at the center of all these you know big Venture back startups you know you you know people like goadin and all these well-known people like why would you go and create a a service like this that could max out at 20 million 40 million a year in Revenue that's like what my in my mind I thought about and probably in my mind even less than that in my mind I was like this is a five million dollar business fast forward to today I'm like man like you did all the right things you literally did all the right things you took a service business

36:59where you were making money you learned about the problems you productized it you learned how to scale via profitable marketing channels you never raised a dollar you have a good name and it's been compounding ever since so tell tell people what it is because I think a lot of people can learn from your how you did it and uh and let's go I will I do have to just clarify though I did raise some money and I want to shout out uh human Ventures they uh a VC who actually understands the hold Co model one of the most successful companies in their portfolio they're building in this way

37:34they have a huge stake in ckbg which is the parent company the holding company that produces a bunch of spirits companies and so I came to them with the idea um like they're building this really cool business there in a similar model to the way you are at lake checkout and um I came to them with the same idea I was like I want to raise the first and last round for this company a little bit of jet fuel and um you know to their credit they were like up for it they saw the vision and so we did it but yeah I just I just wanna for all the for

38:04all the [ __ ] we're talking about VC I want to uh shout out to the people who get it well the the the side note to that is someone needs to create a venture fund that is called last round Ventures first and last round Ventures where you take money it's like a bootstrap business but it's like a little bit of money to actually like get you to profitability and that's it like you don't there's no expectations that you're gonna raise more you know I remember when we closed their uh one of the GPS on this sort of CFO of that whole coat was like look dude this is a

38:38great idea and if it pays dividends one day that'll be a win um and like that's a that's a cool partner to have yeah so yeah um shout out to those guys um what was the question how do we with commit action and why is it cool yeah commit action is a so commit action is the company that I built uh that was out of my services business and it's uh it's a productivity company what we do is a coached weekly planning ritual for entrepreneurs for creatives for executives we solve a problem if you're one of these people you're working in the knowledge economy your your ability

39:15to succeed is dependent entirely on how how well you execute on the big bold ideas that you have and so we're a a company dedicated to improving the focus the execution the ultimate personal effectiveness of entrepreneurs um and people like that by helping them combat what we believe is the primary cause of people's lack of focus right the big problem in 2023 is not people not being passionate enough not wanting it enough lacking access to like how two guides or whatever we like our cup run over with that it's out it's the isolation that entrepreneurs and creatives and execs often have to build and execute within that causes problems

40:01with their focus their productivity that causes them to self-sabotage and procrastinate so what commit action is is a real simple coached weekly planning ritual where you actually work with somebody one of our highly trained ninja productivity coaches to sit down and plan out the highest leverage use of your time every single week then you've got someone on your team right commit action enables you to hire this Pro effectively to be your dedicated focus and focus and accountability guy or girl who's single singular job is to keep you focused and in the zone at all times so we're the only productivity company in the world that rather than focusing

40:42people on checking off a bunch of to-do's or project management we just care about what is the highest leveraged use of your your time and are you carving out even just a couple of hours a week to work on that thing that picking up the ball and moving it forward for like whatever's next for you whatever creates the growth um so it's a coaching company it's a weekly planning ritual is ultimately the the you know what you get and the way it works is as a subscription you sign up on a monthly membership and you get a weekly planning call with a coach every single week and they stay in touch with

41:15you they build a plan um for you they set up a bunch of appointments for you to do deep work appointments you set with yourself to show up and work on your biggest opportunities and they hold you accountable to that calendar on that set of appointments by staying in touch and texting you and what not throughout the week so yeah it's like having it's like having a personal trainer but for your productivity rather than just working out and from a size perspective could you share a little bit about like scale like how many customers or like how big is the business yeah we've worked with we've worked with thousands of of

41:49customers we've we've scaled it up to you know close to about that five million dollar Mark at this point so it's kind of funny because yeah you were right like when you thought about that idea I mean I'd kill to get it to 40 million and I think we will um but that's kind of where we're at in terms of annual revenue and what's amazing about that is that we make a profit every single month where you know we're growing and um there's like a crazy economic model attached to the business because we create a ton of value in the world so the secret to our

42:21if you want to like pop the hood the secret to our business model is that the service really works right like if you want to check out we we get third-party verified reviews on trustpilot people describe the experience of having a personal trainer for productivity is like life changing the copy is so exuberant in the testimonials people just write themselves that we we can't use them in marketing sometimes because they're so over the top it's almost cringe-worthy it's like kind of frustrating I I'd kill for like a four star like this was pretty great to just like make us look human um make us look normal so it it really

42:56really works and the secret is customer retention right that we have these clients who start the service and recognize that it's like a it's like a mental gym membership it's you know when you when you're dedicated to Fitness and you find a trainer who gets you and gets you results like why do why would you ever stop then when you're an entrepreneur you find this this way to be productive and focused that creates Roi in your business you know in most cases is like 10 to 50x uh the the sort of annual return on investment for what they might be paying us you just keep doing it and so we've we've launched the

43:32companies like an alpha pilot and it was just pure Services right talking about bootstrapping we had no software platform we had nothing it was just it was just pairing people up with coaches on my team to do this account this weekly planning ritual we have clients from the initial Alpha pilot who are still worth with us today we've had people who have been with us the best part of a decade um and just voting with their wallets every single month being like this is something meaningful this is something that works and so yeah that's what's been like a big key big Key to Our Success is just refining you know I've

44:05spent years refining the service refining the methodology to make it really effective we uh you know we built a science Advisory board with the professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School with the professor of positive psych at NYU to just get to the bottom of like what is the evidence what is the real science what's the evidence-based way to help entrepreneurs be more effective and so we just you know that's the thing about bootstrapping you kind of have to effort Max you have to grind absolutely every aspect of your business so we just had this idea and then systematically sat down at the beginning and said how do we

44:40improve the [ __ ] out of every single part of this every single little interaction and uh you know ultimately scaled to you know building engineer and engineering team team in-house and building our own software all to create the ultimate weekly planning ritual for entrepreneurs how much have you I mean you how much have you optimized marketing and marketing channels you know because we've talked a little bit about optimizing retention and the product itself but how much of or how much are you doing like r d essentially marketing r d in terms of new channels to to bring customers in a little bit my as a like as a kind of a bootstrap and

45:17my tendency is always to focus on the product first and foremost right like that's that's really what I've been getting after so I will say like I'm I'm better at building an accountability coaching methodology technology Etc than I am as a marketer like I've got a lot to learn when it comes to marketing but we did have some wins I mean we've built we've built marketing channels that have like a sub 30 day payback on customer acquisition cost which is like a super awesome key to you know to scale so we you know we figured that out a couple of years ago which enabled us to run ramp

45:49up we're always looking for new stuff right now I'm in the very early stages of experimenting with Organic content you know it's something that I tactically decided to ignore for many many years because I was building you know I wanted to build something bigger than me and I had built a sort of a personal brand not that I was famous on the internet but I was pretty well known within certain circles in the entrepreneurship world so for me commit action was a journey of like focusing on product at the expense of I've kind of let this organic audience building thing Pass Me By and now I'm putting some more

46:24focus on it now that the commit action is like up and running and you know pretty much runs itself at this point from a day-to-day basis that's I've uh I've started a little YouTube channel I'm posting some stuff on Instagram I think just like you um yeah just experimenting to see like you know we've learned a lot over the last few years about helping entrepreneurs be really effective and we have like a ton of um we have a ton of like information that's really useful I think like science about you know really counter-intuitive things about what it takes to be really focused and really effective as an entrepreneur and the

47:01cool thing about selling a real meaty service right is that we can give away all of the information for free right like where I and that's kind of the journey that I'm on right now is I'm trying to figure out the right formats and the right way to just kind of share our methodology and teach anyone who wants to pay attention how we do things that come in action how we turn entrepreneurs into these execution powerhouses um because yeah you can you know the the secret to it all is you know we have a lot of techniques we have a lot of amazing methods but that at the heart of

47:33them is human accountability um and that's from a science point of view one of the biggest levers human beings have to improve their their behavior their output to become more focused to become more effective is uh yeah is figuring out how to use social psychological engagement like connection with other humans to keep them focused where where social primates we're hardwired to perform at our best when we're connected to others and that's what our business is built on yeah the reason why you're gonna win as a organic content creator is a few fold number one you're known as the shrink for entrepreneurs that itself is super memorable like when you have a memorable

48:15name like that that is it just you're you're playing on easier mode than hard mode the second is your point of view on this stuff uh like productivity and unlocking growth it's it's a unique perspective see it's not like you're remixing other people's stuff you're basically you know the whole the whole concept around it being like rooted in science I think is just a really fresh take so I think once you're putting out content like having a fresh take I think of performs and really really really gets people excited about you um and so I'm like yeah I'm excited I think you're gonna you're gonna crush it

48:55based on those two things which platforms are you most excited about uh you mentioned Instagram YouTube like what do you think is going to work the best I don't know what's gonna work the best for me right like that's where I'm kind of like I'm the most curious right now is like where does my where do my sensibilities and like you know what the algorithms are rewarding right now kind of overlap like when's the where's the Venn diagram there I'm extremely I would say I'm just in general extremely bullish about YouTube as a platform in general like I think it's I think it is insane how the Legacy Media just sleeps

49:30on YouTube in terms of the the size of the audience there uh there's also been I gotta like take my hat off to Google for this there's been an absolute transformation of YouTube as a social media platform most people don't really think of it as a social platform but if you get into like self-development self-improve Movement YouTube there is a bunch of like people anonymously commenting and interacting in there in the most wholesome way possible it's like it's such a good vibe um so it's like I you know I I think we are watching a generational shift from television um to these platforms and I I think

50:09YouTube is I think it's already huge it's way bigger than most people realize um and I think it's just I think it's just getting started it's going to be bigger and bigger so I'm really excited about that place about that space as I think part of the magic of it is that it rewards effort right like the people who are succeeding on that platform uh you know they're they're grinding they're they're you know they're they're kind of coming around to the level of production that like people put into television shows and um and so I think we're gonna I'm I'm always interested in competing in a space where you can win with

50:43quality because I just I like that like I want to make if I'm gonna make something I want it to be like top shelf and so um yeah I I'm excited about that platform for that reason I think I think uh I also just wouldn't take a bet against meta right like I think you know the stock prices got hammered in the last few years they've people talk a lot of [ __ ] but there's some amazingly talented people there and um you know Instagram is the de facto first place most people go to scroll and like waste their time um and consume content and there's an

51:15interesting opportunity there too for sure yeah my take is when you're starting out you want to build an audience you really do need to pick one platform and and really just try to optimize it as well as you can and it might be attractive to be like oh I I already have these shorts I might as well put them on Instagram or I might as well put them on Tick Tock but it's like but now you're thinking about those other platforms when you should really be thinking about how do I make how do I become known on YouTube for the next six months I'm only going to focus on being

51:48known on YouTube group and I know I'm gonna miss out on Instagram and Tech talk and stuff like that but uh yeah that's my my take uh right right now on on building building uh audiences good advice focus focus focus cool yeah I probably needed to have that well I feel like dude you can do it uh commit action version of it just for like audience Builders so it's like sign up to you know commit audience.com and every single day we're gonna give you like we're your audience productivity expert and we're gonna give you uh advice on on how how your content really is like for

52:29example for me I hate listening to myself or watching myself on YouTube I like can't it's like super cringe-worthy but if I had like an expert just give me notes and tell me what I did wrong this week in terms of social media like yeah I'd pay pay for that monthly oh interesting there you go Greg throwing out bootstrap business ideas yeah cool take it dude take it sleep on it yeah I'll have a think about it I mean I definitely think that that owl like coaches at commit action often find themselves in that role of like you know they're there for the to give structure

53:01and accountability and create that that that best practice of planning the week but they often become these like allies and I mean they get fully embedded on the client's team and will be reacting to the stuff they're putting out there in the world we have a we have so many clients that they that you know a big part of why they use the service is to execute on these like long tail creative goals where you have to ship stuff every single day and like you know watch that audience like you know cumulatively compoundingly build in the long term so yeah I think you're right before we head

53:32out what's uh what's the biggest tip you can give to folks around productivity biggest tip around productivity is you're crazy to do it alone right like like I said we're social primates we're hardwired to perform at our best hundreds of millions of years of evolution have optimized human beings to be at their best when they're working together in groups and one of the really dangerous things for you know entrepreneurs for creatives for creators out there in today's world is that we are really socially isolated right these parasocial relationships behind through the screen they don't do to our monkey mind to our animal brain what actual social connection does so the first

54:12basic tip for improving productivity and focus is to have people in your life who care who you talk to about your goals and you talk to about your implementation intentions if you've got friends that you're discussing you know mutually with where and when am I going to work on my biggest ideas and then they're checking back in with you you're simulating what we do like at a professional level at commit action and it works that you know the science on it is like Case Closed overwhelming evidence just even the anticipation of social accountability that it might happen is shown to him improve people's follow-through on goals by up to a

54:52hundred percent right like there's some wild studies out there about how this stuff is effective so I think the tendency for a lot of people starting out or working on anything big is like taking into the bat cave keep it secret keep it safe right like just like work on it work on it until the world is ready but you've you've got to get some allies you gotta uh you gotta you gotta add some accountability because that's what sharpens the focus that's how human beings Were Meant to do their best work and a bonus tip of course is to go hang out with Jean-Claude Van Damme in

55:24Lithuania and don't listen to anything he says oh dude I'll never forget pounding champagne with jcbd at that scary ass nightclub haha deep deep in the heart of ildius Lithuania that was uh yeah that was to this day one of the craziest nights of my entire life shared with uh Mr Greg Eisenberg we do it we do it we do it for these Pinch Me moments you know I think uh that's the fun part about entrepreneurship is it it it it it puts you in places you wouldn't think are possible stop bootstrapping something one day you wake up and Vilnius Lithuania drinking champagne with jcvd totally we'd love to see it all right

56:05man well where could people find you on the internet well you can check out my brand new YouTube channel um this is just under Peter shella and you can also find what I've built at commit action.com if you want to come take a look at uh at what we're up to there there's a ton of amazing free resources on the nav menu there there's an entire free training Workshop you can get all of our methodology um everything our coaches know how to do it's all available for you to download and plug into your life and if you want to take a look at you know adding a Pro

56:34to your personal productivity stack that's an option there too so commit action or just Google my name I'm the only me in the whole world you can find me my website everywhere Peter shellan that's that's a low-key Flex I like it I like that all right that's the Pod thanks