 Hey you guys, thank you for coming to the last presentation of the day. You win. You're the longest enduring attendees. Before we get rolling, I have a question for you. How many of you are currently solopreneurs or freelancers? Work for yourself, do what you want. Okay, great. How many of you have people that work for you or with you? You are considered perhaps their boss. How many of you are thinking about making the transition from being solo to being the boss lady or boss man? All right, cool. Well, we will try to give some nuggets and wisdom for those of you who are at each level of that process. As Leslie said, I'm a psychologist. I don't know how to code and my design is really lacking, but I come to this community a little bit as an outsider, but as someone who has deep investment and deep commitment in wanting to see technologists be healthy and well, I've been married to a serial tech entrepreneur for the last 18 years, so my living room for most of my adult life has been full of people like yourselves who are crafting the world via the internet, people who are coders, people who are designers, people who are business owners. So even though I'm an academic psychologist, I care deeply about helping folks like you be the best possible version of yourselves. And I'm so glad that you have decided to come to a conversation about hiring because the decision to hire is one of the most important decisions that you will make as a professional. And from where I sit as a psychologist, the decision to hire to run a team well can be the difference between supporting flourishing thriving individuals and having a flourishing thriving business, or causing pretty significant harm to your fellow humans and potentially undoing your business. The decision to hire well and run a team well, create a healthy team, can make a tremendous difference in the success of your business and the well-being of your fellow human beings. So thank you for being here, thank you for caring about this topic, because it is a very human topic and one which we don't want to mess up. Many people that I work one-on-one with, many people that I consult with, I work with folks who for a variety of reasons may not be doing well. They have been hurt, they're facing imposter syndrome, they are experiencing anxiety, they're in burnout, they're depressed, they have been hurt by other people. Having a good team can make all the difference in either protecting well-being or causing harm. So before you decide to make the transition from being a solo person to someone who is running a team, ask yourself a really important question. Are you sure? Are you sure you want to do this? Because it's a big deal. You want to think it through very carefully and I think many of us assume that if we have more business than we have time to do ourselves or we see the potential for growth, that adding more people and growing, growing, growing is the best course of action and I think we want to challenge that assumption. Don't just do this because it seems like the next logical thing to do. If you're going to add people to your team, be very clear about why you're doing it and how you're going to do it well. So there are some great reasons to hire, great reasons to bring folks into working with you. One is that you can of course offer more services to more people. You can do more cool things when you have more human power with which to do it. You can also add expertise to what you currently offer. How many of you are awesome at everything? Only ghost. I am not awesome at everything. So when you hire you have the chance to bring in other people who know a lot of things about things that maybe you're not so strong in. So you get to amplify what you're doing in your business because you're bringing in more talent and people who can do things better than you. You can also create great opportunities for other folks. One of the things that I love about hanging out with the WordPress community is that you are a community. There is a value to enhance and promote and support the development of other folks, of other professionals. So hiring, growing a team is a great way to support the development of other people. You can be a mentor, you can be a teacher, you can be someone who creates a great livelihood for people. It can also be really fun to hire to have a group of folks that you work with who are also invested in the things that are important to you. It can be a great sense of camaraderie and we're in this together in a way that can be really satisfying, can sort of enhance the experience of your day to day life. I recently have gone from a professor job where I worked and a large staff of faculty and other people that I bumped elbows with in the hallway all the time and talked about ideas with to now I work in, it's a very glamorous converted walk-in closet in the back of my house. It does have a window so it's okay. But I really miss the interaction with other people as human beings, we crave connection, we crave community and if you're not bumping up into people in your normal day to day job, if you're working remote or you're working from different kinds of places, bringing people in and inviting them into your work life can be an extremely satisfying kind of mental health intervention because you're not in it alone anymore. Also, if you've got a great team behind you and working with you, you can take a vacation and still make money in your business. When you are trading dollars for hours or when you are a solopreneur or somebody who is a freelancer, you know the demands. It's hard, you can't just sort of step away for two or three or four weeks unless you set your business up in a way that you can do that. It becomes difficult when you don't have other people who can respond to emails and support the work while you are you know on the sand drinking your little drink with the fancy umbrella in it. So there are lots of great reasons to hire but there's also some reasons to really really give it pause and think about whether it's the right thing for you. So for example, having other people involved in your business is a significant time investment. Your job shifts from being a coder, a developer, whatever it is now to being a manager, to being a leader. It's a different skill set. It takes a lot of time to make a good hire. It takes a lot of time to onboard well. It takes a lot of time to then support the involvement of this other person in your business. So you want to be very sure that it's an investment you have the space to make and are committed to making. It also takes a lot of cash. It can tie up the precious resources of your business and it's not always the best investment. Sometimes there are other things that you can do to increase revenue or grow your business without bringing people on. So you want to think really carefully about whether investing in a hire is the right financial choice for your business. It also makes you less agile. You have to be more mindful of the kind of projects that you take on, the kind of products that you're working on and it sort of forces you to have a longer term perspective, a longer runway because it's not only you anymore. You can't just up and decide I'm not going to take this kind of project anymore or I'm tired of working with enterprise clients. Once you make a commitment to the livelihood of someone else you have to sort of build your business in a way that supports the number of people that you are responsible for. And I know that hiring someone is different than being in a family with them and it's different than marrying them. It's not the deepest human commitment that you can make but many many of the founders that I talk with really feel the the emotional weight of the responsibility to their employees or to their team members because they believe that once they have taken you know someone is part of their team they have a commitment to that person and so I talk a lot with folks who say things like I've got 51 people who have mortgages that I'm responsible for and I think we have to be honest about the emotional burden of providing jobs for people. It's not all a bad thing of course but it is something that you have to be mindful of if you're going to hire well. And finally as much as it's great to work with other people once you introduce more people into your business you're adding more risks more liabilities there's more fingers in the code more mistakes or different kinds of mistakes rather that can be made and so you have to make sure that you have the time and space to support effective partnerships with other folks as well as quality assure as well as double check as well as talk through how we respond to emails and the tone that we have in our communication and what is or isn't appropriate on the company twitter handle. So more people means more minds and in many ways that's great but it also makes things much more complicated and introduces some unique risks into the conversation that again you just want to be super aware of and I think it's important to pause and say size doesn't always matter that bigger is not better when we're talking about businesses. I've seen teams of eight developers create amazing software and teams of 80 try to do the same kind of projects and not be able to deliver things sort of flop all over the place so it's not about more people it's a little bit of a vanity metric where people will say oh yeah I've got 12 people or we just made our 14th higher or our 85th higher that's not really telling the full story of whether you're profitable whether you and your teammates are functioning well and happy or whether you're making a good product so more people sometimes is sort of associated with hey look how powerful and successful I am and I'm not sure that's the best metric in fact it's not the best metric higher because you've decided to because you need to because it makes sense for you and your business not because you want sort of a crowd of minions to follow you around the universe who are sort of dependent on you so if you're going to do it do it well so cream and I would like to talk with you through some of the steps that we have found that are helpful in thinking about how to do it well and make it sustainable over the long term. We're going to go back and forth a bit so you don't have to clap till the end to save it up. That is the best intro I could have actually asked for to set the stage for what we can do so when we're talking about trying to move our business forward everybody talks about growth I want to grow I want to add somebody you have to understand the basic difference between growth and scale and what the advantages are if you're a freelancer looking to add depth you are going to need to bring somebody on but especially in professional services if all you're doing is adding people you're also just adding cost so to understand how to stair step moments of growth and then moments of scaling your business meaning scaling your revenue without necessarily scaling your growth is actually very important. At crowd favorite for instance we recently actually came down a little bit in a headcount and the revenue is actually starting to go up. How do you do that some of the things that we're going to talk about if I could please. So everybody thinks that there's a clear path from working with somebody part-time contracting maybe employing somebody and then maybe actually once you get to a certain size you start partnering with agencies. Our common friend Dan Mall runs an agency called Super Friendly where he actually works just with freelancers and contractors and they do giant projects. He's found a system where freelancers and contractors can work together and it works for them. It won't work for anybody everybody but it works for them. You can also decide to hire each one of these has its pluses and minuses. In hiring you can actually set up a long-term culture that you can't get with transitions in and out. In hiring you have the advantage of being able to follow people and keep them long-term through when they expand what they're doing in their professional career and those are both ways to grow. This third tier people think it's hard. How am I going to work with somebody else who charges I'll use a professional service example the same rate I do because if I hire somebody for a lesser rate then I can charge the higher rate and make that margin. I'm here to tell you guys one of the quickest ways to scale your revenue is to partner. What does that have to do with a freelancer? Partner with another freelancer. Don't necessarily just hire them at a lower rate. Find somebody who's really good at what they do. Work with them. The quality the client experience same thing goes for products same analogy will go up dramatically. There are many ways to do it and some of them have drawbacks and some of them have advantages and you can see that. So my question for Sherry is how do you prepare to take that first step of growth? Well I think Karim you want to start by preparing yourself and that's always going to be my answer because that's my deal I'm a psychologist so I help people be self-reflective and if you're going to do this well you want to make sure that you are aware of the fact that your business depends on you right. You have a successful business because of your ability to solve problems to think in novel ways to be creative to communicate to show your value that's all internal stuff and similarly the health of your team is going to depend on you. So what kinds of questions could you ask yourself to prepare yourself for hiring? I have some suggestions for you. I think first of all you want to be really honest about your state of mind. Is this your last ditch attempt to avoid burnout? Are you totally fried and you're just like well if I have someone else come in and I won't feel this bad? Are you feeling frustrated? Are you feeling irritated? You have a client that you dislike and you just don't want to deal with them anymore. What is your kind of internal state? What are the internal motivators that are driving you towards hiring? That's an important thing to think about. It's really not a good time to make important decisions when you are stressed or burnt out or overworked so you want to be kind of in a clear state of mind and relatively calm when you are thinking through this big decision about how you're going to expand your business by including other people. It's also a good time to be really clear about your why. Why is it that you are doing what you're doing? Are you trying to optimize for lifestyle? Are you trying to optimize for income? Is it that you want to have the the biggest impact on the community around you? What are you after and how does hiring fit or not fit into the bigger picture of why it is you've chosen to spend your time doing this particular thing to make your living? This is also a really good time to know your interpersonal strengths and weaknesses. Are you someone who is really attentive to detail and might have a little bit of a tendency to maybe micromanage or be a little bit anal retentive? There's a way to lead a team well if that's how you're built but you have to think through that. Or are you kind of laissez-faire like I just sort of trust people to do the things that they're going to do that's going to matter in terms of how you go about leading a team or interacting with people who work in your business. You also want to consider your values, your personal history. Do you have a history of like not getting along well with bosses? Do you have a history of being in conflict with team members? Do you have a history of sort of yeah having lots of arguments or contentious or miscommunications? Again none of these should say yes bring team members on or no don't bring team members on but at least know your liabilities. Have a good sense of where this might go badly and be able to proactively plan around it equip yourself. So you also want to think about the kind of team that you want to build. Do you want a team that's highly agile and flexible and responsive? Do you want a team that practices sort of specific boundaries within hours? And how does that fit into your work life? So for example I spend my days usually talking one-on-one with people or writing or recording. I do not spend most of my days in front of a computer where I'm quickly responsive to Slack or email. It's just not how my work life works. So if I'm going to run a team, if I'm going to have people work under me they need to know that I'm not like on I'm not available 24-7. It takes me 24 to 48 hours to respond to email and I sort of loathe Slack for other reasons that we won't talk about today. But I have to sort of have an awareness of that because I need to fit someone into my business that can deal with those parameters. I have to be honest about how I work when I work and how someone else can support that or be part of that. So I think that the decision to hire, if you're thinking about preparing yourself to run a team, it's a combination of inner work, self-reflection, and some external support. It's a great time to talk to a business coach or a therapist or do some reading, get some great books about teams that thrive. Make sure that you're equipping yourself both inside and outside to enter this new phase in your business. And don't, of course, underestimate the investment. How much time and energy you want to put into this to do it well to building a healthy team. Alright so let's talk about how should we prepare? What can we do? Well if you've kept most of that in mind you might be surprised to realize 23% of these businesses fail due to bad hiring. This is the most important thing that you're doing in trying to grow is that decision of who to bring on. So the personality, the best practices, excuse me, for hiring a team are the most important thing. I'm going to get into some of those details and when we get into those details we have to think about three things. There's a little bit of a triangle of those things and Sherry, can you tell us about the triangle? Yeah, you want to think about does the person that you want to work with have the skills that you need, right? Do they bring a certain expertise? Do they bring a secret sauce that your business is desperately in need of? You also want to assess their their personality. Are they going to fit well with you? Do they have the kind of way of being in the world that's going to be a good fit for your business? And of course you're also thinking about fit so we're talking about cultural fit fit within the business as a larger team. So when we talk about skills, one of the things you need to keep in mind is especially here in the WordPress community we think about well I need another engineer. Well think about not only those deep skills of engineering but communication, taking notes, business savvy, being able to talk to clients, all those things. When I decided I wanted to grow the business that is now crowd favorite, one of the first key people I brought on was somebody who I could communicate very well with. I shared a lot of the key core beliefs and values but we have a completely different skill set when it comes to actually running a business. And today I'm very proud because that person's become my partner in the business, that person's become the person who's actually running the day-to-day operations of the business and making strategic decisions which shouldn't be put through a filter of what's the best technology or what's the best marketing reason. It's what's best for the entity that's the business. So thinking about separate skills and how they overlap becomes very important when you're thinking about who you're going to hire. There are some personality traits that tend to do pretty well on teams. You want to hire for teachability, someone who is willing to learn, who's willing to jump in and has some history of self being self-taught. So you want to hire somebody who's got sort of an agile mind who's ready to jump in. Another thing you want to listen for in your conversations with folks that you may potentially work with, is their willingness to take responsibility, really for themselves. One thing that I always listen for really carefully in interviews is how people attribute blame to other people. They might say, oh yeah that job didn't work out because I had a really bad boss or this project failed because this other person couldn't deliver on time. And sometimes that's the case of course but if that's sort of their their personality style to be to externalize blame or to sort of look for how failures are someone else's fault, that tends to be a type of trait that doesn't like work super well on a team because you want everyone on the team to take responsibility for the own self and if you have someone who's constantly blaming other people that's a level of negativity that tends to be pretty toxic in teams. So you also want people who are flexible, who are willing to take in different roles and of course who are attentive to detail, who are going to do a good job and are paying attention to the quality of their work. So I'm not going to go through every single one of these, they will be available later but here's the concept. You need to start assessing candidates. And the first thing to think about especially if you're at the stage where you're a freelancer and you want to expand and grow the services is, is the person you're going to bring on going to just do the work of a specialty on X, Y or Z or are they going to be able to help you make decisions? Things like motivation, what are you going to be able to do with time management? People think oh there's lots of tools out there for doing time management but how good are they at understanding self-time management and being able to do those... These are all general concepts to looking at a candidate whether they're going to be local or distributed. These concepts here are the general things that if you have a few a few questions lined up or you have a conversation with somebody that you're potentially thinking about partnering or hiring or doing part-time work with give you an idea of where this is going to lead. When we talk about distributed... We're going to skip that one. Okay. Because we have five minutes left. I was going to go through it real fast. I promise. All right. You're the boss. All right. We talk about distributed. We're a good team. See? See how flexible I was right there? When you talk about remote there's other key factors and these are some of the key factors. There will be a way to get in touch with us and ask us more questions post-talk on these but the most important thing is the difference between communicating face-to-face and long distance. These points will help you navigate that. So when you are thinking about a team also you want to think not only about who you're bringing on but how you're going to keep them. How you're going to keep them happy. How you're going to stay happy in your business working alongside other people. And I think this really boils down to again some of that self-worth self-work I should say. And your assumption of the responsibility to model the kind of maturity, kindness, work ethic for your team that you want to see. So you have to be the kind of person that you want your team to cultivate. And that means that you got to do some work. So you are the leader and you are the one who is responsible to acknowledge the contribution that your team members make. One of this like primary drivers of things like burnout are working on teams where successes are never acknowledged where there's never a high five there's never a hey you did a great job on this. So if you want a healthy team you have to make sure that you are a leader who is saying hey here are the superpowers on my team and I'm going to call them out and acknowledge them and utilize them and celebrate them. You also want to make sure that you are communicating effectively that you're careful in your communication. Once again don't send emails when you're frustrated or overtired or working in the middle of the night. Make sure that you're thinking through the kind of tone that you're setting in each of the conversations that you have with your team members. You want to take responsibility for mistakes you want to model okay I messed this up here's how we fix it we are a team that is able to cope with failure because we can learn from it we don't feel ashamed we don't hang on to it forever all of the tone that you're setting really has to come from you. A couple of other things that I want to mention carefully or in addition to are the need for you to model respectful boundaries. You might be someone who does your email at 3 a.m. I sometimes send email at strange times because I do a lot of my work after I put my kids to bed and so I have to tell the people that work with me hey I might send you an email at midnight I don't expect you to respond at midnight. You set the hours that you have for your life and just because I'm online doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be I'm not expecting you to respond quickly. If you want to have healthy teammates you have to support the whole person. Support folks that work with you having a life outside of work. Support the folks that work with you in their own self-care practices. In your team talk about stress reduction check in and say how are we doing this project is huge and it's too soon are we are we sort of losing our marbles here are we doing okay what do we need to do to make sure that everyone is functioning at their best possible level. So you are the one who I'm getting two minutes from him and five minutes on the clock so I'm not sure exactly where we are. I trust this guy. Okay. So we want to make sure again that you're bringing your best to your team. You can't ask people to work or behave in ways that you're not willing to and perhaps you're willing to work all the time but you have to respect and support the well-being of the people who are on your team by listening to and respecting their boundaries and how they wish to work. This is especially true of course with distributed teams that are distributed internationally and time zones and time schedules become kind of irrelevant. There's always someone on in different times. So I'm going to give you a cheat sheet. This right here is the concept that you need to know for all the information that's in the next two slides which you're going to want to download from the URL at the end because this is sort of a roadmap for keeping a sustainable team. As Sherry's showed us today it really does start with the entrepreneur, the founder, the freelancer who wants to go to the next step. The next thing is to plan and prepare. After you plan and prepare it's definitely about setting up the right framework in that plan and preparing to then keep that open communication. Whether you're in the same space or you're working remote you want to make sure that you're always creating that communication because that's the only thing that's going to help you create the long-term trust and create that culture. So if I could. There's a Goldilocks approach to how you manage a team and I'll let you download these and take a look at them but if you fall between these two parameters on each one of these bullet points you find the right place between too much process and not enough process between having too too many tools or a tool that you spent too much time building and having one that doesn't actually meet the needs of the company. Be clear about the expectations of your team. Everybody says that but how many people actually circle back around and go all right when we finish the task. How clear was I on that? My team is constantly giving me feedback on how not clear I am so I know that one. To support your team for the team to support each other here are the 10 takeaways that we've put together a crowd favorite from being both a local and distributed team. It's some of the most important lessons we've learned most of them by failing miserably and then making adjustments and some of them by using the best practices of some of our colleagues here and in other technology and other communities. We want to leave you with one thought about your team culture. It really is like open source. It's up to the leader to author. It's up to the leader to forge that road to set the town and then the team has the right to edit and distribute it and they will make changes. They will make it their own. They will fork it. They will do what they need to do to make that information, that culture, that team pull together and if you're lucky you'll end up with a team and a set of people that really really like working with each other. If it's not working out that way the good news is that people are dynamic that shifts can be made that culture can be corrected that you can learn and grow how to lead and manage better and your work is really never done as a learner as someone who is continuing to support the well-being of other people who work for you or who are in community with you. That's all we have. We'll take your questions and now you can clap. Thank you both. So we have two microphones set up here in the center if you want to come to those microphones and ask your question. We also have mic runners if you're sort of down near the front or stuck in the middle of a row. I have a quick one if you guys don't mind because your topic strikes pretty close to home. I'm a business owner and I have employees. We're all distributed and I just went through a round of hiring and during that round of hiring I was like I know what I need skill-wise but I really like that person. I really love their personality and maybe we can train them somehow to do what we need. What do you think? Personality skills? It's a tough one. I think in some ways it depends on what you most value but purely from a business perspective I think hiring for skills and finding the personality who can work with you, who has those skills is probably a good way to go. I think we all can kind of get pulled into having our friends work for us or work with us and sometimes that works out and sometimes it really doesn't but bottom line is you are supporting the well-being of your business and you want to do what is probably best for your business certainly not at the exclusion of a terrible personality but you can't really pick one over the other but you really can't ignore either one. Thank you. Yeah that's a really excellent talk. Thank you very much for that. I was just wondering if you could give any recommendations around encouraging diversity and inclusivity while trying to make sure you get a good fit for candidates. That's me. I haven't seen you give a talk on it actually. I think you have to be in the networks that reflect the team that you want to build. So if you want a diverse team you have to put yourself in diverse spaces, you have to interact with diverse people so that your network, the people that you know reflect what you want your team to look like. So again it does kind of start with you. If you want a team that's diverse in its gender and its ethnic and racial background skills and experiences you have to find ways to bump up against those folks so that you are not only operating in an environment that's people that look and smell just like you. So it does start with what you do in your time and your personal life and making sure that you're putting yourself in diverse places. We put a lot of effort to try and reach out specifically in those spaces that aren't sort of the typical you know every single job posting board that is out there. Reaching out to user groups and to groups that are in education. Hello Anne. Fantastic talk and great to see really nice repartee as well. Nice back and forth. My question is about growth at a certain stage of scale. I think I took a lot of like insights here into those initial stages of going from a freelancer to someone who's like expanding maybe a relatively homogenous set of skills or like enhancing a core set of skills but there's a point in scale where you're really going to need to specialize a bit and you're going to need support people or you're definitely going to very soon be looking at project management or product ownership alongside development or design. Are there any sort of step changes in your hiring process that you can really identify with? Now I'm going to have to do something different because I'm building different components of a team or the team's now getting more of a specialized structure to it. So I like to take my example from two organizations that have the opposite jobs. The first one is believe it or not the United States Marine Corps and the second one are hospital emergency rooms. In both scenarios there are studies out there that show that the larger the team got the more the communication broke down and the less they were effective. I believe with the United States Marine Corps I could be wrong on this but I think the number was they had 16 people in the team and they brought it down to four. With hospital emergency rooms a lot of them had larger teams and there's a university study which I don't have the citing for but I can get it if somebody needs it and there's a couple of hospitals out there who decided to move it down and they found a magic number to make those teams work more cohesively together and it seems to be working for those hospitals and that's four. So there's a lot you can do with teams of four and then you aggregate teams of four and when you get to certain size of teams depending on whether it's a product or service or other things you do have to bring in more layers of management you do have to bring in more specialization so as your for instance we both have service companies as your service company grows you can have some people mix teams and mix specialties some people have specialty teams but we found the communication on people talk about pair programming but on communication to just get things done very quickly works well around a nod of four. One thing to add to that quickly too is that as a business owner as a leader it's so important for you to have great relationships with peers who are doing similar things because it can be really difficult to hire someone who has a skill set that you're not familiar with so if I was going to hire a developer I'd be like I don't know I don't know what that says so to have someone who can give you some guidance or to have other people who can do a second interview for you who are even external to your business but you can bring in to say hey can you sit with this person can you check their code can you talk to them about their their customer success strategies so I think using your network using your community and having other peers who have some of the same pain points can be a really important asset as you're thinking through as I scale how do I bring in people who have very different skills than me hello hello thank you for your interesting talk maybe my question is little out of scope I'm not sure so if it is just tell me and I'll sit down no problem so I would like to know your opinion about working or hiring or partnering with friends or family member with people who you have relationship in your life you know so do you think that it's always wrong or sometimes you can do it or when there's very few always or never I think that one of the strategies when you're considering working with people that you have a personal relationship with is to start with the worst case scenario so sit down with that person and talk through what happens if this falls apart what happens if we get divorced what happens if we don't like each other anymore you you want to have the worst case scenario game plan in place I also think that even in hiring relationships or business relationships where you're involving friends and family you want to go the full legal course and make the contracts and decide on who owns what not because you are not trusting of that person but because those kinds of parameters and preset agreements can save you a lot of sort of pain and suffering in hurt feelings and confusion and conflict later so if you're thinking about it start with the end start with the worst case scenario and work backwards and actually how that conversation goes is a pretty good indicator of how well you're going to do in navigating complicated business decisions I've had the same problem where I've come up to people who are in a partnership and it's time to get out and they say well we just have a simple one page that said we're going to be 50-50 partners when you're really excited or even a handshake when you're really excited about the new thing that's the time to talk about the worst case scenario like she said and that's the time to get an attorney or somebody who has experience in these things involved a third person to ask you the questions about what is going to happen how do we do that because in having that conversation like she said you'll be able to really see the personality of that person you'll be able to see that you can have tough conversations and it's a little bit of a test right there a little bit of a metric right that's for partnerships but for hiring them for me personally and I'm curious what your take is for me personally it's been very hard to hire somebody that was already a friend unless I wasn't going to manage them I was always able to pull it off if they didn't report to me but the minute I got involved myself for me it was just the wrong decision I'm a little bit of a softy like you know just talk to a little fix it it doesn't always work that way I mean power dynamics are a real thing in relationships so if you started out in a relationship like this where it was an egalitarian or the power differential or the it was sort of a equal power in the relationship appear but then it shifts and you suddenly have more power in a context than someone that you used to be equal with it gets really complicated and it's an easy scenario for there to be hurt feelings and misunderstandings and you have to decide if the business opportunity is worth that or not or you have to as Karim said figure out different ways of having that person supported and led it within your organization such that you aren't they aren't reporting to you thank you thank you and with that let's get another round of applause for Dr. Sherry Walling and Karim Maruki thank you thank you thanks guys