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Show resources: LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course UTM parameters Bidding Budgeting Episode Account Organization Episode Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Transcript: The top five worst mistakes you can make on your LinkedIn Ads. Are you making any of them? Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. 0:18 Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, I frequently get to audit LinkedIn Ads accounts. And I've got a checklist of things I'm looking for specifically, I wanted to share these account mistakes with you in case there were any of them that you were making, so that you can get them fixed. Or if you're evaluating an agency, you'll know which questions to ask to ensure they know what they're doing. In LinkedIn Ads News, we noticed last week that you no longer have to hover over a campaign and click manage to get to the settings. You now just hit the three dots next to the campaign name and click manage from there. So I'm still not a huge fan of the the user interface here and how it's complex about whether you click on the campaign name or you click on manage. But hey, I'll take this over having to hover any day. In other news COVID-19 is still a thing. So LinkedIn is experiencing some really interesting platform growth specifically because of all that time that people are spending at home while they're working. And I've got some cool stats to share with you. So first of them is that there has been a 55% increase in interaction in the newsfeed so that means responding, reacting, commenting, I don't think this includes reading, but either way, this is really cool to see 55% more activity in the newsfeed because of course, that opens up inventory for us to use for sponsored content. There's been a 60% increase in people posting in the newsfeed so that 60% more content there. And 40% more time has been spent reading in the news section. So these all point to the fact that people are spending more time on LinkedIn. And I think that that's a great thing for all of us who are using the ads platform. The LinkedIn learning platform has reported that consumption is up 3x from February and 2x for March. And so what that tells me is, as people are getting more and more used to staying at home working from home, they're investing their time, probably less in Netflix, binge eating, and more in LinkedIn learning, consumption, and probably all kinds of different learning to this is just the one place that we have data from. So good job to all of you out there who are using this time to better yourselves and make yourself a better professional. I wanted to highlight a few reviews that had come in over iTunes here. MaggusK from Germany says "Great stuff. Thanks, AJ. It's really good to hear some tips, hacks, and hints from a LinkedIn campaign professional. Looking forward to the next episodes." Thank you, MaggusK. John from Sweden says great podcast for marketing professionals. This podcast gives you great insights on how to master LinkedIn Ads like a pro. Thanks, John, appreciate that. And finally, just.zee from Spain says "this one is a must. I'm truly enjoying listening to this show. Each episode is packed with tips, no BS, pure gold." Oh man, that just warms my heart. Thank you so much, just.zee. And of course, I want to feature your review too. So any of you out there listening, please leave me a review. We'd love to highlight it on the show and give you a little bit of a shout out. Okay, with all that being said, let's hit it. Here are the top five mistakes that we find people making in their LinkedIn Ads accounts. And again, I want to make sure that you're not making them in your account. Or if you have an agency managing your account, check that they're not making them either. 3:49 Mistake #1 is naming campaigns after the asset or after some arbitrary date range. Anytime I'm going through an account and I see campaigns called 2020 webinar or water guide, I die a little bit inside. And the reason why is because this signals to me that the account isn't producing the learnings that it should be. When you name your campaigns after the audience, what you get is this ability to break down all of the performance in your account by who. Who you're targeting, who is responding to your ads, and how. I've mentioned before that it's kind of like a silent focus group happening in your account all the time. By breaking up your audience into these micro segments of how people are grouped. All of the performance, the click through rate differences, the cost per click differences, the conversion rate differences, all of these things tell you who your ideal audience is and who they are not. And so when you name your campaign after the asset, the only thing you can actually learn about is which asset is performing and you'd be able to find that out quickly anyway, if campaigns are named after the asset that's being advertised, it also signals to me that targeting is likely all over the board. And it's unsystematic, meaning that you're probably missing out on all kinds of opportunities. You might not realize that if you targeted by, let's say, job function and seniority, that you could actually get your cost per lead significantly lower. Or if you were targeting by groups, plus seniority, maybe you could get a much lower cost per conversion. These are all insights that you won't get if you just spray and pray with your targeting. 5:41 It's also really hard to report on an account when everything is named after the asset because there are so many things under the surface that aren't visible at a quick glance, and it would require a really deep level audit to surface all of these findings. You'll know if you're running one of these accounts, When your boss asks you for a quick report, a chill goes down your spine, and you get really worried that this is going to take you hours. When an account is structured properly, reporting takes minutes, it's so easy to break down performance by your ad type, by your individual audience, by your objective, by the content by each ad, all of these things are just a click away. Also, if your account organization is off, you're probably paying too much for clicks, especially at the start of a campaign. And the reason why is every new campaign that you create, LinkedIn has to wonder how it's going to perform. And so it's going to award it a relevancy score of some sort, which probably isn't going to be very favorable. That means if your ads are amazing, because you're listening to this podcast so of course they're going to be, it's going to take a little while of LinkedIn charging you more per click than it should before you get the relevancy score you deserve and LinkedIn starts charging you what it should. If you create a new campaign every single time, you have a new asset that comes out, that means you're throwing out the old one. It's now garbage. LinkedIn can't rely on the strength of its past history to award you a strong relevancy score. That means all of the money that you've invested into these campaigns, it's just going to waste and you're also likely cannibalizing some of that same audience for multiple campaigns. Because if you're not being explicit about who your audience is in the campaign name, then it's very likely that you have other campaigns that are targeting the same audience. And when you have other campaigns, also targeting your same audience, you're not bidding yourself up in terms of competition. It's not costing you more, but you are competing against yourself. Each of those campaigns are for inventory, and it makes it really difficult to pace your spend and control your spend to these different assets. So what does it look like if someone is making this mistake? Well, first, the account is going to be really hard to look at, to understand and to manage, every little thing you have to do in the account is going to take too long. You're also not able to learn as much about your audiences. You're paying LinkedIn, the same dollars, but you're not getting the audience insights. You might as well get those along with the leads. And finally, you're probably paying too much for your clicks. So if costs look high, or efficiency looks low, this might be a clue that this is something that's happening. So go ahead and make your life easier and name your campaigns properly. So how should you name your campaigns? Well check out Episode 7 about account organization where we walk really deep into that. Your campaign names should include a systematic description of the audience, that you're targeting. And it's also great to include here your the ad format that you're using and the objective. It makes it so easy to segment and organize your account, especially if you're running different ad formats and objectives. 9:15 Okay, on to mistake #2. Mistake #2 is using audience expansion. Anytime I see the option of audience expansion turned on in a campaign, I know immediately someone didn't know what they were doing. It's a default value, but it provides no value. In fact, it's the opposite. it detracts from the value of advertising. Most of the options in the platform that I don't think are very useful, have occasional times where they can be valuable or used as a workaround or hack, but not this one, it's literally carte blanche for LinkedIn to muddy up your audience. And I can't think of a single situation where it would be smart to use audience expansion I've had a couple conversations with the product manager at LinkedIn who's over this feature. And they say that it's so valuable that it should be used on 95% of accounts. And that's why it set as the default value. I say it should be used on zero percent of accounts. And so because of that, we're pretty far apart on where we stand. So I don't know if we're going to find any common ground anytime soon. So what is audience expansion? Well, it's an option that when ticked, LinkedIn looks at your target audience and applies a look alike model to them, and then targets other people let other people into your target audience who they think are close to who it is that you're targeting. Here's the thing though, if you can spend all of your budget on your explicit ideal target audience, then why wouldn't you? Why would you ever want to leave anything to chance and let LinkedIn take a guess at Who else would be good to include in this audience? It's just not good practice. Now this isn't to say that the algorithm that it uses isn't good, it's actually pretty great. It's the same algorithm that you've used if you've ever created a look alike audience on LinkedIn, which I love to do. The problem with using audience expansion on your campaigns is that it's all intermixed with your existing audience, and you can't separate out the performance. So if I had a separate row in reporting of how performance was in my expanded audience, versus my original explicit audience, I would probably make a case for it. I'd go even further, if we could customize the URL tracking parameters that were clicked when someone was served an expanded audience add versus the original, then I could track all of that performance all the way down the sales process. And if I could do that, if I had visibility, I'd probably use it 95% of the time. Unfortunately, we don't have that level of visibility. Though, and so this option just muddies your results on who you're targeting. And from past testing with that I did when it was new, it ended up being a drag on performance. Even without the extra visibility, I would probably just cut it. Now, if you have audience expansion turned on, what you're likely seeing are poor lead quality. So maybe sales is letting you know, hey, we're having to throw out a lot of these leads. That might be a clue to look at this. Also, if you're running any account based marketing or ABM campaigns where you're targeting specific companies by name, if you're producing leads from companies that are not on your ABM list, that could be a clue that your audience expansion is turned on. And if you were paying close attention to the performance of your account, and audience expansion was turned on, it's likely you've cut budget from LinkedIn because the leads you were getting were not the quality that you would expect them to be worth for paying $8 to $11 per click. Here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the last three LinkedIn Ads mistakes that you should be looking out for. 13:08 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com. The LinkedIn Ads experts. 13:17 If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you B2Linked is the agency you'll want to work with. We manage many of LinkedIn's largest accounts and we're the only media buying agency to be official LinkeBdIn partners, and performance to your goals is our only priority. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to get in touch and we'd absolutely love to help you demolish your goals. Okay, with that being said, let's jump into the next three mistakes. 13:46 Mistake #3 is using automated bidding. Okay, this is a big deal. So let me explain what I mean here. There is definitely a time and a place for running automated bidding and it should be part of your bidding strategy. But realize that because it's the default type of bidding, and 90% of the time, it's the most expensive way to pay for your traffic on LinkedIn, there's a reason why I'm on the lookout for this while I'm auditing accounts. To break it down. Automated bidding is just a fancy name for CPM bidding, where LinkedIn controls your bid. It's a little bit like handing LinkedIn, your wallet and saying please be gentle spend what you think you need. Now I am admittedly a very performance based marketer, which means I'm always looking for the lowest cost per lead the lowest cost per opt in possible for whatever budget I'm working with. And I know that all things held equal, let's say no matter what traffic you send to a landing page, it's always going to convert at the same rate. What that means is to get the lowest cost per lead, I have to pay the least amount per click possible. So if you're looking at just your effective cost per click. If you are bidding by CPM, this leads to a higher effective cost per click anytime your click through rate is less than two and a half times the average. Now I know this is complex, so I'll break it down for you. What this means is if you are bidding any kind of CPM model, whether it's automated or explicitly CPM bidding, it means you are paying more per click than if you were bidding cost per click. If your click through rates are not two and a half times the LinkedIn benchmark average, which is a lot. That means that your ads literally have to perform two and a half times better than the average before CPM bidding becomes a good deal before it even breaks even with CPC bidding. This is easiest to measure with sponsored content with sponsored content, the average is about .4%. And so anytime that I see a click through rate Over 1% I know that it's cheaper to bid CPM for my traffic than it is CPC. So you could imagine the 10% of the time that someone launches an ad that is significantly above the average, then yeah, automated bidding is going to look great to them. And I talked to plenty of advertisers who've gotten great success, just taking the default options in their campaign launching, and they just happen to land in the top 10% of advertisers. The rest of the time, though, CPM bidding is going to cost significantly more than the equivalent click if you are bidding by cost per click. So just because your account is using automated bidding, does not mean that you're bad, doesn't mean that you're a terrible marketer. But if you've tested into automated bidding, and you know that you're getting the cost efficiency that you're looking for, then you've got no judgement for me. If you just selected automated bidding, because that's what LinkedIn told you to do, that's where I've got a problem with it and you should probably rethink those priorities. If your account is running automated bidding across all campaigns, that's likely a sign that either #1 your account manager doesn't know what they're doing or #2 the account managers focus is to simply spend the budget and it's not to efficiency of your performance. Or heck, you might have this option 3, maybe every campaign is performing over two and a half times the benchmark average and automated bidding is the cheapest way to get traffic. And if this is the case, good on you, I'm cheering you on. For more understanding about how bidding and budgeting work, check out episode 6 where we dive in and dissect all of the different options there. 17:43 Okay, Mistake #4, and it's related and this is your bidding too high. If you're using CPC bidding, like you know you're supposed to be doing, but you are swayed by the siren song of LinkedIn's recommended bid ranges, you are likely paying way too much for your time traffic. You see LinkedIn's suggested bid ranges are quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a better way to describe this. They'll say something like your competition is bidding between $14 and $38 per click. No, they are not. I can count on one hand, the number of advertisers I know who can be profitable on clicks in that price range. And that's generally because when they sell something, they make a million dollars. So if you have an enterprise sized budget, and you're spending six figures per month, yes, you will have to bid aggressively to get the traffic you need in a lot of cases. But if you're not spending enterprise size budgets, let's say you're spending less than $15,000 a month on ads, you likely don't need nearly that aggressive of bidding. What ends up happening is when you are bidding too high, you end up blowing all of your budget in the middle of the night because remember in North America, our budgets start fresh for the day between 5pm and 9pm, the day before. So if you ever hit your budget, your budgets become active between 5p and 9pm at night, the next day, and then you're bidding super aggressively to the insomniacs, the people who are not able to sleep, they're scrolling through their phone. And of course, they're probably not going to convert. And if they do, they may not remember that they converted in the morning. Now, let's imagine that you actually do make it through the night and your budget is still spending during the day. Oftentimes here you will end up blowing the whole rest of your budget at the very first part of the day, and then your ads will shut off, and you'll stop getting traffic the whole last half of the day. If you talk to your LinkedIn rep if you have one, they will tell you know you want to bid aggressively so that you get the best quality of your audience. Well, here's the thing, if you're worried about getting the best quality of your audience, then tighten your targeting. Make sure that everyone within your targeting is a good fit for you. And then you don't have to worry about this. Although in all of the testing I've done, I've never found lead quality to decrease when my bidding decreased as well. Now, not only did you not get to run your ads for the whole rest of the day, or maybe you spent way too quickly, you also paid two to six times more per click than you should have, which we've know that CPC really isn't everything, but it probably means that your costs per lead are two to six times higher than they could be or should be. Remember this rhyme. If you hit your budget during the day, it means you pay too much for your clicks along the way. Again, go listen to Episode 6 of this podcast on bidding and budgeting to go more in depth there on how the bidding and auction system works. 20:53 Okay, last one, Mistake #5. If you are not tracking properly now I came to advertising from the Google Ads world far, long, long, long ago. And Google advertisers have been spoiled for so many years, because Google owns both Google Ads and Google Analytics. So they have this option called auto tagging, where inside of your Google Ads, you can just tick the box that says, yes, do auto tagging. And then every ad automatically sticks on all of these tracking parameters for Google Analytics to pick up and recognize. This means that you have perfect attribution of the ad was clicked at x time, it came from y keyword, and it was in z ad group. This is fantastic for people who are just advertising on Google. But for every other platform, you need to put tracking codes in each of your links so that your analytics and CRM package can recognize where that traffic is coming from. This allows you to associate the leads that come from your advertising efforts. With how much you spent to acquire them. So this gives you the ability to figure out what is my cost per qualified lead? What is my cost per sale? What is my ROI look like? These are all things you can do if you're tracking. If you're not tracking, you're totally blind past the initial form fill. A lot of times you'll hear this tracking, referred to as UTM parameters, because that was the system that Google Analytics came up with that most started to adopt. If you use a different analytics package than Google, you'll have different names for these tracking parameters. Now, if all you care about is your cost per form fill, yeah, you don't need to track because LinkedIn can track the conversion the same way it knows which ad was clicked, by whom and whether or not someone converted. And certainly conversion tracking is super, super important. So you can get a get at least your finger on on the pulse of performance. Are you doing amazing? Or are you totally up the creek without a paddle, or somewhere in between? But if all you are tracking is just the presence of a conversion how much you paid for that, you're really gonna miss the point of LinkedIn Ads, which is the lead quality. We know that LinkedIn costs per click are oftentimes two to five times higher than Facebook's. So if you were running both LinkedIn and Facebook side by side, if you were only comparing your cost per conversion, you'd have no other conclusion to come to except LinkedIn ads is way too expensive and you should push all of your budget away from there and into Facebook. You'll miss the fact that the lead quality on LinkedIn is often much higher than two to five times better than that of Facebook. Now, if all you're using is just LinkedIn's lead gen form ads, you really don't have to worry about this too much because this traffic is not hitting your website. So you're not going to be tracking it with UTM parameters or some other kind of tracking parameter. LinkedIn is going to be passing this information into your CRM, which campaign, which ad it was. So you're probably pretty well taken care of here. So if you're not using tracking parameters like UTM parameters in all of your advertising, this is a great time to stop and start adding them in now, in the show notes, I included a great article from HubSpot, about how to use UTM parameters, how they work, how they look how to fix them to your tracking links. Okay, so that's really it the top five mistakes that I see advertisers making on LinkedIn ads, and if you're making them, it's a great time to get them fixed. And if your agency is making them well, there's not much of an excuse for that. So reach out! B2Linked.com rocks at running your LinkedIn Ads. Okay, I've got the episode resources coming up for you so stick around. 25:05 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 25:14 Okay, here are the great resources that we talked about in this podcast episode. First is the HubSpot link that I just mentioned about UTM parameters. Check that one out, it's a great read. Also, our episode on bidding and budgeting was episode 6. Make sure you listen to that. And then also Episode 7 about account organization. Super, super valuable. And again, they touch on many of these same topics and even go deeper. If you are brand new to LinkedIn Ads or trying to get to learn them. The best way you can do this is by taking the LinkedIn Learning course taught by me, and it's called Advertising on LinkedIn. Search for LinkedIn Advertising or LinkedIn Ads. You won't be able to miss it. The picture of On the cover is really silly. It's me pointing at the camera and I'm, I'm a chubby ginger dude. In just over an hour, this course covers what I usually take about an hour and a half in person in my one on one trainings to cover. And if you have LinkedIn premium, this is free. If not, I think it's only 25 bucks, whereas I charge $500 an hour. So this is by far the most economical way to learn about LinkedIn Ads. Definitely whatever podcast player you're listening on, please hit that subscribe button if you want to hear more episodes like this where we dive deep into LinkedIn Ads. I would also encourage you to rate the podcast. Of course we love five stars. But of course, I'm big on honesty and transparency here. And please do review it the more people who review the higher this ranks in the podcast listings, and I would love it if more LinkedIn advertisers got to hear about this. And of course, I'd love to shout out your review as well if you leave that. With any ideas for the show or questions, feel free to reach out to Podcast@B2Linked.com and I'd love to entertain your ideas. I'll see you back here next week! Cheering you on and your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

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Learn more about Farmgirl FlowersSupport the show and get on monthly brand advisory calls with Fabian____Full Transcript:F Geyrhalter: Welcome to the show, Christina.C Stembel: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here, Fabian.F Geyrhalter: Oh likewise, likewise. So last night, after I put together my first draft of questions for this podcast with you. I usually end up diving deeper and do much more research once I get home. But I have to admit last night I had a really long day in LA traffic, and I just decided to pour myself a glass of wine and recline into the bathtub instead of doing more research. But then I grabbed the first magazine, which happens to be the November edition of Inc. And what greets me? A two-page ad for Capital One and you are the star in it, so.C Stembel: Can't get away from me, even when you tried.F Geyrhalter: It was hilarious. So I got both. I got more research time and I got relaxation time and that's how it works in life, right?C Stembel: Exactly, that's amazing. Best of both worlds.F Geyrhalter: I know. So how did you get into the business of selling flowers direct to consumer? How did that idea come up and when did you actually take the leap into full-on entrepreneurship?C Stembel: Yeah. It came up back in 2010. I should mention, though, before this idea I had probably 4,000 other ideas, none of them about flowers though. I like to kind of dispel the belief system that we tend to have, especially about women in creative businesses, that it must be their passion in life. I must have grown up frolicking in my grandmother's garden. Because that wasn't the case. I wanted to start a business, though, and I wanted it to be able to be big. I wanted to do something good. I wanted to solve a real problem, and I want to be able to actually change an industry, to actually innovate in a space and not just do something the same way that it's been done over and over again. I live in Silicon Valley, so I saw so many people doing really innovative, cool things. So that kind of opened up the floodgates of my brain, thinking, "I could do that in an industry, too." And so I came up with the idea for Farmgirl and for flowers in particular because I was working at Stanford University and one of the departments I oversaw did events for the law school, and I saw how much money we were spending on flowers. So first I just started researching the space from that perspective of why do flowers cost so much. And I very quickly went down several other rabbit holes, research when I found out the eCommerce space was really comprised of three companies that dominated. And it would bring me back to an actual problem I had in my life, which was when I would send my mom flowers in Indiana, I was forced to use one of those companies because she lived too far from a local florist. And I hated the whole process. So I was like, "Oh my gosh." I started researching that and I was like, "Oh, it looks like so many people hate that whole process." They don't think that the value prop is good for what they're spending. They're not getting a bouquet that represents them as a consumer. What they see isn't what they get anyway. When they order something, they think it's going to be this and it's that when it comes. It ends up costing $80 and it looks like it came from the grocery store for $10. And they weren't happy with the customer experience of, if they weren't happy then they had to go offshore to a customer service department somewhere that would try to rectify it but just send an equally lackluster bouquet again. So there was just a lot of similarities in what I was finding in researching that other people's experiences aligned with mine. And I thought, "Well this looks like it's an actual space in an industry that needs some change, and nobody's done anything since the mid nineties." Now, with nine years of experience under my belt, I kind of understand why... people probably had very similar ideas before me and didn't do them because perishability is really, really hard. But with my naiveté back then, I thought, "I'm the first one to think of something to transform this industry, and let me try it." So I laid out all the problems as I saw it and came up with a solution, which was the Farmgirl model where we limit the choice for consumers, and that allows us to reduce our waste by about 40% which allows us to use higher-quality stems that don't look like they came from the grocery store and create beautifully designed bouquets in house. So even if you're sending then to Bremen, Indiana or to Dubuque, Iowa, or somewhere really remote, you can get a designer quality bouquet shipped anywhere in the United States. So I looked at In-N-Out Burger as my inspiration because back in 2010, yeah. Nobody was doing less is more. Everybody was doing more is more back then. So they were the only one that I could find that was really limiting choice to consumers but they were doing it really well and they had created a really great brand. And so I thought, "I'm going to be the In-N-Out Burger for flowers." So that's what I did.F Geyrhalter: And it's interesting because when we chatted just a little bit before the podcast, you said that you liked that my podcast has this hyper focus instead of being everything for everyone. And I kind of created my entire consultancy around that too, that more focused, and I think it's fair to say better options, fewer options, is a holy grail. There's a lot in there because you can actually hyper focus on what you give your clients. But one thing that I think is extremely interesting about what you ended up doing is that everyone comes to think that the flower industry would be, no pun intended, but a green industry, right? But it is totally not the case. It's actually exactly the opposite, right? There are huge problems.C Stembel: Huge, I mean it's, like you said, I would have thought that, and I thought, "Well, they're flowers, and they decompose," and all that. But all of the things that go with the flowers are not compostable and many states they weren't even recyclable, like all of the plastic wrap and all those things, which is why we came up with alternatives to as much as we possibly could to make it greener and better for the environment. Everything we do is how we can make it better for the environment and better in all ways.F Geyrhalter: So it kind of is farm to table part two. So now it's not only the food on your table but it's also the flowers on your table.C Stembel: Absolutely, absolutely. And knowing the ripple effect of knowing... even the food, like the packaging the food comes in. It's things that I had never thought about before starting this and now I think about, I'm very, very focused on.F Geyrhalter: Let's dig a little deeper into that because you actually wrap your hand-tied bouquets with reused burlap coffee bags, right? From local roasters. Because they all have them. How did that idea take shape? And I also wonder, are there enough cool burlap bags as you start taking over the world?C Stembel: Yeah, we are actually running into that problem right now, so we're having to expand our thinking on that as well. We're on a hunt for more burlap sacks, so if you're a roaster in the area and hear this, please let me know. So it actually started with wanting to create a brand, actually. So I think this is... the burlap sacks were to be better for the environment. But also, the second part of that was when I was thinking about how I was going to present my product. Even when I was creating this flower company, I never wanted it to be just a flower company. I wanted to create a brand around it. I wanted it to look very different than everyone else. If someone saw one of our bouquets, I wanted them to know it was one of our bouquets without seeing our name on it. And so I put a lot of thinking into how can I do that? How can I create a Nike swoosh on our flowers, because flowers are flowers. So how do I do that? And so the packaging was where... my first foray into creating a brand was through our packaging. And the burlap was the start of that. I came up with 14 different ideas of ways to wrap our product, thinking of what looks the best and also what's best for the environment and then I just polled a few of my friends to see which ones they like the best. And it was almost unanimous, everyone like the burlap the best. I came up with that idea because of potato sacks, actually, not coffee bags. Because I'm from Indiana and we don't have coffee there. So I thought, "Potato sacks." But then when I researched California, where I'm at now, I was like, "Oh, nobody grows potatoes in California." But what we did have was coffee roasters, and so I thought, "Let me just reach out to them and see if I could buy their bags." And what was really fortunate that a few of them donated them to us to start and have continued. Some big ones, even Peet's Coffee donates their coffee bags to us now.F Geyrhalter: Oh, wow.C Stembel: Yeah, it's been great because we can also help them. They don't have to put them on a container to go back to South America. So it helps the environment even more, helps them cost wise, and we can upcycle them. People love to upcycle them again after we send it to them too and send us pictures of that. But it was really to create a brand and it worked. One of my first moments where I felt like the company was going to make it was about a year and a half in, and I had take a... it was still in my apartment, the first two years I did it in my apartment. And I was walking into my car with three bouquets because someone had called, 7:00 at night and asked for three bouquets. And you'll take whatever order, even if it's a midnight when you're starting out because you need the money.F Geyrhalter: Oh absolutely, exactly.C Stembel: And yeah. And I was walking to my car, which in San Francisco if you're familiar, you usually have to park like a mile away from your house, of course. So I'm walking, hoofing it to my car with these bouquets and three women were coming towards me on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, and one of them exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, is that Farmgirl Flowers?" Just by seeing the burlap wrap on the bouquets. And I was like, "It is." And she's like, "Oh, I love Farmgirl Flowers." And all three of the women start talking about how much they love Farmgirl flowers. And they knew it from the burlap wrap, that that's who-F Geyrhalter: That's amazing. Because you're like, "I'm the farm girl."C Stembel: It was. So I got in my car and I bawled eyes out. Yeah, yeah. I usually am just like, "Oh, I work there." Because then it makes it sound like it's way bigger than just me in my apartment. But you know...F Geyrhalter: That is such a... I mean that's such an amazing brand moment because it really, like you said, I mean, that's when you realized it actually is a brand now. It's not just a start-up, it's not just flowers you would never notice. And you didn't have to put a swoosh on it. You didn't have to actually spell out and put a logo on it. Which sometimes, being branded like that can also backfire. And so what's interesting to me is it sounds like, and I'm cheating because I read that, but it sounds like you totally bootstrapped your business. You actually were scraping by, running a business-C Stembel: Literally. Yup.F Geyrhalter: Literally. And so you had to invent. And so when you basically start to come up with these pieces of brand essence by yourself or maybe with a few friends around the table. When you had to decide, how do we wrap our flowers? And you said you had about 10 different ideas. And you decided on burlap because of it being a natural fit, no pun intended, for your brand. Did you at that point, and maybe even it's just in your head, did you have certain guiding principles for your brand where you said, "Everything we do with Farmgirl flowers has to be A, B, and C? Has to be natural, has to be sustainable, has to be... whatever." Did you have any of that?C Stembel: I think I did, but not in a very formal way. The one guiding light that I have for my company is that I want to create a company that I would want to buy from, sell to, and work at. Those three things. And so it's kind of like my golden rule for the company. And so any time I have a decision to make that I'm not sure about, I run it through that lens. And I'm like, "Well, would I want to work at a company that doesn't have benefits? No. So I need to get benefits for my team." Or, "Would I want to work at a company with this much waste? No." So all those things that makes it very easy for me to decide what to do from there with that lens. I think for when I was creating the brand around the product and still to this day, it really is just that we're creating a brand and products and an experience overall that all of us that work at Farmgirl would want to buy from and would want to get at that product. So it's very much a reflection of when I came up with the aesthetic, even, for what our bouquets would look like, I got all the flower books and I looked all over Google and looked at what all the fancy florists that people were writing about were doing. And I was like, "That's not reflective of me. I don't really like the styles of those bouquets." So I just created one that I would want to receive. And so it's a very informal but just... I still am very active in product development. Me and one person on our team create almost all of the products that you see on our site. And it's very much, what do I want to receive? And then when we don't know, we ask our customers now. So we just did a survey for when we started doing holiday products this summer, and we thought we would get a couple hundred responses from our customers. We were just like, "Hey, tell us what you think, what products did you like? What do you want us to bring back? What new things do you want us to create?" And we had thousands of responses. We were blown away because they weren't like, A, B, C, D. They were like fill in the blank and tell us. And people spent so much time telling us what they wanted and sending us pictures and things. It was amazing. We actually did not budget enough time to read them all because we were like, "Oh my gosh." So we all had to get... all the managers, everyone's taking a couple hundred a day. And that, I think, is a true reflection of... people buy from Farmgirl not just because they love the product, but they love the whole company around it and I feel so grateful for that. We did a survey last year to find out why people bought from us and the number one was just about tied, and it was they like our product and they like our company. Those two reasons. It wasn't because... and I was like, "What? Our company has to do with why you're buying from us?" They just really like our brand that we've created, which is exciting because that means that we can do other things besides flowers, too.F Geyrhalter: Right, right. Which you start doing. I see some hints of that on your website.C Stembel: Absolutely. Yup. Definitely.F Geyrhalter: So in the end, what do you think you actually ended up creating with your brand that is bigger than your offering?C Stembel: I think what we created, and hesitate to use this word because, you know what I'm going to say, because it's so overused, but we actually created an authentic brand. Authentic circa 2000, or 1995 before everybody started using it and not really knowing what it means. We are never going to be that polished company where it's really a couple white male founders sitting in an office in the financial district that's outsourcing everything to other people to make, to 3PLs. That's not us. We have so much heart into what we do, and we show the behind the scenes every day on our Instagram stories. We talk about our failures with our community. We fail all the time. I make bad decisions, we learn from it. Our most opened email was last New Year's Day where everybody was sending out their emails about, oh, what an amazing year, thank you for everything. And I sent an email that's like, "Wow, this last year sucked. It was so bad. All these things went wrong. And you know what? We're going to make this year so much better." And telling how we're going to make this year better. And people loved that. We got people writing in in droves to just thank us for just keeping it real. Because I think we just see shininess around us all the time now, and it's not real. So we like to show shiny moments when they're real and when they're happening. And we like to show all the unshiny moments so people know that they're not alone. This happens to us all. We had a peony debacle. We call it peony-ageddon here. This year at Mother's Day that almost floored us with hundreds of thousands of dollars of losses and stuff. We tell the stories so people know that we are truly approachable and we have a heart behind making their bouquets. And when people want to choose where to place their dollars and their support, they want to choose companies that they want to support with their dollars. And we're really fortunate that that tends to be us because we keep it real with them.F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. And that's going to happen more and more with the next generation. And it's a wonderful shift in the world that otherwise sees so many problems with transparency and authenticity. I think there's a huge shift right now, and it's great to see you be a part of that. And what I actually really enjoyed is somewhere in your many, many interviews, I read that you called mission-driven, you called it actually integrity-driven in a recent interview. And I really like that. I hadn't really heard integrity-driven being used as a phrase too often, but it feels much more approachable and human than mission-driven actually to me.C Stembel: Yeah. I think mission-driven, anybody can pick a mission, right? And I actually found that I was having problems as we were growing and scaling because we had a mission. We had a lot of missions when we started out that aren't our missions now. Because I found out I was wrong about things. One example of that is, when I started Farmgirl with a very clear goal of helping support American flower farms, and we only sourced domestic grown flowers. And I found that I was completely wrong. It was horrible- not even just from supply wasn't there, but a lot of the American farmers still to this day will not sell to me. And the only reason they won't sell to me that I can come up with is because I'm a woman. Because they sell to all my male counterparts, even younger businesses that are male-owned. But it's a good old boys network. And so I was fighting so hard and begging people to take my money, and it was horrible. Horrible. We were going to have to close down because I couldn't get enough supply. And even of the orders that they guaranteed us, we were getting 26% of our guaranteed orders. So I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. So I was wrong. And so saying I'm a mission-driven business and my mission is to support American flower farms and then to find out that that's a, not possible, two, not wanted, made me feel like I was failing in a big way. I don't need to be mission-driven on this one mission that anybody can pull out of a hat and say, this is our mission. I want to be integrity-driven. And every step of the way, I want to use really good integrity to make the best decision for our company and our consumers and our vendors and our environment, and all of the things I really care about.F Geyrhalter: So that's a fascinating example that you just gave and it's also mind blowing and it's also wrong in so many ways. How-C Stembel: Yeah. Amen.F Geyrhalter: Yeah, amen. So if this is the way that you decided to go, and obviously especially in the beginning in the first years of your business, I am sure that you very loudly talked about your mission, right? So that people say, "Yes, I want to support a female-founded company that supports only American farms." It just makes so much sense. And then suddenly you had to pivot and say, "Oh actually it ain't so." A, how was that being perceived and was that the beginning of the transparency and integrity-driven where you just say as it is. And B, where do you now source your flowers and how does that still fit in to your integrity-driven business?C Stembel: Yeah, that's a really good question. Yes. That was absolutely... it was the scariest moment of my life was when I hit send on the email where I sent a letter out to all of our customers and I put it on our social media to over a million people at that point, was really nerve-wracking. I was sitting in a hotel room in Las Vegas at a show when I had to send it out. And it was November 2016 when I realized that we were not going to make it through another Valentine's Day if I didn't change something, which is only three months away, right? So I had three months to completely change our supply chain sourcing model, which was hard. So I went down to South America, I had really great friends in the industry that connected me, when I would go to and say, "Tell me the most value-aligned farms that I can work with." And they gave me great names and I went and met with those farms and started sourcing internationally and sent that letter on January 25, 2017. And the fact that I can remember these dates when I have so much in my head shows how-F Geyrhalter: It's ingrained.C Stembel: Yes, it's ingrained in me. So January 25, 2017 was one of the scariest days of my life. Because you're right, we had gotten almost ten minutes on The Today Show talking about our local mission. We had New York Times. We had all of these amazing publications that had written stories on us based on this mission of supporting local. And to change that entire story was so scary.F Geyrhalter: Oh yeah, unbelievable. Yeah.C Stembel: Yeah. So I just decided after thinking about, how am I going to do this, and researching what other brands do and what other companies do when they need to make a huge pivot like this. And really didn't find a whole lot. So then I just thought, "Okay, what seems right to me is to be honest and transparent and just tell them the why." And I didn't tell them the full why because still at that point I had a lot of shame, which I'm embarrassed to even admit right now. That I thought the reason I couldn't make it work was somehow my fault a bit. And now I don't have any of that looking back on it. I have a lot more wisdom now to know, hey, you can't stop a train as one person if they don't want to stop. They're just going to run over you. So I told everybody, I sent out that letter, and then I waited with bated breath. And it was amazing. We got hundreds and hundreds of emails back from people saying, "thank you for taking the time," because it was obviously a very long letter because I don't do anything super short.F Geyrhalter: And that's a wrap for today.C Stembel: Totally. So I talk a lot. So I explained where cannabis has been legalized, we can't get enough flowers. And people don't want to sell to us and I've been told that I just need to slow down our growth in order to let farms keep up and that's just not a solution for us and all of these things and just shared that. And our amazing customers and fans, they were so supportive, and they were just so thankful that we told them the why [inaudible 00:22:49]. We didn't just pull the wool over their heads or start doing it. And that was so amazing to see and that I think that made me even double down, like you said, on the transparency and honesty with our consumers because for them to come along with us on this journey, they want to feel a part of it and that they can trust you. And if we're explaining why before we're making a major decision and that it's not like we're selling out to save a dollar. We're doing this because we need to in order to stay around. Then they were very understanding and amazing and so supportive and wonderful. So it was a great experience that could have been a horrible experience, but it worked out well. And now where we're sourcing is we're sourcing a lot more internationally with, like I mentioned, cannabis has really changed the landscape, especially in California, where 80% of the flowers are grown. People don't like to talk about that story but it's really real. And also I just have to say that the international- we have some really great domestic farms, a few really amazing domestic farms that we work with. And we will always work with them as long as they want to work with us and keep growing flowers. However, the international farms, what I have found is that they just treat us with the respect that we didn't get here as mostly females. And it's really refreshing to have farm partners that are values-aligned and they do amazing things for their teams. Amazing things. And also want to grow with us. And that I don't have to beg them to treat me with respect and take our money. And so I have no qualms because I think I also vote with my dollars just like our consumers do. And as a company, we still buy from some of the farms... one of them I had to threaten a gender discrimination lawsuit to get them to even sell to us. And I hate that I have to give them money. I need their flowers, but the fact that... if you have to threaten to sue somebody to get them to sell to you? And then you have to give them money? That's not voting with your dollar.F Geyrhalter: Unbelievable. Well, and actually, to interrupt you here for a second, I heard you say on CNN, nonetheless, that you feel it is a tremendous benefit being a female-founded company. So this is interesting in context of what you just told us. So something must have flipped around and even though you had to go through this horrible hardship, which, quite frankly, was threatening to your livelihood at that point. I mean, people who are not entrepreneurs, they might not understand why you say it was the worst day of your life because people say, "Well, it was was when you got cancer or when something horrible happened." No, this is about existence. This is existential fear, right? So you still feel like it's a tremendous benefit being a female-founded company, which I hope that is true and I love it because I had back-to-back female founders now for the last couple of episodes. And I think it is more and more the future, hopefully. But can you expand on that a little bit?C Stembel: Yeah. I think that there's certain things that I feel very... I feel that it is a tremendous asset in the flower space or in a creative space because I know what consumers want. So 80% of people that buy flowers are women buying for women, which is crazy to me because I'm the only larger scale female-founded eCommerce B2C flower company out there. They're all male-owned. And I think that's a huge asset to me because the things that they don't take inspiration from our company on is making the bouquets in house and really making the bouquets special. They're amazing at marketing and technology and things like that. But they're not fixing the real problem, which was ugly flowers, in my opinion. So I think as a woman who understands what women want, that's a huge asset. And the fact that my team is over 60% female run as well, we know what our consumers are going to want and that helps us. Where our male-owned competitors I don't think understand that they have to actually make beautiful flowers to get customers to come back at 62% rate like we have and to be able to spend less than $10 on customer acquisition cost because you don't need to keep re-acquiring customers because your last ones are always ticked off that they didn't get a good deal and they didn't get a great bouquet. So there's things like that that I think are a tremendous asset to being a woman in this space. I think almost everything else, it's harder. I just want to be really honest. It's harder. We've been bootstrapped the whole time, not because we didn't want to raise capital, but because I couldn't raise capital. I've gotten over 100 no's. I have spent 30% of my time for over three years trying to raise capital and finally got to the point where I'm like, I'm not even taking a meeting anymore. I'm so tired of spending so much of my time when I have less than a two percent chance of raising capital as a female.F Geyrhalter: And to be-C Stembel: Statistically speaking, you know?F Geyrhalter: Yeah, and to be fair, this was going in two ways against you. One, most likely because of all of the clout that goes against being a female founder for sure. But on the other hand because you also had that integrity where you said, "No, I'm not going to go for the bottom line. No, I'm not going to go A, B, C, D, E. And after that there's the door. Thank you for your time."C Stembel: Absolutely. My team are all full time with benefits, 401K. We're not going to do things just to improve the bottom line and make everybody independent contractors or... we're not going to do things like that. And so that definitely negatively impacts our bottom line, which is not what investors... because they're looking for a very quick return. We're also always going to think at the longer term plan. I make decisions that on this quarterly report would look horrible because it's going to help us next year or the year after. And so I'm not going to play this game of fudging your numbers just to look good for investors. I'm looking for the longterm plan to build a really viable, sustainable, longterm really great company that creates really good jobs, nontech jobs, as well. And that's not that attractive to investors that need a really quick turnaround with a 10x return, you know? So there's lots of reasons that we don't fit the model and the patterns of what they're looking for. But also as a female, un-pedigreed female. I don't have any college degree, I didn't work at any of the big tech start-ups before. So I also need to be really realistic about what my outcomes and options are. And it's just better to get my 30% time back and keep growing at 50-80% growth year over year like we are every year and keep doing that by investing our profits back into the company, so.F Geyrhalter: And I think it is the right thing and the only thing to do today. And I gave a keynote last week in Vegas and it was a group of healthcare staffing CEOs. And I basically told them what you just preached, right? That there's a new way of doing business, and it's about transparency and it's about solidarity, etc. etc. And afterwards there was a big Q&A and one person said, "This is all fine and good and you're talking about a lot of start-ups that do that, but how could mid-sized companies start to do some of that? How can we suddenly turn into a transparent company? And I think it was a really interesting question, right? Because if you from the ground up create a company that has that at its roots, it's so much easier. Obviously Fortune 500s, good luck. But the small ones, the small to mid-sized companies that say, "Hey, I believe in what you say and I would like to do that, but how can I do that?" What would your thoughts be? How could a company that is not built on those values, how could they slower start to inject those and actually make them actionable? Putting you on the spot totally here, because you know what? I was put on the spot?C Stembel: That's a really good- no, that's a great question. No, you totally, no...F Geyrhalter: Karma, I forward it on.C Stembel: And good job to the person that asked that question because I think it's a great question. I mean, I've always said that there's not may moats that we have here at Farmgirl. Our competitors all order our bouquets, reverse engineer... they can do whatever they want and they can see all of our packaging that creates this amazing brand and unboxing experience and they can replicate it. And they all do. But the thing that they can't replicate is the heart that we put behind it, and that really shows. And so that's a great question because I've said that the moat that we have is that it's really hard to make a pair of low-riders into Mom jeans. Once you're a thing, it's really hard, especially if you have people that have been there a long time that this is the way they do things. I used to work at Stanford University before this, and it was basically a government job is what it felt like where just people had been there forever doing the same thing over and over and over again. And one of the negative responses I got from a superior, one of the bad feedback I got for my performance was that I forged ahead too quickly and didn't wait for everybody to catch up. And that was a negative on my performance review. And I looked at her-F Geyrhalter: Congratulations on your negative.C Stembel: Thank you. That's what I told her, I was like, "That's the nicest thing anybody's ever told me." Which is not the response she wanted. So I think it's really challenging, especially if people have been there forever. The only thing I can think on the spot that I would probably try if I had that situation where I was going into a medium-sized company that wanted to be like a Farmgirl, let's say. I'm just going to do it in the flower terms because that's where I'm at. But they'd already been doing this for 20, 30, 40 whatever years the way they had been doing it, is I would probably have to create a whole new department with new people to help influence change instead of dictate change. Because otherwise you're going to blow up your whole culture, right? And so it would have to be a slower process, which I do not do well with. Actually my team, the people that come here that need to take a long time to analyze and overanalyze everything don't work out here very well because I'm usually like, "We're going to try this and we're starting it in two months." A whole new process for... we did our whole supply chain in three months, we changed.F Geyrhalter: You have to, yeahC Stembel: Yeah. You have to move so fast here. But at big companies that have already been, or medium-sized companies that have already been around for a long time, I don't think you can move that fast without really disrupting your culture, unless you need to disrupt your culture and then maybe you want to.F Geyrhalter: Well, and I think it might not even disrupt the culture. It might just positively color the culture in a different way. I think that the idea of maybe even starting with operations and slowly adjust operations to do something better and then have it bubble up to the top so then you can talk about the story. Because everyone just want to talk about the story, right?C Stembel: Well and talking about the story if it doesn't actually... that's I think where a lot of the big companies... that's great point because where I see that they get called out on their fake authenticity a lot is because they bring in this marketing team or an agency, right? To tell this really cool, hip, new story. But it's not actually what they're doing.F Geyrhalter: Exactly.C Stembel: So you're right. Starting with operations and actually changing how they're doing things, and then tell the story afterwards so it is truly authentic and not just that they're trying to be cool.F Geyrhalter: Yeah. See? Together we can do this answer really well.C Stembel: Yeah, it's great. Totally.F Geyrhalter: As we're slowly coming down to the end, one question I really like to ask every entrepreneur, what is one word that can describe your brand? If you have to put your entire brand into one word, I call it your brand DNA. How could you sum it up in a word?C Stembel: One word would be heart, definitely. And I think it's on so many different levels. So everything we do, we do with heart. We say that all the time at Farmgirl. We're never going to do the easy wrong. We're always going to do the hard right. And we're always going to make sure that everything we do, we're putting our whole heart into. And that's what I think customers relate to. And I know that from their feedback to me. Anytime I'm ... I did a speaking things this weekend, and the people that came up to me afterwards were talking about their experiences with Farmgirl. And this happens everywhere I go, if I'm in a crowd of females anyway, not men. But if I'm in a crowd of females, everyone comes up and tells me their personal experience they had with my company and my brand. And it has to do with number one, we're really fortunate that we're celebrating people's life moments. Really important moments in their life, where they be really amazing and wonderful or really sad, too. So we already have that. But then in addition to that, we have the whole experience of when you receive a Farmgirl bouquet, it's not just the flowers, it's the whole packaging, it's all the collateral cards as we put in extra. We put a little enamel pin that has a story with it, usually about my life. We have one that's a grit pin or a be a work horse in a sea of unicorns, that's also another one that people love.F Geyrhalter: And a feminist pin too, right?C Stembel: Yeah, feminist. We have take the bull by the horns. We have all ones that have a personal story of when you're having a hard day put this on, it's going to give you strength. This is about remembering to do the hard things even though they're not the fun things. Things like that.F Geyrhalter: So good.C Stembel: So we do these... it's a definite holistic story when you get your Farmgirl bouquet. And they tell me every single feeling they had when they opened every single part of the collateral. And they tell me about how the flowers made them feel and feel loved and special. And I think that that heart that we put into it shows and kind of transfers to the person who gets it. And I think that's really special that we get to do that. We get to show people that they're loved and that they're special and make them feel even more so in what we bring to them.F Geyrhalter: The heart that we put into it shows. That's your perfect Valentine's Day message.C Stembel: Yeah, totally. We're shooting that this week so I'm going to go tell them after this.F Geyrhalter: That's right. So after everything you have self-taught yourself about branding, and obviously it works and it comes from within, it's intrinsic. And of course now you've got all kinds of data and there's so much more to it, I'm sure, at this scale that you're working at today. But what does branding mean to you today?C Stembel: We don't have all the fancy tools that all the big companies have, and I don't think I want them, honestly a little bit. Because I like just being able to feel things. I like being able to think about things and ask our customers. I don't ever want to get to the point where I'm just taking industry data and being like, "Well, everyone's saying this is what consumers are wanting now," and stuff. I want to be able to keep that connection with our customers that then influence who we become as a brand, too. And I think that branding to me, number one it's my favorite thing about what I do. Absolute favorite thing about what I do is the brand that we get to create because I feel like it's kind of like a love letter a little bit. And we get to show our emotions and our heart on our sleeve to people and I think that that's really amazing and I love doing that. So it's my favorite part. I also think it's probably the most important thing about what we do. I don't ever want to create a company that doesn't have that, that doesn't have heart. And I use this a lot, but I never wanted to create a company that sold toilet paper. Not that there's anything wrong with it, I just didn't like-F Geyrhalter: Oh, you never know. There could be toilet paper sold with heart.C Stembel: It could be, it could be. I've seen some recent ones, I'm like, "Wow, that's a good idea with toilet paper." But I just wanted something that I personally could create a brand around and create love around and connect with people about. And so I think that that's what brand is. It's really showing your heart and showing on your sleeve a bit and connecting with your customers.F Geyrhalter: That's beautiful. It's so true. It's so true, especially with today's companies. I do have one last question because I'm sure everyone listening would have that same question. What's your PR secret? You have been on CNN, you have been on Hitting The Mark, okay maybe that not, but still, you've been Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and anything in between. Was it hiring the perfect PR agency or just hustling your way in by using your unique story? I mean, both are very difficult.C Stembel: Yeah. I think it's that we have a good story and we photograph really well because flowers photograph really well, which is really lucky for that. But it is having a great PR agency, too. We have a phenomenal one in New York, Jennifer Bett Communications, that I can't say enough about. And they're wonderful and they work with us on what we want our story to be out there and who we want to be telling it. And so they've been wonderful to work with. So it's definitely not all... people think that we're just lucky and it's free and everything but we put a lot into it too.F Geyrhalter: Oh I'm sure.C Stembel: Yeah.F Geyrhalter: And thank you for sharing that. That was great.C Stembel: Of course.F Geyrhalter: Listeners-C Stembel: It is money, so.F Geyrhalter: That too, of course. Exactly, exactly. Listeners who fell in love with your brand just now, where can they get some Farmgirl flowers for the holidays?C Stembel: Why thank you for asking, that's a great question.F Geyrhalter: Well you didn't see that coming.C Stembel: Totally. Farmgirlflowers.com, on our website. And then we also ask that you just follow along with our journey on Instagram and Facebook too, if you want to see more behind the scenes every day. We like to show you how we're making each bouquet and fun things about our company there as well.F Geyrhalter: And I think you have 133,000 flowers, is that correct?C Stembel: I think we're at-F Geyrhalter: Or is it 311 now? One or the other.C Stembel: Yeah, I think we're three something-F Geyrhalter: There you go.C Stembel: On Instagram. And probably about the same on Facebook. I think overall, it's a little over a million between all the channels.F Geyrhalter: That's awesome. That's really, really amazing. Congratulations on everything. I'm so thrilled that you were able to share your insights and your story with us on the show. I know you have a jam-packed schedule, so we really appreciate your time.C Stembel: No problem, thanks for having me. I really enjoy talking about this. I don't often get to talk about brand, so this is really refreshing and wonderful.F Geyrhalter: Excellent, thank you Christina.C Stembel: Awesome, thank you Fabian.

Do you feel overwhelmed and think that if there were just more hours in the day you could get it all done?  Instead of managing your calendar, manage your energy.  Learn how one minute can save hours with my guest Josh Davis, PhD and author of the international best-seller, Two Awesome Hours. He is Sr. Director of Research and Faculty at the Institute for Personal Leadership.  He is a trainer at the NLP Center of NY, and teaches The Art of Public Speaking.  He received his doctorate from Columbia University, then joined the psychology department at Barnard College of Columbia University, prior to working in leadership development.  His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, Fast Company, Huffington Post, strategy+business, Training + Development, People & Strategy, Psychology Today, and others. He or his work has been mentioned in the Times of London, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other major media sources. Well. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. I really look forward to what you're going to be sharing with us on the podcast. My pleasure. It's really nice to be back with you. Well, Josh, why don't you tell us - what is the science that you're going to share with us today? I'm looking forward to sharing something about how the brain works that we can leverage in order to get ourselves out of that state of overwhelm when we're stuck at it being like, oh my God, it's just so much to do, right? That kind of a state and instead be able to get us to a place where we're putting our efforts into the things that really matter. I love it. That's something I hear all the time with the executives I work with. They're overwhelmed. There's not enough time in the day and this is definitely something that is going to resonate with a lot of people. Excellent. It just seems to be getting worse. Actually. There's more and more on everybody's plate is no longer a nice to have and I think it's becoming clear to many people that it's not going to be possible to solve this problem by trying to cram everything into the calendar. I don't know. Some of your listeners may have already come to that conclusion, but if they haven't, that's also something that I'm going to suggest. That's great. Why don't you share some of the hacks that you have around how we can become less overwhelmed and really be more effective with our time? Okay, so first of all, I think it's helpful to draw a contrast between what many of us do and you don't have to admit publicly that you do this, so you may recognize this behavior in yourself from time to time that you know when we get overwhelmed, what we tend to do is to just think like, well look, there's so much work to do. I just have to keep myself working constantly. I've got to work every minute. I've got to work more hours. How else am I going to do it? And logically, it makes a lot of sense. It's simple math, right? Do you have a team? You get them to do more work as well and have no downtime as much as you can. That would be a fantastic solution if what you were talking about a factory where you get the exact same output every time you run the machines and then you should just keep that thing running. But human beings are not anything like a factory. Yeah. When it comes to this, we are different in a really important way, which is that we can be phenomenally creative, productive. We can make clearheaded decisions, we can map out plans, we can think about how to influence others, all of the things that are so key to knowledge work. We can do these things just exceptionally well at times and very quickly. You could have a morning where you're just hitting it out of the park. You're taking care of everything that was on your list, and then at other times, if you're anything like me, you can spend three days where you're, you're practically worthless. So the solution is not going to be that what would seem obvious if we were thinking about something where you get the same output every time you run it. Instead, what we need to do is to work with the way that human brains and bodies work now because we can be so quiet, impressively productive and creative at certain times and not at others. It means there are certain conditions that helped to set that up and when you turn to the research you can learn what some of those conditions are. Some of them have to do with things like rather than trying to manage your calendar, you can be trying to manage your mental energy. You can be trying to manage your attention. There are times in the day where if you've just been through a really tough meeting, you might be highly emotional. It's actually harder to think clearly in those contexts that in those moments you actually are not as capable and you may not realize it of making good clear decisions or making them as quickly or even taking into account the same information you would under different circumstances. If it's later in the day and you've been making a lot of decisions, it has been shown with judges, for example, that they tend to make worse decisions as the day goes on and now these are decisions that have major implications for people. Parole decisions for example, that are made later on in the Judge's day, or this side or that side of lunch, they tend to be either better or worse for the people seeking parole - that what happens is when the judges are more fresh, they are capable of and motivated to take into account more information. Now the judges are not aware of doing it differently. They still think they're doing the best they can and being very fair. Right, right. This is all happening often outside of their awareness, the brain is simply operating differently. Once you have accumulated a certain amount of mental fatigue, it is just simply harder to make those kinds of decisions. The thing is, we can take this stuff into account. Now, you can take it into account when you're about to start an important task. You could take it into account when you're planning ahead, you can say, look, this is going to come late in the day. Then the really important negotiation, I'm going to create a space for myself to be able to refresh before that. Get a little exercise, take a nap, something like that. But Carl Icahn, famous billionaire, he is said to have scheduled frequently his really challenging negotiations in the afternoon because he knew that the other lawyer he'd be interacting with would be fatigued and then he would schedule a nap beforehand. I mean, the thing is, it's evidence. So simple. You might say, well yeah, of course I'm fresher. Of course I'm better, but yet you know what the science says you are so much fresher than you realize, the difference is extraordinary in terms of making that an incredibly productive and effective time period or not. Now you can also in the moment, when you're about to sit down to do something, say, is this the right time for it? And now you might say, well look, I'm tired all the time. As time goes on. If you're focused on setting up these periods of time when you can be at your best and the most important work, you will find that you started doing things that enable you to not just be tired all the time, that it actually starts to lead to greater work life balance and what happens is not that you're doing everything on your list, but you're getting to that elusive goal of saying no to the things that are not as important because you're able to think more clearly about it. So I'll pause here for a moment. I've been weaving together a few different pieces. Yeah, I really liked the fact that you talked about not managing your calendar but managing your attention and managing that calendar is something that I struggle with and other leaders struggle with. What are the things from a leadership perspective that you would recommend be on the calendar earlier in the day when you're fresher to really be more effective leading yourself and leading others? Yes, I do have an answer for that. That I think is really an essential piece. We have to step back for a moment and think about what's really important to do day-to-day. And if you're a successful person, you could probably, you know, if we're having a conversation over beers and we were just on the weekend, at some point you could tell me, well look, these are the things that are important for me to do. You know, there's certain relationships I want to build. There's this new marketing platform I want to invest in. These articles I want to write, whatever it is, the important stuff. You could tell me that and then I could ask, how do you spend your time? How long have you been saying to yourself - that's the important stuff, right? So you know what the important stuff is usually from time to time, sure it may not be clear, but you know what the important stuff is usually. And then we find ourselves saying, how did I just spend three hours on that, on these forms or these things that I should have outsourced that to somebody else? Or you know what? I didn't even need to do some of those , to respond to some of those emails. What, you know, what's wrong with me? Right? Right. And so we, we look at it and say like, my calendar is so packed but back to back. Right? And you know, these kinds of ways of talking to ourselves and yet at the same time we can have these experiences of wasting time feeling like we actually wasted the afternoon. We didn't get to the important stuff. So what I'm going to suggest is that the issue is not a calendar issue. The issue is that we're not finding a way to connect with what's important. Now it's not that you don't know what's important and it's, and you've probably have read Covey and you know that you should be putting x percentage of your time into the stuff that's important and not urgent, right? You know those things. But for some reason you're not doing it well. Here is what's going on. Once you get started on a task, you get into this reactive mode. You're kind of on autopilot. You're leveraging parts of the brain that are relatively less conscious, where you're going to be relying on parts of the brain that has to do with habits, behavioral habits, habits of thought. And the thing is as we go through life, we accumulate more and more habits. And the whole point of that is that we don't have to expend as much mental energy conscious. Deliberate focus is very energy intensive and so we avoid it whenever we can. So whenever there's some kind of way of being on autopilot, we do it well. What happens is that let's say you flip open your email and you started checking it, you get on autopilot, right? That takes over and you become reactive. As soon as, that is another way of talking about it, this reactive mode, as soon as you, you're in that reactive place, all of a sudden it's just much harder to be in touch with what's important. It's that it's hard to even recognize that you need to take a moment and step back and think about what's important and whatever you're doing in the moment. Yeah, there's some importance to it. So it's going to feel important in that moment. And so this is why we have to create opportunities and we have to start practicing doing this. To make it a habit, you have to create opportunities to break out of autopilot, to step out of that reactive mode, bring back online this conscious, deliberate attention and focus that attention on the question - "What's really important today?" You know, by the end of the day, which thing am I going to be happy that I spent some time on at the end of the week, by the end of the month, even by the end of my life, which are those things and leverage that conscious, deliberate focus that we can have when we break out of autopilot. The thing is to break out of autopilot, you can't just willfully do it in the moment. It's so strong, it's very hard to willfully break out of it. So you've got to plan ahead. And one of the things you started out by asking me "What can you do first thing in the morning?". First thing in the morning, and I would actually recommend doing this a couple of different points in the day, like first thing in the morning and then right before you actually started your first task in case things have shifted or just to help you refocus is to how, it can even just be one minute. It could be 10 minutes, but it could even just be one minute where you have freed yourself out from being reactive. The computer is not open so you couldn't be responding. Your phone is not in your hand, so you can't be responding to it. When there are not other people in front of you, so you can't just be reacting to them, but you create a space where you can actually step back, often physically, I encourage you to physically step back from the desk if you can and just pause until you can connect with and remember, okay, what is that important stuff? Once you have that in mind, then if you're a competent person, you're going to be able to find ways to think about -  okay, you know, what? Could I afford to spend some time on that right now? If not, when can I do that today and how can I make it so that I'm going to be mentally fresh when I get to that point? Does it mean that I want to do it after lunch, before lunch? Create a little bit of a break, do some exercise right before to reset. That, if that's the important stuff, then it's the important stuff. And what happened is that it also becomes much easier to say, look, here are some of the things that I'm, I'm going to save for when I'm fatigued or I'm just not going to get to, right? Because it's not the important stuff. But the thing is you've got to leverage those moments that you build into the day to do that because you're not going to be able to catch yourself and think about it as you're going through the day. Once you are in reactive mode, you're in reactive mode. So that's something that I think is absolutely critical to do at the beginning of the day. And of course you can do it multiple times a day and should, you know, put it on your calendar or the beginning of any new task or the end of the meeting. Have one of those moments where you step back and you'd do that. I call them decision points. So I think that's perhaps the most important thing that I can offer actually in terms of reclaiming your day and doing the stuff that matters and doing it well. Yeah, I love that. I got that from your recent book, Two Awesome Hours, where it talks about those key decision points and knowing when you have to make those decisions on either, like you said, going forward with the work you're doing or stopping and saying, is this really where I need to spend my time? That's really powerful. In those decision points you can also, after you've connected with what's really important, you can also just quickly check in and think about how, how mentally energize or fatigued to am I right now? Because I don't know about you, but I can sometimes, if I'm sitting at the computer and I am in reactive mode and I'm doing stuff, I can think like, you know what, I feel fine. I could keep going for another couple of hours, but once I step away and I go get that coffee or something and I'm standing there, I realized how clouded my thinking is. Yeah. And I realized this is not the time to tackle those challenging issues that I'm going to do it in half the time if I wait till the morning, you know, or if I wait till a little bit later and I'm going to do it better and this is the time for me to do something else. So, so you can also check in on your mental energy in those moments you can make a big difference. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Especially the standing up, moving around, catching yourself, even if you took a minute, right, you said, this isn't a, you're not talking 15 to 20 minutes meditation, you're talking one minute, get up and really move yourself away and, and check with what's going on. I think that's a really powerful tip and something that I know I need to do more myself and I know it makes a big difference when I get up and walk around throughout the day, keeping me fresh. One minute to save hours. Right. Especially if you got in that rut, that rut of maybe checking email or focusing on something that's more of a tactical task in the morning. So Josh, how have you applied this to yourself? Oh, you know, that was one of the wonderful things about writing this book. You know, I already had some ideas. There were some things I had experimented with, but when I did the research, I started to, you know what? I started to believe it a lot more to be honest. Yeah. And so I would actually go and experiment. I mean, I was like, oh wow. You know, these things do make a difference. So, for example, , and this was something that you shared this with me earlier, that you went ahead and and redesigned your office. Right? That's so me. Even now that I know that essentially my attention systems are designed to pick up on things that are sitting around precisely, you know, that's what it is for. My attention systems are not designed to stay focused, they are designed to pick up on whats changing, what needs attention, what is threatening, things like that and all the things that are sitting on my desk are things that I owe to somebody or I forgot to do, or it was important or it seemed hard. They're exactly the things that are going to take my attention. It is simply not fair to myself to sit down at a desk littered with these things. It's so much extra mental work. I'm fatiguing myself unnecessarily. Every time I get distracted, my mind's gonna wander to one of those things instead of wander to creative solutions on whatever I'm doing, right? And so I've just gone ahead, you know, I was not somebody who cleaned up my desk and cleared things away all the time. And now you walk into my office and there's nothing on the desk. You know, even like people see it and they sort of, they comment on it. They're like, oh wow. You know, and, and whenever there is a shared space that I'm using, you know, people come in, they always want to sit down on my desk because it's the cleanest one, because they're drawn to that too. They know it's going to be easier for them, right? And it's easier physically to sit down, but also mentally it's easier. So I mean those are some of the things. And there's another one was like learning about how exercise, you know, we think of exercise as this thing that it's like, well if I exercise I'll probably be healthier long term. And of course that'll help my work. Cause if I'm healthier I won't miss work and blah, blah, blah, Right? That's motivating to some degree. You know, it's like I don't want to die young. Yeah. Right. There is some motivation. But what that motivates me to do is a few times a week go and try to work out for an hour, an hour and a half, really hard, right? And it could happen anytime. I could do it right before going to sleep, but now I've seen that exercise is one of the most reliable ways to reduce anxiety in the short term. Meaning like in the next few hours. So if I want to reduce my anxiety and have an easy time paying attention, easy time staying present, essentially letting go of the things that don't matter, exercise is a virtual guarantee, and it doesn't have to be for an hour or two hours. Moderate exercise, 20 minutes on the treadmill, working up a little bit of a sweat breathing heavily, that's going to give me those psychological benefits actually better than if I'm really pushing hard and then I don't want to waste those on sleeping. I mean, sure it will help me sleep. It's nice, not a waste. These are the things I want to strategically use for the immediate benefit. All of a sudden I can just switch into a state where I'm less anxious and more present and have an easier time focusing. Anytime I'm doing important work, that's where I want to be. So now all of a sudden exercise become something that I'm using strategically. I was able to exercise every day. You know, I really, I exercise every day, sometimes a couple of times a day, just briefly if it's going to be key for work, I use it as a strategic tool. So actually thinking of exercise as this strategic work tool has gotten me to exercise more regularly then when I was exercising for its own sake. So as a result of having the health benefits too. That was a big shift for me, was that exercise is a strategic tool to be used for that day or your work capability that day and it's a reset button. You can do it anytime if you need to reset, there's an important thing later in the day, you're having a tough morning, you can build it in. Those were a couple things I think were really unexpected that were kind of real pleasures of doing this research. Changed how I function. That's great. What's the exercise? Can it be 10 minutes walking? Maybe brisk walk outside if you don't have a treadmill or something available for you throughout the day? So there's a slightly more nuanced answer to that. Short answer is yes, but the longer answer is that some of the psychological benefits will occur from something like just 10 minutes of something that you do have to get your heart rate up. You do have to, you know, you want to be breathing heavily. Maybe getting to the point of almost breaking a sweat, but it should not be more than moderate. So if you want all of the benefits then moderate exercise is key. If it's a brisk walk, often it doesn't need to be longer. Like if it's a brisk walk and you're not actually breaking a sweat, then what would get to that level of moderate exercise from, in terms of the physiological factors that are changing, it would probably be more like a 40 minute walk. You know, like going for a brisk walk at lunch kind of thing or a brisk walk while you're having a meeting or something like that. You know, a walk and talk kind of thing could be done if you've got somebody else's really on onboard with that. Something really brief. 10 minutes, you know, going up and down the stairs, doing a few jumping jacks, that kind of thing. But you know this also depends on the person, what's going to count as something that requires exertion. Great point to mention how in shape you are, how far you can walk in and what it will take to do that. I know people who might be in less good shape might have an advantage here because there's a little bit less time they could put it into it and still get some of that. I haven't experimented with that. I just had that thought in the moment. One of my favorite executives that I worked for, every morning he made sure that there were not meeting scheduled before eight o'clock. It was a rare exception because it was so important for him to make sure that he did get exercise and work out that morning because it just made a difference in his day. Yeah. That's great that you have that have that reference experience. Nelson Mandela made it a part of his daily routine in jail. He would actually run in place for 45 minutes cause he knew that it made him so much mentally sharper, is how he described it. Yeah. Well Josh, have you worked with any other leaders or organizations to implement some of these techniques to help them with overwhelm or just be more effective? So I have had a number of opportunities to go in to companies, share these ideas and the different ways that people apply it are just to me, kind of extraordinary. Ways that I wouldn't have expected, you know? So you've got some people, let's say salesforce, that might be in cars all the time, right? And so you think like, oh, well how are they going to apply some of these things, right? They have these very restricted physical locations. And here I've got people talking about how they're able to take exceptional advantage of the idea of these decision points because they have this forced time when they can't be writing, they can't be staring at something else. And so rather than just putting on something to listen to, they're deliberately taking some elements of that time to do some of these decision points and as well as some elements of the time to do something else I talk about in the book, which is really great for fostering creativity and then ending up working less. And I have had, now this will sound like bragging a little bit. I've had people come back to me and say, I have a new problem. Some of my colleagues are getting frustrated with me because they feel like I'm not essentially overworking myself. I'm not, you know, it used to be a badge of honor for everyone to talk about how hard they're working, how many hours they're putting in, how exhausted they are. And to be honest, I'm getting what I need to get done. In fact, I'm getting more of it done and I'm not as exhausted and I'm not staying late all the time. And I've had a couple of people who were sort of frustrated with that, what do I do about that? And I, you know, so there's a famous psychotherapist who once said "progress is moving from the same damn thing over and over again to one damn thing after another." So that's where we want to get. It's like, let's get to that point, let's change that culture. Let's start deciding, well what is it for me, that counts as success and look, some people have been very clever, right? You know, there are some situations, and I've been in these from time to time who I've learned to not let people see that I have work life balance because I know they're not ready for it. So, I don't know if that's where you're going with the question, but those are some of the things that I have heard and worked with people in financial institutions and the big names places and then worked with people in pharmaceutical companies and various different types of industries and different types of levels as well. There's one group that made it a big part of their onboarding program based on this book. You know, there's been different ways that people have implemented this, but those are some of the kinds of things that I'm, I'm very happy to say do really seem to make a big difference. And I also kind of want to let people know it is possible. That's a great problem to have that you know, people look at you and you are so put together, you know, don't seem to be stressing as much as they are. But tell me a little bit more about some examples of decision points that they were making - the salesforce. So I did not in this specific example I was offering, I didn't actually probe and get a whole list of the specific decisions. There's a couple of things that I did get that I can share it so I don't have a whole lot of examples in this case. But one example would be there are certain key accounts and look, everybody knows they need to be putting in, every salesperson knows they need to be putting in more into their key accounts, right? Because these are going to have an outsized impact, right? And therefore need outsized attention and yet it doesn't always work out that way because of the amount of time, the amount of effort that can just go into these other leads. And I'm like you don't know exactly where they're going, right? It can draw your attention and can really like, you don't want to leave any stone unturned. And so it's actually a very disciplined, conscious decision to actually come back and be able to say, "All right, let me step back and look at the big picture here and be very strategic about where my attention is going and about which relationships I want to nurture so that these key accounts, they are getting the love from me that they need on a regular basis." So some days where it could have been days that would go by without them getting the attention because you're attending to these other things, but ultimately you actually don't think need as much attention - its that kind of a shift. Actually intentionally looking and saying, where am I spending my time? And there's a lot of mental offered on client that's not as high a return as others. And it's about being intentional. And the thing is, nothing I'm going to say here, is going to be rocket science, you know? And that's, but that's the point, these are things that we can know ...we're just not doing them. So what I want to suggest is that if we want to learn to do them, we can take advantage of understanding how the brain works and how, where we get into these pitfalls, how we get stuck and when we have the opportunities to think differently, what we would have to do to be, to step back and connect to what matters. That's great. I love that. So as leaders listening to this podcast and thinking about, Gosh, I am at the overwhelmed stage, or I'd love to have that work life balance problem where it, you know, I've got it pretty much under control. What's one thing that they could do right away after listening to this? One small thing that could make a big difference? So there's also a phrase from psychotherapy that "You're looking for the difference that makes the difference". So I will suggest that the thing that makes the difference may be different for different people. But if this is something you're not already doing, then I would say see what happens this week. If you give yourself one minute when you get to your office, when you sit down, before you look at any media, before you look at email, before you open your computer, where you pause and you think about "what's the really important stuff that matters to me today and when during the day am I going to do that?" If you just give yourself that one minute, once a day, each day this week, just try it and notice what happens. Now if that is something that you're already doing, then what I would invite you to do is to go to the next step and during that one minute to ask yourself, "what's my mental energy like right now and as a result, do I want to reorder how I'm doing things?" If there is a really important presentation coming up in an hour and I don't want to be fatigued for it, maybe now is not the time for me to go and make a whole lot of meaningless decisions about emails that are just going to get me kind of frustrated. Maybe now is the time for me to go and do something creative. That's going to get me energized for this and you might end up coming to a different decision if you're thinking about what's the mental energy I want to show up to that meeting for. So that's the second thing you might do during that minute. I love that. Yeah, just that short reflection time, if they're not doing, can make a big difference. And sometimes it's right after you wake up because that's when people check their media. Yes, yes. Most of us have our phones as our clock right by the bedside and pull it up and you know, you're curious and sometimes it's exciting, sometimes even want to see what there is. And regardless if you pull that up, just realize you'd get into reactive mode and look, you can recover from that, but you'll need to have some planned time to step back. But at some point that morning before you really get into things, I recommend if you're open to it, to experiment with not even looking at it until some specified time of the day, like 10:00 AM or even later, you know, just to discover what happens for one week. Just discover, do I actually survive the week? Am I still alive at the end? Do I still have a job, right? Did I end up making different decisions as a result of giving myself that mental freedom in the morning? Yeah. So if you're willing to try that, I encourage you. That's great. I think that's a great tip to start and you have so many great tips in here too in your book Two Awesome Hours. Like I told you, I did read it and I have been applying it and I like that you've got tips in here, not just for yourself but from almost an organization perspective and environment and a space perspective. So I'd really recommend everyone get a copy of Two Awesome Hours and read that. Its a really easy read as well and it's very practical and it's not sciencey. So you did a great job with that too. Thank you. Thank you. I, you know, I worked hard on all of those things. I'm glad to know that you had that reaction. And you know, you remind me of one thing also is that when everybody else in your environment knows the same thing, you can support one another in it. Right? You know, you can know, you can leave one another alone when you're thinking, for example. From a culture perspective, what you uncovered I think has a lot of implications that leaders and HR leaders too can really be thinking about, to set the right environment for their teams. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today and I just wanted to check in with you and say, was there anything else that you wanted to share? Anything you've, maybe you're working on next? Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, for those people who do find public speaking to be a challenge, I'll just put this out there as a teaser that, it is possible to actually learn to not just get through it, but to enjoy it. And so if you're curious about that, then you know, look me up on Linkedin and you'll see the next time I'm offering the course. I've been teaching it for many years and it's a very different approach to public speaking. It's about how to learn how to enjoy it. And it is also science based, research based, drawing on tools from the behavioral sciences and psychotherapy as well. Oh, that's excellent. And so they should just look up Josh Davis on Linkedin. Josh Davis, Phd, there's a ton of Josh Davis's, everybody had the same idea to name their kids that at the same time, but, but Josh Davis Phd will take you there and that way you'll see the next time I'm doing it, I do them in LA and sometimes in New York. Great, and I'll put your information on the transcripts as well. Well Josh, I really appreciate you spending time with us. I look forward to having you back to share more of your work. Maybe your next book. I'm sure you're working on your next book at this point, right? Yeah, just beginning it. Oh, okay. Yeah, just beginning the process right now, so yes, I would love to come back. All right, well thank you and I hope you have a great day. All right, thanks. Take care. So to recap, to get ourselves out of that state of overwhelm when we're stuck thinking we have so much to do, we can utilize decision points to get us to a place where we're putting our efforts into things that really matter. The issue is not a calendar issue. The issue is that we're not finding a way to connect with what's important. Avoid getting into that reactive mode or autopilot. Create decision points and put them on your calendar because you're not going to be able to catch yourself and think about it as you're going through the day without being intentional. You have too many habits that you've built. Josh also reminded us of the psychological benefits of exercise, even 30 to 40 minutes of moderate exercise to keep your mind fresh. Here's one thing to try over the next week. Give yourself one minute when you get to your office, when you sit down, before you look at any media, look at any email and before you open your computer.  Pause and think about what's the really important stuff that matters to me today and when during the day am I going to do that? If you just gave yourself that one minute once a day, each day this week, just try it and notice what happens. As Josh shared one minute to save hours, I really recommend reading his book Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done, it has some great tips in there. I hope that this was helpful to you and I would love to hear how you're implementing these tips yourself. I use these myself and share them with the leaders that I coach. Want to know more about what Josh is doing - www.twoawesomehours.com is the place to go.  Linkedin is also a way to connect with Josh. If you're interested in coaching or leadership development for yourself or your organization, please reach out to me directly by email at jillwindel@talentspecialists.net Have an amazing day.  

DESCRIPTION In today’s episode you will hear a special interview with Geoff Woods Vice President of the ONE Thing and how he lost 40% of his income overnight. You’ll also understand why so many of us fail when we think big and act big and what to do instead. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode: Find out the keystone habits you want to build and grow your success. Find out how you practically focus on your ONE thing in the midst of the whirlwind. And see how Satori asks Geoff about how he deals with stress and the surprising answers. So listen here to find out how Satori goes deep with Geoff Woods on what creates badass results in life and business. What’s up everyone, This is Satori Mateu and welcome to a new episode of Halfass to Badass. In today’s episode we have a special treat for you. I’m interviewing Geoff Woods, the vice president of the One Thing and host of the ONE Thing Podcast. If you haven’t read the book the ONE thing, it’s a great book that I highly recommend and as you listen to the interview you’ll know why. --Script-- Okay. So welcome Geoff. I'm so happy and excited to have you here on the show. And so before we start, the one question I really liked to ask because we all have different perspectives. What is the difference between a Halfass and a Badass in your perspective? It would come down to, either a purposefulness or intention, you know, kind of kind of the same thing. When I think of halfass I think of somebody or, or actions that are not purposeful or deliberate, you know, just Kinda, you just kind of doing it. You're just going through the motions versus when I think of a Badass, I think if somebody who's intentional in what they do and why they're doing it. I love that. I love that. That's beautiful. So let's get into it. I'd like to know what's your backstory? Yeah, so I, um, today there's a book called the one thing, which is one of the highest rate of business books of all time. It was written by two guys, Gary Keller, who started Keller Williams. It's the largest real estate company in the world and his co-author Jay Papasan. When they wrote the book in 2013, uh, I don't think they realize that it was going to take off the way that it did, but when it did, they looked up and realized, oh snap, there's something here. But Gary's one thing was being chairman of Keller Williams, Jay's one thing was writing books. They needed somebody who is one thing was the one thing. At that time I was in medical device sales and I had always known that I was destined for more. I wanted to wake up and own a business that made a big impact in the world and deliver real security for my family. But I had these golden handcuffs on. I had a good Gig, you know, worked 35, 40 hours a week, made good money, had great work life counterbalance things were great, but I was lacking that fulfillment. And, uh, it took two things happening in my life story that really forced me to make a change in the first was a colleague of mine had a stroke. He was 35 at the time. They remember my wife and I, we had just bought a house in Orange County and just had our first child and my wife had made the decision to become a stay at home mom. And I remember looking at my colleague thinking, wow, if what happened to him happened to me, what happens to my family? That was very unsettling. And then the next week, my company needed to make a change to our commission structure in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. And overnight I lost 40% of my income. Wow. And when those two things happened back to back where I'm already going, wow, I actually have to go to work to earn a living. And then the comp plan gets cut and I have zero control over it. It's suddenly when the pain ratchet it up. And as months passed and we just started hemorrhaging cash in the bank accounts, almost hitting zero is when I finally had enough pain in my life to force me to make a change. Cause it's um, it's uncomfortable to go into the unknown. And I heard this Jim Rohn quote that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with looked at my five. Oh Wow. These are amazing people. I always want them in my life. And the challenge was I was seeking guidance on how to build a business from people who weren't qualified to give it. I set out on a journey just to upgrade my five. And uh, I met Jay. Pat Has, cause he spoke at our national sales meeting and I approached him when he came off stage and we formed a relationship. And ultimately, uh, my one thing became turning the one thing into our training company. Hmm. Wow. That's very cool. And what, what was some of the, as you were building this thing, I mean, you know, you came into this, like what was the one mental shift that you would have to shift for yourself? Oh yes. In my first 90 days I had a state of the company meeting with my two partners, with Gary and Jay, and this was a defining moment in my life. I was being assessed on three things. There were three things that I had to be able to do exceptionally well otherwise. Otherwise, I was fired. I had to be able to cast a vision for the company because if Gary and Jay had to do the thinking for me, they didn't need me. I had to prove that I could drive revenue for the business and the test was could I generate $100,000 in 90 days or less out of thin air? And the third was I had to prove that I could recruit and retain amazing talent so that we start with number one, because they were ranked in order of priority. I had to prove that I could cast a vision. So I had to create a business plan and get Gary and Jay to sign off on it. Now you have to little context. I've never been a CEO of a company. I finished sales guy, sold copiers and I sold medical devices and all of a sudden I have to sit down with the chairman of the largest real estate company in the world and sell him on my vision to get him to sign off on it, which was very intimidating and I walked into this room. I handed Gary and Jay each a copy of my one page business plan. This is a framework that we teach and it's simply one page because it's tough to be on the same page with your organization if your plan literally doesn't fit on the same page and on it were three things, the three major priorities, and if we just accomplish those would make hitting our profit goals possible. We started talking about number one, Gary and Jay asked a bunch of questions about it. I answered him. I said, are we good? They go. Yeah, and so I went on to number two because that's what was next on the list, right? And pretty quickly Gary started asking more questions about number one. I didn't think anything of it at the time. I just go, oh, he must have forgotten something. So I answered the questions. I said, are we good Gary? He goes, yeah. And so I finished up number two start talking about number three. Gary goes back to number one and at this point I realized something was off. It was like Ben Stiller and meet the parents where he's realizing that he's not at the circle of trust. That's where I was. I answered the questions. I said, are we good? He goes, yeah. I start talking about number three and Gary within 10 seconds stops meeting goes, quick question, do you need to accomplish number three in order to accomplish number two? I said, no. He said, do you need to accomplish number two in order to accomplish number one I said, no. Said the do me a favor. Draw a line between number one and number two we're even better. Rip The page in half. And then he said, what was so profound, Satori, he said, don't even think about number two and number three until you've earned the right to buy mastering number one. Here's why this was so profound, is in that moment I realized my entire career, I had fall trap to the number one life productivity, the lie that everything matters equally. Yes. For you who's listening to this, think about like how you go through your days. Are you really clear on the one thing you can do that would make everything else easier or unnecessary? And until your number one priority is done, do you view everything else is a distraction answer for most people is now that's where I was and that's when the journey began. Yeah, I love that. And I obviously I've listened to the podcasts, you know, for a while now. I mean, how long have you been out now? I mean, uh, the one week we launched the one thing podcast, January of, it's 2017. So hello? Yeah, we're, we've been going at it for awhile now. Yeah. And that's amazing. So I, I've heard the different constants. W, how would you describe the one thing? Concept. I mean people, I know I have, I hear it everywhere, but he was like, you know when your one thing you want but people don't really seem to understand what's, what's the one thing really like what, how would you describe the concept? The one thing is the surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results for you. Who's listening to this? Have you, have you ever had one of those days where you were so busy and you at the end of the day you looked up and you thought to yourself, I was so busy, did I get anything done? Right? That's ordinary. That's what most people realize. The one thing is understanding that out of everything that's on your plate in any given moment, there is one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary. It's like when you line up dominoes, do you knock down each one individually, right? No, you, you line them up. So all you have to do is knock down that lead one. And what happens to Tori? Don't go down. They all go down. So this is about whether it's in your business, in your health, in your relationships, in your spirituality, how do we get clear on what we actually want the goal and based on that, how do we line up our priorities and our actions so that were so clear on that lead dominant, we can just whack away at that one thing until it falls. Right? Yeah. And I think what are the different areas of life, right? Whether it's being a parent, right? Parents, right? Running a business, taking care of your health and you think all the different things that are spinning around a lot of times. So what does one do to folks in as one thing that wasn't, what does it really mean to focus on the one thing? Yeah, sure. What does it mean to focus on the one thing? It starts first and foremost by seeking clarity. I think a lot of people, if you just even asking the question like what's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary. That's a big question and big questions don't have the immediate answer. It's not like you asking. You're like boom, I got it. They required that you search a little bit. So for starters it actually means that you become the type of person who pushes past that wall of, I don't know. Right. You seek, you seek and you find that answer and once you do, you actually time block it. You put it on your plan or you put it in your digital calendar. So there is time reserved for you to accomplish that one thing. And when you show up to that time block, you protect it. And that's kind of the framework for the one thing. Identify your one thing, time block your one thing, protect your time block. Right, right. I love that. I think that's so true. Just curious. It's interesting cause sometimes it's going to simplify it. Let's look at it as a parent, right? What's your one thing as a parent for you? Yeah. So for me, and this is, this is me, this is not me projecting onto anyone else. My one thing, the one thing I can do that makes being an extraordinary parent easier is actually being an extraordinary husband. Hmm. I've, and I've understood that for at least in my belief, if I want to raise my children to be the best possible versions of themselves, I have to model what it looks like to be the best partner. Now selecting. And then what's the one thing he says, and this is, this is where people sometimes get stuck with the one thing is they find an answer like, oh well be an extraordinary husband like up. That's my one thing, right? It's the one thing you can do, do meaning action activity such that by doing it would make being an extraordinary husband easier or unnecessary. And this is where, uh, we can break down a lot of things. There's a lot of things I can do to be an extraordinary husband from being present with my wife, to dating my wife to being on the same page about money, to understanding what each other's goals are. There's a lot of things, but really narrowing it down cause I've done this. My one thing to be an extraordinary husband is 36 date nights a year. I've gotten so clear and if, if we look at my 401 which is a tool that you used to have absolute clarity on your priorities. If you look at number one under the personal section, it 36 date nights this year and I track it. Nice. Like I can tell you I'm seven behind year to date. Thanks for sharing that. But what's interesting with that, I think that is that when people think about, you know, let's say those 36 they'd nights, right? And they go like, well that seems to kind of stay of four kind of. But it's kind of like you have the flexibility inside of those date nights to do whatever you want to do, right? It says not I'll give it takes away or robs your flexibility or cra or creativity, right? It's just making sure that it actually happens well and to get some more background there. I mean, when I looked at being a great husband, there were certain things in my life there were missing. My wife and I were, we weren't feeling like we were going together. You know, we, we've got two young kids, I'm starting a company. It's a very stressful time and our marriage reflected that. And so we weren't on the same page about money. We didn't have insight into each other's goals. We didn't really know how to communicate together in a way that, um, we remained connected. Sometimes we would just get charged and emotionally things would, would escalate unnecessarily. There were all these things and last year I thought the one thing for our relationship was to every single Sunday have a family meeting to talk about our finances. Cause it was a major sticking point for us in our marriage. And after going through that for a year, I started to realize that being the money accountability man with my wife didn't actually make her love me more. Why? Why is it that my wife didn't enjoy those conversations? And I told myself that until we got the money under, uh, under tight lock that then we earned the right to do date nights. But then I figured out going through and failing for a year that if my wife and I had date nights regularly, we would be connected. And if we were connected, we could have better conversations about money. And if we were aligned around money and the rest of our goals, we wouldn't have tension. And then we'd show up as better parents. And you start to see how the dominoes lineup, and I chose 36 cause I said I don't need to do one every week, but I can do three months. Nice. Nice. That was beautiful. And, I think that when you talk about that, it's kind of even like that. Right? So when you think of why those date nights, what's the one thing you do to show up presently? Likes to be present. Yeah. So for me it's, it's, it's come down to the, to the cell phone and the technology, you know, am I like tea today? Tonight is date night. So if we were to look at my schedule, I know if I look at my planner or my digital calendar, if I see meetings leading right up to the point that I need to turn off business mode and get into husband mode, I know I'm already setting myself up for failure. Do I have a transition time? Is there a time where I can just really decompress and process everything that happened in our business during the day and mentally prepare myself to walk into the household, the marriage? One of the things I do Satori's when I drive home and I park in our parking lot, uh, I turn off the podcasts. I put my air pods back in the case because for years I walked into the house listening to a podcast or talking to somebody on my phone being greeted me by my children. And then that was the transition. But there was no transition at all. I turned down the tech, I closed my eyes and I meditated and I start imagining what it's gonna feel like to walk into the house, to embrace my wife, to hug and Kiss my children, to mentally be there and nowhere else. Right? Yeah. That's what I think is a distinction between a half assed or bad ass. Yeah. And, and here's the thing that I would say, um, because this is a huge misunderstanding about the one thing. People will read the book or listen to the podcast or you know, they'll listen to everything you talk about here's story. And they'll be like, well, I want to be a badass. And they view what that means to be at a level of perfection. But perfection only gets into the way of what's possible. Every single one of us is going to fail on our, on our path of mastery. And the question is not, are you perfect? The question is, are you doing better today than you did yesterday? Yeah. What's your morning routine? My morning routine. How do you prepare your win? Yay. Yeah. So this is what it looks like. Uh, I wake up between five 30 and six every day I go and wake up my daughter so that she can start getting ready for school, come downstairs. I make myself my breakfast. I make the kids breakfast. I'm with the kids and my wife until it's time to walk my daughter across literally across the street. I'm staring at it right now too, so she can hop on the bus to go to school and this is what's kind of cool. When I switch, when she started taking the bus to school, I realize, oh, I have about an hour to an hour and a half until I have to be at the office. So then I get in the car and I go to the gym. I work out for anywhere from 15 to 15 minutes to an hour. I do a sauna, then I do shower and all that stuff and then I head into the office. Nice. And meditation happens in the Sauna. Oh Nice. That's beautiful. Yeah. And so is that something that you as you want, things that, something that you keep consistent? It is. It is a true routine and habit at this point, and here's what's cool about this is if we looked at my one thing planner from last year, I tracked the number of days I was exercising on average going into at least halfway through the year or eight months into the year, I was exercising on average about four days a month, which I was not happy with. I wasn't happy with my level of energy. I really wanted to transform my health but really struggled to do it, but this is the cool part about lining up your dominoes. My daughter's starting to go to kindergarten and walk. Just walking her across the street was a natural, I know by 6:40 AM Daphne's getting on the bus. What if I just had my gym clothes ready to go and my lunch packed and I just got in the car and went to the gym? That's what it started with. Can I just get in the car and go to the gym? Not, let's be clear, if I drove to the gym, it parked and then decided, you know what? I actually want donuts for breakfast and went and got a dozen donuts and crushed him. It was still a win. That never happened though because I was in the parking lot. I went into the gym and sometimes I only worked out for five minutes, but it was so much more about becoming the type of person who went to the gym every day. And because I started going to the gym, I started working out longer. I started doing the sauna, which allowed me to meditate, which allowed me to take a cold shower, which all of a sudden it's like, oh look, they have mouthwash here. I never used mouthwash. And all of a sudden I'm using mouthwash every day and then I'm moisturizing my body. And like now you're just looking at a much more beautiful Jeff. That's awesome. So I assume that piece of that actually keeps you centered. It keeps you focused. And how do you deal with stress? I mean, so many people that are overwhelmed, they're stressed out, had a million plates spinning at all times. And that talk about this, you know, as part of our precision based growth focus to go deep with things, but how do you deal with stress? And I've been very intentional about this one recently because I've also started to study and the people that I surround myself with have been educating me on what stress actually does to the body. Anytime I'm feeling stressed, it starts by just being present and knowing it. Like we all have this amazing thermometer in our bodies called our feelings and anytime you're not feeling good, your body is saying something is off. And the first thing I do is I just go to breathe. Like just deep breathing. Like in any moment you can pause and even one breath can reset things. Um, it really comes down to that. It's the breath for me. Yeah. There's some other things I do, but like that's, that's the one thing. Yeah, that's good. I mean I'm the same way. Breath is like so key and something that I, that I learned years ago, which obviously the training martial arts for many years, but this kind of breath that really helped me, it was kinda like, you know, you know the different systems we have that bond or that key, the Chris stress or relaxation. And so breathing in and out like almost like, well you, when you meditate you close your eyes and breathing in and out with the same inhalation as exhalation, the pressure and the temple on the, on geeking out on this. Just stuff like breathing in and out at the same templates, same rhythm in and out is like, it equips, liberates your body and your mind and your nervous system. Yeah. It looks, just sinks it down. So I was at a, a dad's retreat last week. It was a group of entrepreneurs who are focused on being family, men with businesses, not businessmen with families. Good distinction. And they brought in a guy, a doc his name was named Sachin Patel and he talked about stress and the effect that it has. How um, where the blood flows in your body is where things grow or the, the rejuvenation, the rest and when you're stressed, like it literally shuts blood flow down in certain areas of your body so you're not able to recover the way that you need to after these days. And he said, you know, it's, it's shifting when you're stressed, you're in a sympathetic nervous system to a parasympathetic state and the one thing you need to focus on, it's called the Vagus nerve and it's right like in your throat, which is why breathing is so good for it. He talked about gargling is actually really good chanting ohm like that that vibration actually stimulates the Vagus nerve and just doing that will take you from sympathetic to parasympathetic. It's either, even when I make those, some of them like even like I can feel the vibration, right. Has a calming effect. Yeah. Vibrates in your chest. You know, the people listening to this, they're like, oh, okay. So I mean we could talk about so many different directions. Is matters so much. I mean to me like this is the most important thing to do is to begin to take control of your focus. Take control of your emotions, take control of your life, period. Um, what are you, I know you talk about power habits. Yeah. What are your three power habits that you believe makes the biggest difference and keeping you productive and efficient in life? Well, let me, let me back it up a little further. There's a quote in the one thing, it's my favorite quote. It's from FML. Xander. People do not decide their futures. They decide their habits, their habits decide their futures. So that explains why you're asking this question said, Corey, you know that so many of us, we have these dreams, these goals, ambitions for our lives, and we rely on our discipline. We rely on our willpower. But both of those are lies. It's not about being a disciplined person. It's about leveraging your discipline to acquire habits. And your willpower is not always on will call. You know, it's, it's, it's just not always there for you. So how do we get really intentional about forming keystone habits that not only help us in that one area that we set out to intentionally, but it also has this halo effect where it starts to shine down and pay dividends and other areas of our life. And I can only share the habits that I have formed that have helped me, the habits that I have for and may not be the same habits that you need to form. And we can walk through a little exercise to help you identify what that first keystone habit is that you need to form. But for me, I remember when I first started the company, my partner Jay looked at me and said, Jeff, the fastest way that you can get out of business with Gary and me is to not love the book. And the book is ultimately about habits. So what your first power habit be, and I looked at page one 14 of the book and it shows the seven circles. These are the seven most important areas of your life. And I'll share with you and your spirituality because every single one of us is going to wonder why we're here at some point, right? It's our physical health. Because if you don't have your body, where are you going to live? It's our personal life. The things we do for us personally to make us the best versions of ourselves. It's our key relationships. That's all the relationships you have. It's your job, meaning your specific role inside your organization, whether it's your company or you're an employee, it's your job. Then there's your business. If you're the owner, then your business is different and if you're an employee, it's how. What's your one thing for the business overall and your finances, spirituality, physical health, personal life, relationships, job, business, finances. Jay said if you could only pick one area to form a habit in first, which would it be? And I listed off four areas that I really needed to form a habit. And he said, Geoff, the book's called the one thing, not the four things. And I said, I get that Jay, but I, I really need to do these two. And he said it, but if he could only choose one, and I said, I think I can do too. He said, Geoff, it's called the one thing and so I picked business to start. I had just moved my family from southern California to Austin, like the business had to work otherwise it was for nothing and the one thing that I could do that would make everything else in our business easier or unnecessary was for me to develop the habit of thinking in order of priority. You heard the story earlier about the GPS, the three priorities and the number one until you're number one party's done. Everything else is a distraction. How can I become the type of person who, when I just looked at the world I thought in order of priority and the one thing I could do that would make thinking in order of priority easier or unnecessary was could I check my four one one my priorities before I check my email? Which for those of you who are going, what's this four one one thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you go, if you go to the one thing.com that's what the number one in the URL and you click on the training tab, you'll see there's, we've got a free training on what a four one one is. We also have what a 66 day challenges. That's a challenge that you'd go on to a foreign power habits. They're both there for free and they'll give you a quick training on it, but my four one one reflected my true priorities. I just want to at least look at it and check it before I checked my email, which was everyone else's priorities and I tracked it every day for 66 days and you fast forward about 10 weeks. All of a sudden I stopped feeling the need to check email all the time. All of a sudden I was clear on what my one thing was and I just, I wanted to move the ball on it first and all of a sudden I started getting these amazing results in way less time and my stress plummeted because I didn't see everything that needed to be done. I just saw a bunch of distractions and I was just like, they don't matter. Let me get my one thing done. Yeah. That's engine. You say that. Cause I, I kind of developed for myself, you know, I hardly check my email anymore people go. “You don't check your email?” I’m like no. I believe that is someone really wants to get in touch with me and it's really, they'll find a way. Right. And the people that I really want to reach me, they have my cell phone. Right. If it's really important. So yeah, I really checked my email. Um, but yeah, that's, that's true. So how did you, how did you identify your core? That place where you're like, okay, how do I sort out what the thing is? Like the thing that's going to be most important? How did you think around it? Um, ask it differently. Okay. So how do you, when you, when you talking about the foreign one, right? Yeah. Like when you got to the point of understanding what, what it was you first started thinking around how to, how to identify them first of all, the areas, right. And yet you, one thing, how did you get to go deeper to know which one we want to focus on? Yeah, and this is, this is something that we see people struggle with a lot before they start doing training is either a, the, when they're picking their one thing, they're, they're still thinking too big. There's this idea of we have to think big and we have to go small, which is not what most people do. They think big and act big. They think big. Like, oh, I just, um, I just need to build a great business. That's my one thing. Right? But that's still too big of an idea. Like you have to go small to the point that it's a two inch domino that literally with the flick of a finger, it's so easy to knock it over and it's so powerful that it would knock over all the other dominoes. So let's recap. As I told that story, let's actually dissect it. Okay. I started with the seven circles. I looked at the seven areas and said if I could only pick one, what would it be? And I forced myself to pick one with the loving help of my partner Jay and I picked business. I then asked the focusing question of the book. What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary? Well, if my category is business, the one thing is to build a great business and what's the one thing I can do to build a great business? I have to show up as the best possible leader I can show up as well. What's the one thing I can do to show up as the best possible leader? I have to be clear on what matters most. Well, what's the one thing I can do to be clear on what matters most, I have to know what matters most. What's the one thing I can do to know what matters most? I have to start being able to identify my priorities. What's the one thing I can do to identify my priorities? We already have a model and a system for that. That's what the four one one is. Can I check my four one one before I check my email? Now let's be clear. It doesn't mean that I had to do anything else, but could I at least look at my priorities before I open my inbox and even gave the outside world permission to penetrate mind? Right, right. There's this idea of thinking big and going small. It's actually very simple. Just keep asking, what's the one thing I can do to make that happen? Until you get to something that is so ridiculously simple that you go, I can do that, and then you trust the domino effect by knocking it down every single day. Knowing that over time if the results aren't going to be there after day one, it's not like I'm a millennial, so I did it one day and then I wanted to trophy. Right. I had to trust that over 66 days to really make it a habit. The, the, the, the result would eventually show up. When you were going through that, was that, was that challenging for you? Was that a struggle? I mean, you wanted that trophy. I know that, but you know, it's like when you're going through that, what, what was the obstacle that came up for you? It, it's, it's the trusting of the domino effect because it's just like, the shape of success is that hockey stick growth, you know, you're doing the right activity and you're succeeding so slowly. It feels like you're failing. Hmm. You're succeeding so slowly. It feels like you're failing, you're doing the right actions, but the results just aren't there yet. So it feels like you're failing. It's just like when you start working out for the first time in a long time, like it's painful. It sucks. It's not fun. You look in the mirror and you're like, I'm sorry, I, I'm not getting rid of my washer and dryer there. My wife's not doing laundry on my washboard abs. Right. And we want that instant gratification. Right. We're so conditioned to it being quick, quick, quick. Right. Bingo. So it's, it's, it's really just mentally preparing yourself to understand that, uh, the, the greatest results, extraordinary results. They come over time, not instantly. Yeah. I love that you say that because you know I talked about this a lot. People have said he's fantasy goals, whether these fantasy targets but they're not really clear about what are those actual activities required to achieve that target. And this, this is so the four one one, I mean we built an entire membership community around this where every month we do calls and help people dissect their foreign ones. And the mistake that we often see is they might be clear on their goals, the results they want. But tell me the last time you got out of a meeting and you thought to yourself, what result am I achieving right now? Say Never. We ask, what should I be doing right now? Actions are the language of our thoughts, not results. Yet we write our goals in the form of results. And when you actually have to say, okay, well what do I specifically have to do to achieve that? We quickly hit that wall of, I don't know, right? That's your opportunity to push and search and just keep asking, well, what's the one thing I could do that would make that easier? And necessary, well, what's the one thing I could do that would make that easier or unnecessary? Right? And you break it all the way down. Yeah. I love that. And I know you talk about me listening to the episode that you guys did on right around Christmas Day, right? Like how people make this news, newer solutions like 50% of Americans, right? It's crazy. And then what happens at the end of February? Gone right? Gone. That's it is making this huge shift. So I've got a question of you because of all this stuff, right? Cause we have all the, all this things to, to maneuver. How do you practically focus on your one thing in the midst of the whirlwind, all people trying to pull for your attention. Trying to push it. Like I almost look at as long, almost like you're trying to aim for target, right? And somebody comes in from the side and knocks you and I'm like, whoa. Yeah. Well it starts by thinking big and going small. Hmm. For you who's listening to this? Do you think it's a realistic expectation that if I told you half of your days, we would advise and encourage you to have blocked and protected for your most important work? Do you think it's a realistic expectation that immediately you set the bar for success, that you have four hours time blocked and protected every single day? Zero distractions, zero interruptions? Do you think that's realistic? No. Yes. That's what we, that's what we can aim for and I can tell you over three years of living this, my days look very much like that and that's not where I started. It started by asking the question, can I time block and protect a 10 minute window every day? Can I for 10 minutes not checking email? Can I for 10 minutes, not even allow text messages or phone calls to come to my phone, so I'm even aware of them. Can I for 10 minutes if somebody knocks on the door or asks, do you got a minute? I could say, I'm actually in the middle of something. Can you come back in 10 minutes? I could say, yes, maybe you can mate. And if you can't say yes to 10 can you do five? Like how do we make it that lead domino that you can do? Because when you do it every day for roughly 66 days, it becomes a habit. And do you think you just stop at 10 minutes? No, no, no. All of a sudden it's 30 minutes. It's an hour, it's two hours, it's four hours. It's the path to getting everything that you want is to get one thing at a time. The cool thing about this domino effect is that when you line up your dominoes and you just knocked down to lead one, it starts out like, like I was really long train. It starts out too slow to even notice it's moving until it's moving so fast. Did it just cannot be stopped. Yeah. So out of everything that you are hearing in this episode, Ask yourself the question, what's the one thing I can do? Yeah, it's such that by it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary. Hmm. Let me give you a final question. I know you gotta go. Interesting. So in what area do you half ass things. Okay. Eh, yeah, I'll tell you where I had been half assing things in where I am now being intentional. Okay. I was half harassing my role as a husband and as a parent. Hmm. I we um, every year do a, a, a couple of schools setting retreat. You came to it right? And we do this exercise where we asked the question, what are the roles you play in your life? You know, so I wrote down husband, father, son, brother, cousin, nephew, business owner, value creator, uh, employee podcast hosts. Like I wrote down all these roles that I played and then we, um, we rank them in order of priority. Hmm. What is the single role that matters most, that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. And ultimately I ranked, um, husband, father, value creator and then I kept ranking them. But we made you draw a line, meaning kind of like Gary did to me that until your number one priority is done, everything else is a distraction. What's the line that no ifs, no ands, no buts. You must show up as these is this version. I drew it after three. So it was husband, father value creator. That was two years ago that I identified that. And over that next period of time, um, every week when I sat down to do my four one one with my partner Jay, cause this is a model for having conversations with the people in your world. Um, Jay from time to time would challenge me and say, are you really showing up as a value creator? Are you really showing up as a husband first as a father? Second is a value creator. Third, you know, are you being the type of person who helps other people get what they want first? And I wasn't, hmm. I mentioned earlier the, the, the idea of I was showing up as a business man who had a family rather than a family man and with a business. And that'll change this year. I got really intentional about it to the point that I know and I track with my coach, my date nights, my family for one on ones with my wife, uh, coming into the house. And actually not just allowing myself to sometimes when you feel bored with, I got little kids and sometimes it's not highly stimulating, but to get on their level and to really put myself in their shoes and to play like a kid again, like we're setting the cations that are intentional about being present with the family, not just about good food and good cities. Right. Which is really interesting you say that cause like I think so many people that are listening to this right now and they'd probably thinking like, you know, I am, I know I know this stuff. Right. I know this is so important and they're still not doing it. But what, what would make the, like, like you said, you, you have these identities for yourself already two years ago. What was the shift that made you actually realize the urgency or relevancy of it? Uh, I'd say it was, it was my wife's in my relationship. We just asked the question. We looked at where we were and we said, great, if we keep going in this direction, what does that look like over the next five years or 10 years? And we didn't like the answer, we didn't like where it was going. And so you got two choices. You can close your eyes and cross your fingers and hope that things better or you can actually put a plan in place and work the plan. And so we started working on it and get just just one thing at a time over time led to a lot. Yeah. And I want to be clear, we're still on our path of mastery there. Like we're still going down that path and we're being intentional. Got It. And that's the key thing. You stopped and you made that evaluation. Mm hmm. Yeah. Okay. Geoff, where can people learn more about you and the One Thing community? Absolutely. So you can go to the one thing.com that's with the number one in the URL for the website. The book is the one thing all spelled out, the o n e thing. Uh, the podcast is the one thing podcast. And if you go to the one thing.com, I would suggest clicking on the training page. You'll see, we've got some great courses there that are the basic principles of the book in 15 minutes or less for free. And if you want to go deeper, we've got foundational trainings and events and corporate training and all that stuff. So it's, it's, there's good stuff there. Cool. It's a great book, great community. Uh, check it out. You'll love it. Awesome. Geoff, thanks so much for sharing this time with us and I really appreciate it and I think that people are going to be able to get it, has some really great insights and take some time, re-listen to this stuff again, and uh, I'll talk to you next time. Thanks Satori.        

Y'all know how we do. Anytime I'm doing a presentation at a conference or other public event I try to obtain the audio from it so that I can share it with you guys. As my listeners might recall, in our last episode we caught up with president of the Mentionables Apologist Network, Joel Furches, who talked about the Mentionable Conference we had coming up in Greensboro, NC. Well last week I had the privilege of presenting at the first annual Mentionables Conference on the topic "The Historical Impact of the Church". I had a blast kickin' it with all that were presenting and/or in attendance and am thankful I can share my contribution to the event with our Tru-ID Podcast listener family!  P.S. Be on the lookout at my Youtube channel as we will be updating it with excerpts from the Mentionables Conference (i.e. Q & A) a lots of videos coming soon! Key Topics: The contribution of the church to philosophy, science, humanitarianism, and law.