The Power of Becoming a Feedback Magnet with Kat Cole | Where It Happens

0:00what's up everyone we just got done filming an epic episode with the cat cole went into so much cool stuff had some really cool frameworks around building a startup where you come down from what the big companies have and build that for the small guys what'd you have greg i liked the mmdd framework made my day difficult i thought that was brilliant super quick easy win to ask your employees to make the experience more fun more enjoyable more rewarding so many cool startup ideas coming out of this one you guys are gonna love it let's dive right in the saying used to be let your game

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1:53otherwise would be able to is it complex though no it's super easy to set up only a couple of clicks you can go through the process so quickly there's no dilution ever and if you don't draw on the money you don't have to pay any interest against it it's a great solution for fast growing startups and they should all check it out today so if you want to go look into it go to capchase.com dude i finally watched squid games okay what do you think i know i like i used to i used to talk trash about um like these uh subtitle shows because i couldn't do it

2:26um i always had trouble like reading while watching and um first off i realized that like after two minutes your mind just somehow adjusts to it and you just like naturally read and are able to watch the show so i've never really figured out how to do that until recently but it definitely happens and so like one thing i'm over that whole hold up on it and squid games is insane and i'm like i'm super late to this party i get it everyone talked about good games like several months ago and it's not that cool anymore but it's uh it's crazy i mean it's like a super interesting

2:58human uh really dark but like great quality good acting i was like i thought it was dope i mean i basically don't watch tv so i haven't seen squid games have you seen the mr beast squid games reenactment no you have to watch that have you seen the like whole all the hype around this like he released he just spent like seven weeks putting together like a real life reenactment of squid games obviously not killing people um but got like 100 million views in like 72 hours i did see that on twitter the stats on it were complete i mean that guy's legit visionary is that what got you

3:31into squid games you like saw it you're like oh i should probably watch that which is fascinating actually as like a case study on how creators can like add value to these platforms because he made the video he obviously did really well on the actual video the whole thing got sponsored 100 million views like he's making a bunch of money on it um but the amount of value that i imagine it added back in like driving a resurgence of squid games into the netflix platform and he's not getting or capturing any of that so it's kind of interesting like could you see a future where um

4:00these platforms actually like harness creators to go create cool viral content around it to drive people back yeah that gets me thinking of uh cc0 do you know what that is no so some nft projects have what's called creative commons which basically means that uh the community owns the rights to um to the product so you own a cryptos right and cryptodes like what that means is you actually don't own the ip to that cryptos nft anyone kevin our video guy could go and just print a hat with your cryptos on it and the thesis on it is that if you basically open source the ip

4:46that anyone could you know do things with it that more creativity is unlocked and then because of that there's just like more there's more memes around it and you know if there's more memes around it the value goes back to um [Music] you know the value goes back to the original sort of purveyor of the meme in this case cryptos another way to think about it is do you know the the remora the remora and shark relationship no so remora is like a fish that basically hangs on to sharks yeah the sticky thing that sticks on the side exactly like cleans it and eats the eats the parasites yeah it's

5:30the it's the definition of it's a definition of a symbiotic relationship so that's the idea is that the big shark is kryptodes and the little sharks are these like projects that are kind of built on top of it baby shark baby shine exactly um i think it's kind of a cool idea i don't um so i guess the analog i would use in like a real world uh would be like people that are creating replicas of certain artwork or certain collectibles and that actually drives more people and drives value of the actual like but but i don't really know the right way to think about it in a in an nft sense i

6:12agree with you though like the nouns thing that we talked about like jack butcher our friend uh you know created these like nouns sweatshirts and hats and different things that nouns are like the red glasses that are like cool kind of pixelated things also cco yeah yeah okay so very cool because then you have a bunch of people out there wearing these things and some of them actually own things that are nouns some of them don't but hugely valuable to the ecosystem around it because it adds this coolness and this vibe to it um so i do feel like there's something there it's an interesting concept though for like

6:43netflix or these other platforms that are trying to gain share to collaborate on to like seed interesting creators to create things that stoke viral intrigue in the product it's sort of like guerilla marketing yeah i mean i think i think that's the future of hollywood is like it's not you're not guar super guarded on your ip right you make it more open i remember i once 2000 like four or five i drove down from montreal to burlington vermont to go see a third eye blind concert love third eye blind by the way semi-charmed life is still like one of my favorite songs of all time so i'm there i'm at the concert

7:21with like my best friends and i had just gotten a audio vox cell phone with a camera on it um i even think i actually i brought a digital camera as well like an actual digital camera and i was really stoked and then when we got there the venue higher ground in burlington vermont we like me and my friends started taking pictures and they were like there's no pictures and it was this whole big thing where third eye blind doesn't want anyone to take pictures and i remember thinking back then like 20145 whatever it was like that doesn't make any sense like the more pictures i take

8:01and share on social the better it is for you right like i'm taking pictures of their of of you the singer of third eye blind i'm posting i'm like i had such a great time like and i think uh that's kind of the same aha moment i'm having with a lot of like hollywood productions where you're either like very guarded or unguarded and the ones that are gonna win are going to be unguarded are there platforms this is it's making me want to ask a question to you you might know the answer you might not are there platforms or like infrastructure for small companies to track and manage their ip so like disney

8:42has thousands of people that are dedicated to this probably and are like constantly tracking hits on different ip and what it's doing and the value of it but like if you're a small creator or you're a small web 3 project or you're like up and coming you don't really you have all this ip you have it out there in the wild maybe you're just a startup actually and you have your brand or your logo uh whatever it might be like are there platforms that allow you to actually track uh hits on that ip the like perceived value of it because the ip by the way um in traditional

9:15financial services context has value like you can go get a loan against ip and actually have cash that comes in from it so i wonder whether you could build a platform um because i haven't seen it exist that actually just helps companies especially content related companies track and manage and like kind of leverage the value of their ip more readily i haven't seen anything i think what you're describing is basically like hootsuite but for ip so instead of tracking like tweets instagram posts whatever you're tracking like your digital ip yeah or non-digital ip yeah in like a really like nice dashboard probably a great business idea there

9:54it's kind of like a niched down version it's like a kind of cool little niche though but like um you know every startup does the whole like in the wild thing where like they have their slack channel or whatever they're operating on and they're like oh i saw i don't know swag up in the wild and you're like saw the picture of this thing or like oh i saw a party round sticker in the wild or mercury in the wild whatever it is and that there's actually something really powerful in that right like if you are seeing it in the wild more being able to actually track and manage the

10:24value of that and track the perceived value of what you're creating and then figure out like what are the levers we can be pulling to increase that value it's kind of a cool idea i think like the bigger idea slash framework is that there's some you know you started off by saying like disney has thousands of employees probably doing this thing and it's like how do you take basically that software that they've built that's proprietary and bring it to everyone else so the idea like the framework for it is like what are what are you know and facebook is notorious for this stripe is notorious for this where they have

11:04amazing internal software and just bringing that to everyone else this is this is an amazing framework so this is like um i forget who i recently talked about it might have been like our friend sean pourie that i talked about this with but i don't know it was bobac um we have a friend bobac who is an investor debut capital um small fund that's doing all black and latinx founders and they backed this company squire it's like this barbershop platform and basically it's for like mom and pop type barber shops and it brought the like management tool software of huge salons and barbershops like big chains

11:42and scaled that down so that any mom and pop could have the best in class tool and that like he was talking about it in the context of that that is a very cool framework for starting businesses go find like what the largest company is doing and doing really well so in this case disney what are they using for ip management defense ip defense would be a part of this of like who's infringing on your ip and not using it appropriately and then um figure out what that looks like and what's like the atomic unit of that that you could bring and give to startups as

12:10a small tool or give to um you know smaller companies as a tool yeah and maybe that's the case for like going to work at one of these big companies it's like you're getting a first hand look at the potentially greatest internal software and then you can just use that and bring it to different verticals yeah or you just go talk to 20 people at some of these companies but like i think the coolest version of this actually would be for for creators so i like it for startups i think it's interesting because they have cash and their stuff but like an up-and-coming mr beast he's bigger

12:43now an up-and-coming mr beast is producing all this content um all of it is kind of their face or their brand around it they might be tick-tock youtube they have it across all these different channels people are resharing it taking the videos doing like talking about mr beast stuff whatever it is all over these different platforms can you give them a tool that allows them to track and manage all of their personal name brand creator ip that exists out there so that they can kind of track their like perceived net worth almost in the value of like what they're building as a personal brand yeah i would even do it like give it

13:17away for free just get like everyone on it yeah um and then monetize how like you could monetize i guess on the back of that with sponsor you like you you become the connection point because you're tracking the value of ip so you know um all of the hits on it you're able to then be like a marketplace that's connecting different brands in for the actual ads on it um you could help them actually by like connecting them with services to scale the quality of their ip because you're constantly in the flow of seeing what they're producing and how it's being reused and how much and the k

13:50factor on all of it um yeah it's interesting i like it financial services stuff on the back of it it's kind of an interesting thing yeah i like that framework a lot though just to like double down on that of go find what the huge company is doing that they're doing extremely well and that they've probably spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars developing plus hundreds of people go find that and niche that down into a product that is like just what is exactly needed for smaller players like you don't need the disney full suite of services probably if you're a creator or if you're a

14:22startup so you find what is like the atomic unit of that that works really well that's valuable and you go pull it down into the smaller universe and make it freemium like make some free component like for example i'm an investor in a company called vid iq which is basically started off as like a free chrome extension for creators to see you know on youtube specifically um [Music] what is their vid iq score they have this kind of you know unique score what are their video tags and it just allows like it's competitive analysis for the video space and they started up by giving out for

14:59free and then they started adding like paid products and stuff like that but i think that like obviously the best way to like win a market is just to like give it away for free and then as you're learning about it then you just add paid products monthly subscription and like vid iq is an example that business is absolutely crushing it totally agree two huge opportunities i see in two totally different industries to apply this one twitter analytics so there's like ilo is one that i've seen follower wonk is another no offense to them but like i i've used both and i just think there's a lot to be wanted from the platform and

15:36so i think you could go create like a beautiful intuitive version of that it's free up to 10 000 followers and then if you have more than that you need to pay um and just create like exactly what a massive brand is using to track and manage other social like hootsuite or whatever but you kind of have brought it down to something that's very actionable for a twitter creator go talk to a hundred people that have a scale following talk to me talk to greg talk to whoever and figure out what exactly we would use and need like we're booking guests for our show i really want to be

16:07able to search by location find who lives there what they do like how big their influence score is like all these different things that i can kind of do it with ilo and with follower wonk but it's not great and it's not quick and easy and i can't like plug in an assistant to do it or do something like that so i think that's one opportunity that could be really big the other one would be transportation and logistics like i've talked to i have a driver who kind of helps me a lot in new york i talk to a bunch she drives for uber i talk to her about all her

16:37problems and one of the biggest issues she has she's trying to figure out how to scale her own time as she builds her business right now it's just a time for money trade for her and she's doing well but she wants to take it to the next level but she keeps telling me like oh but it's such a headache if i hire someone then like dispatch and dealing with bookings and dealing with when they're driving our private clients and doing all of that would be really difficult and i was asking her like what exists there has to be a software that you can do this and she said limo assist

17:04is the main one people use in new york and so i went and looked at it and it literally like it says been around 35 years whatever it's like this old company that's been around for forever i'm sure it's fine for like taxi companies and these old you know dial seven the old stuff but like if you are a young one she's a young woman that's trying to build this she's tech savage she's digitally native why doesn't just a very simple dispatch and like driver management tool exist where you could like take what the big huge limo companies are using and just scale it down to this yeah i think whenever you

17:33hear that like the word headache basically it's like a light bulb should go off in your head where you're like okay amazing startup opportunity right there so i think with this in particular like yeah it makes complete sense yeah and you could go i mean that doesn't have to be a venture-backed business by the way like you could probably build that with low code no code tools figure out like whatever the dispatch looks like figure out some algorithm for it with one or two people and then go find a hundred drivers to test it out and you could pretty quickly figure out whether it works or not and

18:05do it in a geo focus start in new york start wherever and see if you could scale something maybe it already exists but the fact that this woman was like limo cis is the option i pulled it up on my phone i'm like it's not mobile enabled the website i'm like scrolling didn't fit the screen and right away i was like oh my god a non-mobile-enabled website from a company that's supposed to be the de facto player like red flag well that's another like sign right like that's like a really that's i've never even thought about that but if like go like find mobley unoptimized websites in like for big businesses and

18:41like if you're you're looking for a business idea like go compete with them right and just make it like digitally native mobile first this is our friend nick huber's uh thing where he says uh you go like see who's still who has a fax number on their on their like page or if you go to their facility and they have like a fax machine there you just know that they're ready to be disrupted it's like the exact same framework to short those companies yeah seriously i mean you short them by going and attacking their market share um but i think this is interesting so um i know we've riffed on this for a

19:14while we have a awesome guest coming in yeah um one of my favorite people in the world cat cole incredible like multi-disciplinary thinker she's been an operator she's been an investor she's a life coach ceo whisperer i mean she's done so many different things and i know it's going to be a wide-ranging discussion i do want to get her perspective on a bunch of this stuff i want to talk to her about the whole idea of like niching down things that exist for huge companies and i think in the context of coaching that idea is really interesting like ceos tim cook jeff bezos they have ceo

19:45coaches that are these incredible people we're talking to them why doesn't that exist down for normal people middle managers like up-and-coming startup ceos and so i think there's an interesting concept to kind of go deeper with her on that given her specific knowledge cool yeah i mean i've had a coach for a while too so would love to get her opinion on it personal experience love it all right let's bring her in cool what is marlow so marlo is an essentially an atomized coaching app okay and they take the mechanics of coaching so feedback 360 feedback metrics ongoing feedback reporting directly to the person and basically have digitized

20:32the non-kind of like non-unique elements of coaching and are putting it in hundreds of companies and taking coaching all the way down to the like the i don't want to say the word lowest common denominator but to any level of people manager and spreading it throughout the organization a cost effective way there is a human coach element but you get all this feedback that's just automatic and then recommended steps but then you get a coach once a month but it's being spread across that whole company and so there are these other insights right if you have a coach that's spending 30 minutes with you 30 minutes with you the coach

21:16is going to be able to step back and give the executive team some insights like hey in addition to what the data is saying about your 200 people managers i'm talking to 50 of them and here are some common themes so the there are like actual insights and data and then there's still a human element which scared away some investors at first um but it if you talk to any any big company that is the issue is that there is still an element of confidential reflection that's needed for a manager to process what they're seeing even if you give them really great data i'm just on their website i love how

21:56specific they are so like you go to the website it says you can't even see the website until it says every manager deserves a coach which is like kind of a hot take you know and it's like put your name and email to actually access the actual website um so you access it and so you put in your your email they're like check your inbox they send a pdf overview of like why and i love i love that they're just starting with the why yeah it's interesting it is really interesting and it's also an interesting example of i guess there's a couple interesting things that i draw by the way i'm not an

22:34advisor or an investor mentoring jason calcanis's launch 21 yeah um and was so blown away that's cool i heard that i had a follow-on i didn't see that one i saw um there's a business called scale that's doing coaching um uh chief product officer i think from tinder um was starting it that was pretty interesting they were raising money recently you should meet with them and chat with them at some point super interesting i've always thought about these as like the consumer facing side which is like a marlow or a scale where um you have to like win customers and marlo sounds interesting because they're kind of taking the b2b approach like

23:13going and landing the client then you can go and get as many people as you want it can be b to c or b yeah and it gets smarter as you have more people on it and there's product-led growth within the organization because i'm like if me and greg are in the same company and they're offering this and i'm not using it and i'm not growing as much as greg and he's getting promoted suddenly i'm like oh [ __ ] i gotta get on this thing i gotta be using it in the same way for sure so it's kind of a smart selling tactic the other approach would be just going

23:39infrastructure layer and saying um like practice which i'm a investor in full disclosure julian smith the founder of breather has started this thing and it's infrastructure for coaches and it's you know managing their bookings managing that whole experience which again goes to this whole idea of taking what massive people probably have expensive software and all these things and bringing it down to any coach so if i'm a coach and i have 10 clients i need a way to manage bookings and retention and track all of that and so they're building a product for that small subgroup basically taking a bet on and this is the reason i like

24:14infrastructure personally i know coaching is going to be a much bigger thing 10 years from now than it is today because people are starting to get more in tune with their own personality traits feedback being an important thing uh spirituality as an aspect of it and that was always a thing where you were like oh no i'm tough i gotta just grind through it whatever put my head down like hustle culture was kind of the last iteration and now we're realizing no that's not the way to grow and so the infrastructure to me is a cool play on it because then you don't i don't have to bet on who wins i just get

24:45to bet on hey the space is going to be 10 times as big in a few years and so i want to ride that wave yeah it's it's also interesting this division of coaching the life coach versus the career manager coach and where should they overlap for scale i mean it's hard to get away from the psychological element but not all coaches have the same level of capability training summer therapists some are not it's really interesting when you get into coach and people like what kind like am i gonna have someone making me draw circles and talk about my dad and you know all of this stuff or is someone

25:27just going to help me be a better people manager and is there a way to do that without any of the life coach so what do you guys think about that i've never had a coach so i want to ask your opinions on this of like what do you think i don't know if you want to go this deep into somebody else's there are a lot of people who consider you whether or not you're formally their coach they consider you a coach and uh probably both a life coach to talk to them about challenges of becoming a operator ceo investor all the things you've done but like what do you i mean

25:56you have a coach or you've had a coach yeah is it a life coach is it a purely executive coach is it both i mean i feel like for us like our lives and our personal lives and professional lives really bleed yeah into one so i feel like having a coach that's just focused on professional doesn't really make sense anymore yeah i mean at some point you're going to hit a wall you're getting those conversations where it's like okay what i'm what we're working on has deeper roots than this business exactly so we're gonna have to break through the dirt and that's when you get into this

26:33personal like [ __ ] going on at home or um there is something from your childhood that's causing a behavior that you don't realize that all your people are picking up on and reflecting back to you it's it's almost impossible to stop at the surface exactly i had a i had a coach for a few years and that coach like helped me basically sell my last company islands to wework like just through the whole process and i would say like 30 of the stuff we worked on was literally business like tactical professional stuff and 70 was like hey like why are why do you want to sell

27:13the company oh it actually stems from this you know uh you want validation or something you know and and and really like prying and that's why like yeah i think the best coaches do have that personal plus uh professional kind of way of thinking about it and i think that's the harder part to do at scale yes you know something at a marlow or any of these companies that are breaking it down into its parts and getting feedback at some point it requires a human touch like a one-on-one you can't ai your way to like your issues with your mom needs to be intimate it needs to be

27:50intimate like there needs to be like trust like blind trust like completely blind trust that's what's interesting about marlowe are platforms like it where they're pairing together the human coaching element with the data-driven feedback the process orientation and that is scaring away some companies and it's scaring away some investors but i think it's the right way right i think it's the way to do it right over time it just may slow down what i like about marlow is that it it's getting people who wouldn't have a coach something yeah so it's like get them started and then from there like let them potentially oh oh you know i never

28:32thought a coach would actually be you know valuable it's that tagline on the on the website the statement of to your point where the world is going why shouldn't everyone have access to some form of professionalized structured rooted in expertise feedback and then some guidance with what to do with that feedback i mean that has its own limitations but if every manager had that from the time they began managing got used to soliciting feedback receiving it and doing something about it like ask answer act and being a part of a culture where that's normal imagine what they would be like when they're executives and ceos and there has to be

29:15like the point you made about investors being scared off by the fact that there's a human element here cracks me up because it's like first off i just think that's dumb yeah but there's huge businesses now being built around mental health as an example for companies like um spring health lira are both multi-billion dollar companies backed by like tiger and some of the biggest you know investors in the world and clearly there's a human aspect that's selling basically b2b mental health services and then there's actual you know mental health coaches psychiatry like i think there's actually clinical aspects to it but clearly that's human and everyone knows that has

29:50to be feminine so it's almost like it's almost it seems like a silly pushback where people just think oh coaching and feedback can be automated and so it should be and i'm not going to invest if there's a human element because it can't scale in an unbridled unhuman way right exactly but there has to be multiple billion dollar businesses within performance coaching as that industry becomes as big as it should be i i think about the lost gdp from the fact that there are people who are not maximizing their skills and they're leaving talent on the table because you have a you know in a big

30:22corporate you worked in a big corporation i've never done that but even in a you know finance org like i was at a private equity fund and then in that there are people that literally get left behind we talk about not leaving children behind when they're in school but that happens in organizations every single day thousands of people are getting left behind because they're not getting consistent feedback they're not given the tools to actually grow and get better at the things they're they're deficient in yeah and so to me i look at it and i say as an organization if i'm the ceo or a board member at a company i

30:50want this because it's making all my employees more productive and it's a no-brainer if i'm a person i want my company to have this because it's allowing me to scale up which i'm going to make more money and take care of my family so i care but i don't know how you could look at that and say oh there's no there's no billion dollar plus outcome within this industry because there's a human element that just feels short-sighted to me not to mention one of the greatest challenges of our time is labor and staffing at all levels and you talk to any founder any ceo any investor or board what are what are

31:23their biggest challenges they're in this bucket of finding talent and getting people coaches at all levels increases the likelihood that some of your talent moves up from within and you don't have to go find it externally and then the retention is higher and the cultural knowledge is higher and they're all it shouldn't be everyone but more from inside an organization should be able to move up than often do less catered lunches more coaching seriously like oh great i have my kombucha on tap and you have my like nice catered lunch who cares about that that's commoditized at this point this feels like the next layer of that like

31:58oh you're giving me things to level up my career to become better at the things that you're telling me i'm not great at giving me more consistent feedback um i recently read an article about becoming a feedback magnet and how the greatest leaders are feedback moments and magnets um siobhani berry i think was the person that wrote it um she runs a a course called ascend which is like a leadership program for women very very cool um and she wrote this great piece i think it was a first round review article they published it and it was this idea of being a feedback magnet and i've never thought about it that way of

32:30like the best leaders or feedback constantly wanting feedback because um there's so many times when you like shy away from it or scared of feedback because you feel like it's a criticism on you rather than flipping it the entire opposite way of this is a huge opportunity for me to get better at whatever it is i think there's there's a way to reframe feedback in not just someone having a shitty experience and having the courage to tell you and you having the gumption to digest it but literally feedback as in a radio it's signal it's just signal i mean when i worked for hooters and i was running the training

33:08department so i was a i don't know 24 year old director of training for the corporate office and when i would lead these workshops for managers and for franchisees whenever we would go on breaks we'd you know i'd go in the restroom pee in the stall and then stay in the stall so i could hear what people were saying and i never use the emperor i know it sounds creepy but i never used the information for evil i never told anyone um there was one time where i heard something that was against the law and so i had to do something about it pretty overtly but even if it was just people saying

33:42the music sucks on the break or these snacks aren't great or that guy in the corner is distracting granted i was only hearing the women's version because this is before the all gender restrooms but i still had feedback i had intel and then i magically corrected these things like it was just not about me sometimes the feedback was me man i wish you would stop saying that word that's so annoying or when she does this it's annoying and i'm like great to know fix just this constant constant iteration i've been so obsessed with the true truth which is other people's truth not mine and if and if you frame it that way one

34:22the ego is completely removed it's not about me it's about their experience and yes their experience is a reflection of me this is true for coaching managing putting on events audiences community whatever and just caring about their experience and then deciding what's signal versus noise you know where are the patterns versus the one-off and then doing something about it and so ask answer act sometimes ask is just listen and then create an environment or in my case eavesdrop on an environment where people are speaking the truth which they tend to do washing their hands in the restroom uh beside their classmates and then do something about it and just to

34:57your point of a feedback magnet and then soliciting it so doing check-ins and asking for it and that starts to not only give you the things to act on but it builds a culture where you don't have to ask for it as often how do you so i think it's i mean that's an amazing example first of super basic like makes sense that you were on like multiple episodes of undercover boss you were an undercover boss before you were an undercover that's true so many people have asked like wow did you learn something you know life-changing or transformational and and the answer is yes because of course the experience

35:35was unbelievable and i don't want to sound like an [ __ ] when i say but not really because i've i've always believed in being there in the trenches listening asking i don't typically have a wig on and really bad makeup to try to pretend i'm not who i am but when i was traveling around the world opening franchises every time i was in a country i'd never been there i was leading a team i had never met they had never met each other they were coming from all over the world to be a part of a team to open a new brand to launch literally a new entity

36:07and brand in a new country for the first time there is no trust there is no familiarity most people don't assume trust and start at 100 and give you a chance to go down they start at something lower and you have to build it and this idea of being able to build trust rally people around a common cause iterate as the experience evolves to get to a common outcome every time in a different place with a different team i was building that muscle when i was 19 years old because i you know there was no playbook like you have no choice you have to know the true truth you have to

36:39ask people for their experience because if they don't do the work the store doesn't get open and if you don't get feedback from them and understand their experience there's a lot of friction and to your point of productivity you don't have productivity and so coaching feedback check-ins like all these mechanisms to ask answer and act to listen and then iterate literally lead to the best leadership outcomes so i think 95 of people are sensitive to feedback i don't know if you agree or disagree i was gonna ask the same question and my question to you is how like what advice do you give to people to help them be less sensitive and it

37:21makes sense why they're sensitive it's like especially worse yeah especially if you're like i think about it as like uh you're like a chef in a restaurant and then you're creating this you're just spinning off something that's your food yeah exactly but it's you it's like you're putting yourself in the thing yeah artwork whatever it is so how do you develop that thick skin like how you clearly had it somewhat intrinsically probably if you were able to do that at 24 but like to listeners even myself trying to embrace and become a feedback magnet how do you actually do that do you have to remove yourself from it like

37:52what's the most people would say find a way to remove the ego and remove yourself but that's a very difficult piece of counsel especially for people who take pride in their work yeah it usually comes from a really good place and not tactical it's not tactical because it's like okay what is the ego like honestly what is that we're going to get into a very meta discussion what is selfish yeah exactly yeah who am i yeah [Laughter]

38:29but i have a pretty tactical approach which is if the the fear of feedback is around the optics of failing however you define failing failing to be perfect failing to be wildly successful failing to do what everyone needs at all times failing to delight you know whatever that is i just redefine failure fail so go farther up funnel of the psychology i redefine failures first attempt in learning like of course when there are new elements and the reality is there are always new elements there is no way the playbook of yesterday works for this there's no way what i did with 30 different humans in a

39:13different country is going to be exactly the approach for a different country and 30 additionally unique variables and so failure's first attempt in learning failure is not um you know preventing or failure is not having issues failure is not someone being disappointed that's not failure failures just fail fail first attempt in learning and then this definition then of what is my role my role as a server go back to the chef example the restaurant example when i was a hooters girl is for them to have food they love an experience they like so they spend the most and tip me the most that's it like my

39:57proximity to feedback the feedback loop in that business is it's not even a line the dots are like laying on top of each other you cannot escape people's reaction to what you in the business have prepared this amazing training ground for digesting feedback because they're like i hate this or it's not what i wanted and you literally have to fix it you can't be like oh that makes me scared i'm going to go to the bathroom like you got to fix the wings and and make it not about you i remember so many times we had two wing sauces mild and three mile they sound a lot alike in a loud

40:31restaurant and so sometimes three mile would get delivered which is blazing effing hot and when they ordered mild and they would take a bite and it was an unfortunate incident and i'd have to say i'm so you know could have been them could have been me but say i'm so sorry that is not what you wanted or needed i will get back on it right away right it's about them and i don't beat myself up that i made a mistake because what's really important is just fixing it and then having a great experience and then oh by the way here's some extra ranch and celery you're going to need it

41:03after accidentally and making it better even better because there was a mistake so this idea of reframing reframing failure um has been empowering to me going back to that hooters sit in the restroom listen to what people say and then iterate on their feedback example failure would have been letting the experience be suboptimal failure would have been not correcting the things in their mind it's in their mind no matter what don't i want to know it and then i have the choice to do something about it or maybe it's not something i change but i can explain a bit later of why things are the way that they are

41:41it's literally why i implemented the mmdd log made my day difficult log in every restaurant i've ever opened this was guidance from like a 1980s restaurant consultant where he'd say do an mmdd log let the staff tell you what makes their day difficult find the patterns fix it so literally every opening i had a clipboard at the back door before you left you had to write the one thing that made your day the most difficult sometimes the answer was me luckily we had a culture where obviously people felt comfortable saying cat's confusing us with these instructions but then i could find the patterns come back the next day

42:17fix the top few things or if i wasn't going to fix it say hey this is making everyone's day difficult here's why we can't fix it right now so i see you i hear you let's try to smooth it out around the edges but it's i actually can't change so don't spend your energy or i disagree maybe something bigger at the corporate level um i disagree that this should change here's why i've clearly done a bad job of explaining the benefits so i have used a literal version of the mmd d-log for 20 years in business it's now a slack channel and all the companies i

42:50run and advise or an email if the culture isn't comfortable with an open slack channel i've used apps where you upvote and downvote what made people's day difficult the less change the more often you need to ask or the less change the less often you need to ask the more change the more often you need to ask so if there's a lot of [ __ ] going on it's made my day difficult every day and every day there's change if it's you know a little more spread out you can do it once a week once a month but this literally is soliciting feedback and building uh feedback magnets in the

43:21organization i do it in departments because not everyone needs to know about everyone's feedback but then department leaders need to talk and if there's something that is consistent across the company it rises to the level of the executive team it's also a startup cool yeah like i'm i'm listening to you and i'm like okay cat like how do i invest you know like how do you productize this like i don't know if it's a slack bot or an email with like a dashboard the branding would be perfect um i see it now i love it i've literally implemented this for decades it could literally be called

43:57like feedback magnet wait it's just a thing that like gets dropped into 20 places in the organization feedback feedback yeah i think that's a cool idea idea it might be maybe not the most game-changing practice in a company but in the top three well i mean i experienced it firsthand in the context of my own career where like i would get to a year-end review like we had a two review cycle was our standard which may be a standard incorporated like you have a midi review in the year end and there would literally be things that would come up in my year interview that i had

44:31no idea i was doing wrong and i would show up and be like how how did i not know that that was an issue how did i know my hair was so good well i knew that no but seriously like that is crazy and that is a lot of gdp and growth for that company left on the table when that happened so feedback or whatever we end up calling it um maybe it's i i there's like a very simple way to implement it too it's just constant feedback like you have an interaction with someone they should be able to rate that interaction it's kind of there was a

45:01there was a black mirror episode did you ever watch that show oh yeah like black mirror where like you would rate your interaction with someone like i would see you and it was augmented reality and then i'd be like oh five stars for cat like two stars for greg didn't really like that here's why whatever and during the course of the day you'd have like a build up of different interactions different things that would kind of rate your experience but that could be in a corporate setting like if i have a meeting with someone and i feel like they didn't come in as prepared as they

45:26should have been or they didn't deliver the insights in a you know short form enough to be able to iterate on that and then at the end of the day get a reporter end of a week of things i can be working on and thinking about super cool one of the things i noticed as i've pushed this feedback practice he's like this is happening as i push this feedback in practice two leaders who were then getting it that weren't me right it's one thing if i'm comfortable with it i've redefined failure i'm a feedback magnet i'm doing it that's great but when i start to push it to other

45:59managers who then are implementing it there's still a lot of psychology and emotions to the whole point of where we've gone with this discussion underneath how to take it and so if you put in this feedback bot magnet some mmdd log made my day difficult log there must be an accompanying alignment around anyone who is in charge of receiving and acting on the feedback around the attitude the culture the removal of ego to the extent that it's unproductive you do have to have that as the side dish to this thing in a company in order for the people who are being asked to give feedback to do so candidly

46:44and frequently otherwise we all know how it plays out right someone gets it and is like that's [ __ ] or someone gets it and they're like oh that's me i i don't know how to process it or deal with it or these people suck they don't know what they're talking about right you have those managers as well who don't respect the people giving the feedback and discount it and so this can be quite revealing across the organization of the need to create feedback magnets of the need to have discussions and coaching around feedback culture and can why don't we want to know don't we want to act on it if we don't

47:22our competition will if we don't someone else will i think the really cool thing about it too is that it creates a very real stake in the ground that you can then track against so like if i know from the first month here are the five things that consistently come up about me as a manager as a peer and now this is what i'm going to get reviewed against or compt against is going to be my ability to take that stake in the ground and improve it and so if i was getting rated as a three on communication you know efficiency or something i need to make that to a four and so i'm just

47:52going to be thinking about that constantly because i know that at the end of the year or at the mid-year whatever my bonus or my review comp is going to be based on my ability to actually improve those like five things that have consistently come up and so it's kind of cool to think about how then it plays into the ability of orcs to actually action on um you know performance reviews and promotions and bonuses and all of those things to make them more i just always hated the arbitrary aspect of that pay it's like oh did my boss like me and was i nice to

48:19them and did i do stuff for them versus did i actually make real progress and get better at the things i was supposed to be getting better at so it's kind of cool it could be an interesting component and to your point of patterns over time so you know my husband and i do these monthly check-ins that many people have heard yes so it is feedback and so since the month we met we decided that we wanted to be as good for each other at home as we are in business and i've never felt that way in previous relationships i mean i wanted the relationship to be

48:51good but i never thought i want to be an amazing partner but i did when i met him and he did as well and so we're like all right if we care and if we want that and we want to be proactive about it where can we take inspiration for how to do that and of course the answer was business and our our leadership roles and so we scheduled a monthly check-in we asked the same questions every month what's been the best part of the last 30 days what's been the worst part of the last 30 days tell me one thing i can do differently to be a better partner for

49:21you and that is either a stop a start or continue what has worried you the most in the last 30 days what has given you the most pride and what are you most grateful for every 30 days since we have met we have asked and answered those questions to each other sometimes it only takes 15 minutes max other times it creates a deeper discussion we don't hold off real-time feedback for that place but that place that space is held for the purpose of feedback on anything touching the relationship which could be work and this check-in format i've used in business for over a decade as well so

49:57sometimes since it's about work the thing that has worried them the most that affects them at work is something at home so it's not a heart to your point of it's not a hard line and there's not a big wall there there are things that affect who you are in this piece of your world that come from other pieces and there should be permission to talk about that but it's still primarily focused on the area and those monthly check-ins which are not okrs they're not checking in on kpis you're not talking about deliverables and performance it's just those questions has been [Music] i mean i don't know our relationship

50:28without it but i can tell you the people who've adopted their own version of it after hearing about it have said this has changed my marriage or this has changed my direct report relationship with my executives there's something about that going in tapping into just where you are and that question tell me one thing i can do differently to be a better partner for you is very interesting to see the patterns over time this is another startup idea by the way that there's gonna be too many coming out of this episode but like that should be in an app or some easy format where like i

51:02would love to do that with my wife i think that's super interesting and could make it really easy six moleskins exactly it's a really cool like if i'm just on the go and i want to like put plug something in or i'm thinking about it it's kind of a cool idea to just have like a super simple whatever app interface where you could check in like we have all of this for when you first start dating hinge exists there's all the algorithm and you're connecting and it's like trying to match you at the outset but then there's nothing really as far as i know that exists for like

51:30later on now you're in a relationship or you're married and you're trying to track these things and track the progress of your relationship you want to hopefully have a curve where you're growing over time in your proximity and in you know the depth of your relationship and and you change and so there's different things that change about your life you have a kid you don't have a kid you're like getting old you're kidding me all these different phases and so the ability to like track it over time look at the data over time for these people that are more data oriented and not like you know kpis and

51:57all this and that but like find patterns just it kind of provides like a journaling plus real feedback element to it that's kind of cool to pull together it's it is interesting to see when you talk about like one of the questions which can be the most emotional which is what's worried you the most in the last 30 days um to see how that evolves over time and even with my direct reports executives right sometimes it's the health of a parent money um or something directly in the business like my team is just not jealous it's very interesting to your point of being able to look back and go look how far

52:34you've come remember when that was the thing that was wearing you the most and remember when that was the thing that was the worst three months in a row look how so yeah that's amazing we'll add it to the list i need to add i know we're starting to get close to the to the end of our time together i need to ask you a question that relates sort of broadly to your career and experiences but one of the things i've admired about you as a friend and as a mentor person i look up to is you're extremely open to new ideas experiences people cultures you've shown it with your

53:11going down the rabbit hole in red pill on web three and how deep into that world you've gotten and how you've embraced our cartoons half of the time yeah but it's a it's a um it's a personality trait you clearly have and that you've embraced and i read an amazing story about you from early in your career i think of an experience you had in the middle east and it's a perfect example of this trait that you have and i think a lot of people will benefit from hearing it so i would love for you to just tell this story yeah i was uh traveling in egypt

53:43visiting my franchisees and um this was with cinnabon and the gulf is the largest market outside the u.s for cinnabon there's so much at the time uh 31. okay new president of cinnabon taking over the global business and i had for the past two years i had also spent some time in in turkey and fell in love with theodon the call to prayer i mean when the loudspeakers would blast it was it touched my soul it was like meditative and so much so that i had an app on my phone with the addon with a call to prayer from every major country that that has it

54:20so there's different tones and different speeds and it's really cool anyone can like look it up in the app store just look up a don or called a prayer and a bunch of them will come up and um and i really have no religion to speak of personally and i just thought it was beautiful and so i had this on my phone i'm in egypt we're driving through and then call to prayer comes on we pull over to people you know need to go pray and um and this happened a couple times but throughout that my franchisee that was in the car when it came on i just said

54:55this is so beautiful can we roll down the windows you know i really wanted to hear it the music was on can we turn down the music so i can hear it and he was blown away he was blown away that an american a non-muslim like all the things you can imagine that this was a narrative violation in this moment and he had he got teary and it started this whole different conversation together about my appreciation for it i showed him my app he didn't even know there was an app like with all of these countries and he thought that was really cool and we were already totally vibing it

55:32was he's just super cool guy but it took our relationship to a very different level quickly and he saw me as a i don't know a family member a more connected human because i just said something that clearly articulated i thought something about his culture was beautiful and on its face like i don't know what they're saying i mean i know a bit more now but at the time i'm like i literally have no idea what there's like i just think it's so beautiful and it created this moment that accelerated trust and a common bond that led to better business you know and it just went on i'm still dear friends

56:09with the franchisees while all over the world but certainly in this region today i i believe that that moment did something with our relationship where i became more like family than this very hospitable culture would have already treated me um that lasted throughout my my term as you know president of the brand and even into being president of many brands with the parent company and it made it easier for me to call and say hey do you want to be a franchisee of jamba juice and hey i mean it led to big business and big growth over time around the world and similar things happened but that was a really unique one

56:44and you didn't go into it what i think is so amazing about the story is that that wasn't why you did it you didn't say you weren't like oh this could be a big business moment for me let me like kind of play my way it was just you were that was who you were i'm not that strategic but it's sort of i mean there's an amazing lesson in there just like you said narrative violation like be a narrative violation just embrace different cultures different people different ideas talk to the random person on the street that you come across you end up coming up with random

57:11startup ideas you build these relationships that you never know how they extend you never know where those trees kind of lead you in those branches unless you open yourself to it i love i used to call myself a walking conflict of interest not because i was but because i knew that's how some saw me i was a hooters girl and i was advocating for women's rights i was running cinnabon and investing in the future of health and wellness and and it's not that i was atoning for my sins you know i'm the same person who saw purpose and mission in these things as i'm on my own

57:43personal journey and in fact that makes me more of a bridge person because i'm not preaching to the converted i'm someone with a hand in one world a hand in another authentically not trying to have no opinion or no point of view or being neutral but literally find beauty here and find beauty here and live in both worlds where many people don't it's one of the things i'm loving about web3 and nfts like this you know anonymity and um just leaning into web 3 and then people coming together irl and you put some of these groups together and every one of them would acknowledge we might not have ever met we may not

58:22have otherwise been in other circles it looks like a narrative violation but it's actually not it's actually it is the way i think it's the best i also like how i like how you use the word authenticity because it reminds me of because you know i know you were not strategic but i think from a marketing perspective like being authentic obviously is such a great way to grow your brand yeah you're seeing this with web3 like nft communities that are taking off but it reminds me of the story of like in quebec people don't drink coca-cola they drink pepsi and the reason why they drink pepsi is

58:57because when coca-cola and pets when coca-cola came to quebec they basically used the same ads that they use for the rest of canada and they're just like okay there's these french people who live here we're just gonna translate it into french like literally the worst country to make that decision the worst country yeah and it was completely like people were like you know uh absolutely not and then pepsi came and they crafted a message that was so authentic to that group of people and they kind of went you know they went anti-coke in a lot of ways they just basically learned from their mistakes and to this day

59:36pepsi is everywhere i have a funny story so i uh brought the first hooters uh to quebec gatineau quebec and we had not thoughtfully evolved the business were open to it but other than what was required by law which was the menu being in french and english there wasn't really any other overture to say we are here for you and there are certain places certain cities countries states boston is another one as a city in the u.s where if you aren't like of the people by the people from the people for the people one of the worst cities for chains as a result and if you don't figure out how

1:00:19to really grow from within you are doomed and i remember it wasn't until the last day i was there for almost 30 days that the team warmed up it was brutal i mean it was the toughest time in building trust in relationships i had in any country anywhere in the world out of 80 countries because of this one it was a pattern of american brands entering the space without the respect and partnership so there was just this wall up and it took us while we're trying to train and deliver and get our poutine right and all of the other things on the menu and trying to get my american

1:00:55trainers to not you know react and poke fun but to just be curious like be curious and help make it happen it was so high friction and at the end there were tears and hugs and appreciation but it wasn't as natural as that you know egypt story it was uh it was there was a lot more you don't want to be here and we don't want you here and it's you in our land as opposed to our thing that we're building together and about a week into the training i scrapped it all i scrapped the menu scrapped the recipes had a like a do-over meeting with the

1:01:30team where all we did was listen and learn in french listen to people talking about their restaurants that are their favorite how they think this type of food has a place in their world i mean i should have done that day one but i'm proud that i had the courage to still do it day eight quebec is the only place in the world where starbucks isn't called starbucks and kfc is now called kfc i believe it it's called you know kfc is called pfk pule-free kentucky which is hilarious yep um starbucks is called le cafe starbucks and they they do you know i think it's a lesson learned

1:02:06right for these brands um that's right to make people feel at home and i think you know there's that saying uh if you can make it in new york you can make it anywhere but if you're a marketing person if you can make it in quebec you can make it anywhere for sure because and that that's what i think i learned from that experience of is if you're going to be a community builder you do have to uh you have to not talk and listen i guess it's the big sort of uh lesson there and then once you've listened you really understand the people then you can understand what are

1:02:43the nuances that they have that i can build product around so that i can serve them i mean literally a listening leader is a learning leader and a learning leader is a lasting leader and you're never done that's good this interesting listening leader is a learning leader learning leader is a lasting leader boom that's good that's a good get that tattooed on my chest yeah i think that's a good place to uh i think that's a good place to wrap up i know we got to get you out to whatever your next event is as well so thank you so much for coming in and joining us

1:03:17yeah awesome so much fun i like constantly learn so much from just being around you so i feel privileged that we get to do this somehow for a living circle is awesome it's the future and we love it so thank you so much kat you're the best great thank you so we covered a whole hell of a lot that episode so i don't know how you're going to do this but what was your one big takeaway i think my biggest takeaway is how important it is for all of us startup founders startup employees employees creators to find a coach and use a coach to become uh just the best version of

1:03:59yourself and i know that's easy to say and it's hard to find a coach and they're expensive but i think that um you know even if it's you know once a month once every two months once every three months or even using some of those automated solutions that cat was talking about um i think uh i think it's pretty crucial to go just go one layer deeper for me like how can someone go find a coach like what what what's the step to take for someone that actually wants to go do that an action on it is it like google search are you talking to people you tweet it out like how do

1:04:32you actually go find a coach i mean i think i think you know first is you just ask around ask friends join discords come into our discord and just ask and maybe we can provide some recommendations the hardest part about finding a coach and cat you know can't kind of mention it is finding someone you can trust so i think it's like a very personal decision also like what you know what might what might be a great coach for myself might not be a good coach for you because you just might not just connect with that person so i think it's going on you know step

1:05:03one going on discord going on twitter asking around step two going on google setting up like there's there's a bunch of marketplaces that you can kind of like go and uh have video chats with some of these people just to get a sense of it and then feel it out and set up a budget for it and this is like your invest in yourself budget um maybe it's a couple hundred bucks a month maybe it's a couple hundred bucks every three months whatever you can afford and and use that to you know work on one or two three or three things that are affecting your professional life

1:05:38that even might stem from your personal life super super interesting something for me to think about personally too because i've never had a coach yeah in this context so yeah definitely something for me to reflect on more um time for a coach yeah i loved all the startup ideas and we had so many in that episode which was crazy to go through but like the whole concept of taking something that the big companies have and have built finding the atomic unit of that and delivering it to a smaller group of niche down smaller community is such a cool concept to me like whether it's for transportation

1:06:10with the uber drivers that i talked about um you know whether it's the coaching solution that we talked about and and applying it here um and then the feedback feedback and dating or the feedback and relationships uh app ideas were really really cool so i'm i'm excited there's like a lot out of there that i want to jump into the community want to get in there and talk about more let's talk about all these startup ideas let's talk about coaches see if we can help some people get more of that coaching and maybe some peer-to-peer coaching couldn't even happen as a result of it so we want to jump in there

1:06:38let's get into the community let's talk more about it look forward to seeing you in there see you in there cap chase is the financing solution for fast-growing startups it lets companies access their revenue today so that they can reinvest in their business and grow and scale much quicker than they otherwise would be able to is it complex though no it's super easy to set up only a couple of clicks you can go through the process so quickly there's no dilution ever and if you don't draw on the money you don't have to pay any interest against it it's a great solution for fast growing startups and

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