 As I started looking at this talk, I started realizing the tagline came across a little bit more negative than I was hoping for. I've learned some very interesting lessons in the past five years now. Some lessons that I've brought over with me from another career, from other places. Some lessons that I've learned, thankfully, to other friends, members of other companies. And a lot of lessons I've learned thanks to the people working with me, which has been absolutely amazing for me. So the idea of the myths of self-employment, I do want to deal with some things that we tend to think about ourselves and things that I thought about going into this. But more or less, this is more about a talk about what I've learned, things that I've put together, and then even better, lessons my friends have learned. Right before Scott Rubicon, if we had an all-day meeting on Thursday, thanks to Corey Haynes, we started what was called the Cluster 7, which in the beginning should have been called Places Corey has visited. He had gone to a bunch of companies during his journey mentor and found a lot of companies that had very similar ideals. Companies that had very similar ways of engaging with each other. And he decided these people need to be in the same room. And thankfully, got us all together in Chicago one time. We'll never forget the date because it was during the Ash Cloud that prevented CJ from coming over and prevented Chris and Enrique from going back over. Apparently, Iceland didn't like Europe very much that year. So we got together and realized we had a lot more in common than we all had realized. We were fighting a lot of the same struggles. Some people were at different places in their career path. Different places in their journey, different places in their adolescence, in their adulthood as a company. But what we all realized is we had the same values, and it was phenomenal. A lot of us had been friends with other people in the same way. I'd known Dave Hoover since our days together before we became Thought Quidders, and I'd seen him in the apprenticeship tour, and I'd watched Optiva Grow. I knew about Mike, I didn't know him very well. Mike and Paul from Athe Flight, but had a lot of respect for him kind of externally. I'd been incredibly close friends with Justin and Stuart from Relevance. But it was great that we all got together. And so I'd had a lot of things I wanted to get across in this talk, a lot of things that I had learned. But it really was kind of interesting because it was a little bit selfish, because it was all me, right, what I'm pushing out to you. And so Thursday at the Whiskey Society, where all great conversations occur, we're sitting around a table and I decided to ask them some poignant questions. And the feedback I got was phenomenal and overwhelming. And so I've now got enough material for like eight hours worth of talking. So I'll try my best to keep it to 40 minutes that I have left. But I've pulled this around and around. So if it's just just joined, forgive me, but feel free to walk with me through this. And then hopefully have time for questions, because that would be where it comes in the most. Anybody here thought about starting a company? Okay, what are some of the reasons you think about starting one? Anybody? This is not a rhetorical question, seriously. No more boss. Money? All right. Control your own destiny. Control your own destiny. That's excellent. Not getting into a position of where you're trading a unit of time for unit of wealth. That's fantastic. And in five years I have yet to learn that, but I run a consultancy. So what's that? To be able to do interesting things. To be able to do interesting things, indeed. So these are a lot of the reasons for starting a company. Mine were pretty simple. I was an extrovert. I wanted to stop traveling. I couldn't be independent. I was standing at RailsConf 2006. I've been working for a company that I absolutely loved. And still to this day, I've had a lot of love for it in its original form. And I traveled from Columbus up to Detroit, which if anybody's been in the States, don't go to Detroit. So I've been traveling there every week so that we could cram ourselves into a conference room and do amazing things with software. And then I got on a plane from Detroit and flew to Chicago, where the energy level for Ruby and Rails was just incredibly palpable. And I had convinced my company to run a drinks event for kind of what we thought of as VAPs, people in the community that we wanted to reach out to. And I'd been selling Ruby internally very, very hard because I really, I really finally realized that you had this amazing ability with technology. This thing with process that had been taking those two together, not technology, but people in process, putting them together and cranking out amazing software. And all of a sudden somebody comes along with a language that was the perfect fit of the triangle. And so I spent a lot of time on my company trying to convince them we need to do this. Put on the first ever, with my friend and mentor, Neil Ford, we put on the first ever introduction to Ruby inside the company, which we coined the ADD guide to Ruby, and two projectors, two monitors, there was something going on at all times. If we'd had a juggling clown, I think we would have covered all bases of distraction. But we had been pushing very hard, I'd been pushing very hard. And I'm standing there in this conference realizing that I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be there desperately, but I didn't want to be there. I was completely and totally torn. What I wanted to do is turn travel on its head and go look, there's times when it makes sense, but we have to accept the fact that we have families. I have three of the most beautiful children sitting back at home, and I was going to get on a plane and go back to Detroit to have to work another week before getting to see them. Why not experience something exciting? And I looked up on a wall and somebody had taken those sticky notes that you have, the really large ones in conference rooms. They had taken one and put it up on the wall and said, need a contract or $80 and all that with a Sharpie. Within hours, you had this wall, I'll never forget the scene. You had 12 of those pieces of paper up and you had writing all over the place. Need good people, would love some help. And I'm having conversations with people going, look, I know about Ruby a lot. I have not used it in production very well. But I think there's some amazing things here and they're asking me about things. And I started realizing there's an incredible opportunity here. It's for me, once in a lifetime, right? And one which I could have a lifestyle that I wanted to have. But then I turned around and thought, hmm, I could buy a Mac because the text mate license is $3,045. So I could get a Mac, I could go home, and I could start programming. And this would be phenomenal. And I went, oh, God, no. Anybody who's met me knows that I like to talk just a little bit. I need people around me, that's where I get my energy from. The reason I loved software was I discovered Agile when I first came into software, I came into software very late. But I was promoted from intern to project manager within six months, because there's no one that can talk to people. Scarred, Scarred Schetlis when I did. And I discovered Agile and XP, because my mentor had said to me, he looks at me and he says, Joe, you can screw up and know tomorrow. You can screw up and know next week. You don't screw up and know in six months. And it was phenomenal. But it was about people. It was about bringing the power of people back to technology. And I loved that. So I reached out to a friend who had been doing Ruby and Rails for quite some time. He was a basement programmer and reached out to a friend and he laughs and he says, it's funny that you're reaching out to me because there's another guy here in the community that is as well. And I think all three of us should get together. And so we started talking. And we started talking about this idea of a co-op. So Ken Barker and myself and this guy, Jason Long, we get together and we start talking about what's going on in the ecosystem, what skills we have. Jason is a phenomenal designer. He's one of the very few breeds who I absolutely hate, like Bruce Williams, who goes and becomes an amazing programmer and then goes, I think I'll try this design thing. And then they rip out gorgeous stuff. I looked at and thought, I'll try this design thing. And oh my god, I wanted to throw up when it was done. But he's an amazing designer. And my business partner, Ken, I met him and we worked together in the community. And I realized he's got this amazing ability with people and he really had his personal hack together, which I didn't. And if you're going to start a company, obviously somebody needs to help with finances and things like that. And he really had done an amazing job with limited resources himself personally. And so I thought this is a great team to put together. And so we started this co-op. And so we get together. The very last minute, Jason decides he's got his own thing and he wants to say, understood, fine. So we get a couple more people in. And we were up to four very quickly. And suddenly we realized with four people we couldn't decide where to buy toilet paper. This idea of a communist business model didn't exist for a reason, apparently. Having a four-headed monster as a company didn't go well with the clients we were working with. We couldn't decide what to do with decisions because we were all at very different places. We had one person in particular who was one of the most amazing developers to this day, is one of the most amazing developers I've ever met, who was a business partner of ours. And we'd have to sit him down and explain the pros and cons of either side. And then he looked at it and kind of went, iny, meenie, miny, okay, go. And so we kept going through and we decided, let's take this seriously. We have an opportunity here. Very quickly we grow. And when we first started, we looked at 37 signals and we were going to be like that. We're never going to be more than eight people because any more than eight people weighs you down. We passed that in six months without realizing it. We actually stood back one day and went, holy crap, we just hired number nine. What happened? But we had work coming in. We had people that were happy. We were working and refining things. And so we go along. And it was at that point we decided, let's be business owners. Let's take control of this and actually understand this role and go into it. And since then we've built something absolutely amazing. We almost had $2 million last year, which I was extremely proud of. Even more bit of pride was we opened an office here in Edinburgh, Scotland with my business partner Paul Wilson over here. Because what we had done over there was really interesting over here for the conversations I was having. Not in an off-shoring trying to make money on something else, but in a wanting to excite people. And I kind of found my niche. And that's what one of the things we do. But the interesting thing was the myth that I come to it with, which was I wanted freedom. I wanted to be able to control the things I do. What I didn't realize is you get freedom and control. But you get it in a very different way. And you add a lot more things that control you. I was talking to another friend of mine, Venkat Supermanium. He put out a practice of an agile developer. And I was telling him about getting ready to start my own thing. He goes, oh, fantastic. Working for yourself is great. You get to work half days. And you get to decide, is it 12 AM to 12 PM or 12 PM to 12 AM? And I laughed at him. About six months later I looked at him. I said, damn you. I had to ask myself at one point, what do I value? What is it I'm trying to do was not a good answer? What is my business plan? Didn't mean anything. I was riding a wave. But what was the one common thing I could have in control, which is what is my value? What is it the things that I consider important? And I decided at that moment I had two questions that I wanted to ask myself. And I still do to this day. Number one, have I built a company I always wanted to work for? I had a lot of problems with the places I was. I had a lot of issues with things that had happened. But when it came down to it, I was still a developer. I was still a developer that loved the idea of creating something from nothing. And so was I creating the company I always wanted to work for? And number two, do I feel like a slave owner? I have a very unique skill set that lets me run a company. My business partner, Kent, has a very unique skill set that lets him run the other side of the company and let us work together. But you know what? Everybody has very unique skill sets that all come together. From Matt Yohu, who runs our apprenticeship practice to Jim, who's taught me more about speaking and people that I could ever hope to understand, to people who understand technical things in just such amazing ways, to somebody who was with us before that I still up to this day, Chad Humphries, that showed me that any argument can be solved by staying up all night and coding it just to prove that he could do it. I joke. He's just an insanely amazing technical mind. But I realize that we can work together to create something, or this could shift at some point, and I could become the man. I could become this thing that, there. So I had to figure out, what is it that I value? And what is it that I know? What is it that we know collectively? I know sales. I had been there. I had done it. I hated it, and I left. But I had to ask why. The interesting thing was, the why was simply a product issue. It was simply an issue of what I was believing in the having behind me. Sales in a company you believe in is the most easy thing you've ever done in your life. Because you're excited to engage with people. You're excited to tell them about something. I met a dinner last night with people we're talking about engaging with. And you realize it's not a sales dinner. It's the start of a partnership, you hope. It's this idea that I know what we do. And all I'm trying to do is tell you about it. It's phenomenal. It's amazing because people need to spend money to do things correctly. And you want them to do that correctly with you. At some point, you also have to realize who's in control. So anybody that's learned to drive a car remembers the time, I'm sure, where you started off doing it. And you said, OK, fine. You put it in drive. You let your foot off the brake. And oh my god, it's moving. It's going away from you. You push the gas pedal and it keeps going. And you spend about the first six months or so letting the car drive you and hoping you don't steer it into a wall. And then all of a sudden, something flips at one time in your game control. And all of a sudden, you're the one driving the car. So you always want to keep conscious of the fact that the business will run you. But you need to realize when that happens. And you need to realize how to take control and how to put things in place that do it. So there's a lot of other advice I wanted to give. But I sat down with the cluster of seven. And then since then, I've asked a couple other friends of mine, business owners, in fact, up until this morning, an hour before my talk, I was doing this. And gathering quotes that were just amazing. So not a whole lot of attribution. Some comments, partially because some I want to keep secret from the context, partially because I want to screw up what they're trying to say. The beauty of quotes is you can interpret it the way you want, and I've got the microphone. Don't send that email, get them on the phone. I was told this the other day. We're telling a story about something going on. I'm too afraid to engage with this client in a certain way. And I feel like I'm not providing them value. And I want to send them this message. And I've got a lot to tell them. And I've got this email. And as soon as a friend of mine looks over and says, stop whatever you do, do not send that email. Get them on the phone. It's funny. It's a lesson I know, but I keep forgetting. When you start a business, actually, let me back up. The first time I ever was a manager. It was a very small bakery counter inside this grocery store. And I just simply worked up through the ranks of this place. And I remember this one time, this lady's yelling at me. And she'd overheard me talking to somebody else about having grown up in Germany. And I've never encountered somebody who took that as a negative thing. And unfortunately, she had some things in her life that had led this to her, that led her to this place, some things in her family that led her to this place. And Germany for me is home. It's as close to home as I'm going to get as an army brat. I have no roots, which is phenomenal because you get to have them everywhere. And you get to make fun of anybody. But she turned to me and started using some racial slurs that were just unbelievable that would come out of somebody's mouth. As a white guy, I don't get that very often, right? We have an advantage of not being in that situation. But I wanted to deal with her. And the first thought in my head is, you know what? I need to get my manager. And I turn around and I realize, that's me, right? That's the line of defense. And I opened my mouth and came out without arguing, tried to defuse the situation as best as I could, went to another place that I really couldn't even figure out what I was saying, and it worked well. And I started to realize that people want to be heard. The things that people come out of their mouths are not always what they're trying to verbalize. I've got severe ADD and I've fought this all my life, but I thought it was just my brain that's broken. Apparently, everybody has this issue in times. You have thought patterns. The more I've learned about the brain recently, the more I realize you have thought patterns. You have trouble verbalizing. Getting them through the mouth and coming out vocally doesn't always work. And so you need the ability to have conversations. There's also something I've discovered throughout time, which is this idea of three realities. Everybody has three realities in a situation. There's the one in your head. There's the one in another person's head. And then there's one in the real world. And the only way you're going to find these out is to talk about it with each other. And email is one of those things that only allows one point of view to come across. Instead of having something come out, and the person go, I'm hearing you say this, and you go, oh my god, I didn't think about it that way, but you're right. No, that's not what I was trying to say. People are hard. People are not easy to figure out. But everybody wants to be talked to. And any problem that you come up against, the sooner you get somebody with you and talk to them, the problem fades away no matter how badly it is. There always comes a resolution. Everything always comes to an end. Sending an email and taking the cowardly way out never works correctly. You can't save money by making money. And ironically, Ken and Paul are not in this room, and I think they would actually shudder if they saw me put up this slide. I'm a slightly spendy person. I haven't quite reached the Randall Thomas division of that, but I'm trying to get there. I balance myself out with two business partners that are really, really good with money. But something I did realize very early on is saving every nickel and dime is not going to get you where you need to go. I realize this goes against everything culturally, where I am in the country, but just bear with me here. I'm constantly amazed at the lunches that I've taken people out to, and that I feel slightly guilty about that turn around and turn into something later on. And I'm not taking them out with the idea of I'm going to get a sale out of this. Simply taking them out because I'm enjoying the conversation. Jim and I were engaged in a conversation with a guy at a conference in Vegas. It was phenomenal. And I was just like, you know what? I am starving. Can we go have some lunch? I'd love to take you to lunch. Really? Yeah. And this guy's out in this remote academia thing stuff that he's doing. And so I'm like, there's never any business justification with this, but you know what? We're at a conference. Let's just do this. It'll be OK. Then we're in Vegas in the Bill Cops, and I go, because, well, everything's just 10 times more in Vegas. And interestingly enough, a year later, we end up in a training class, and we're sitting there. We'd been brought in as private training classes. I've never heard of this place. It was genome research. It's kind of interesting. It was out and way out from San Francisco. And I'm sitting there, and I look up, and the dude walks right in. And I'm like, oh my god. He's like, yeah, somebody said something about training, and I remember a conversation we had. Really? That was so cool. I take people to lunch at a conference at least once if I can, maybe more. Not because I want to be showing off and doing things, but because I want to share a time with people. I want to share a time and an experience with people. But things like that cost money. We didn't hire a salesperson for the longest time because things like that cost money. We didn't do certain things because things like that cost money. There are times when you spend the money and you take the risk. We hired somebody. We had no idea how we were going to work them. We had no savings account built up. But we trusted that they would be such a valuable ad, we just did it. And trusted our gut instinct. And sure enough, it paid off in droves. It helped the company. It changed the company completely. And conversely so, stop spending money. You're always going to get conflicting advice. Your job is going to be how to filter it out. I said earlier, stay with what you know. I decided very early on, what I know is software development. What I've learned very well is software development. So I stick with that. I use that as my metaphor for running a company. What is that metaphor? You can't prevent things from occurring. But you can set up feedback mechanisms that let you understand when it happens. And you tighten those feedback mechanisms as closely to the problem as you can. We call it agile software development. If somebody put it so eloquently the other day, which I thought was amazing, you can walk outside. You can't prevent it from raining. But you can bring an umbrella. That's the essence of agile development. So I took that, and I applied it to a business. And so I set up feedback cycles. I set up these things. And so instead of trying to just, your brain hurts by trying to figure out what decision you're going to make, and which way to go. And you're getting advice that says, do this, don't do this. Do this, don't do this. Really, it's kind of like reading two dieting books. You're just like, oh my god. Carbs are going to kill me. Carbs are the answer. Protein's going to cause cancer. Eat nothing but protein. Oh my god. You start to realize that everything works differently for different people. But one of the other interesting discussions that came up the other day was stop spending money. There is a time where you can't just throw money at a problem. The first dot com bomb taught us that. There's only so many air on chairs you can buy before your company goes under. It's not going to actually cause you to evaluate. Or spend money on Super Bowl commercials for pets.com. You cannot overcommunicate internally, externally, your customers, your family. You can't overcommunicate. There's no such thing as this. I fight this all the time. You take on this grand responsibility. And if people knew the fluctuations that went on in business, they would be scaredless. Somebody said the other day, Dave Hoover put up a slide in his keynote that said, oh, come on. Come to me, come to me, please. About there's no such thing as job security. If people knew how close companies came, no matter how large they are, it would drive them crazy. And jobs as business owners sometimes is to help even out those ways, but also help act as a barrier, which is true. But there are times where communication is essential. Something I've learned in my personal life time and again is not communicating inside proves that people think in two different ways, in three realities. Those realities are drastically different. I'm making dinner, my wife's huffing and puffing at something. I'm thinking she's pissed off because I'm taking off again next week because I started a company that so I wouldn't have to travel. I've told that story in three different countries now. Turns out I just left my guitar out of its case and sitting on the couch. But instead, we huff and puff and go on and have a tense evening, which always works out well, right? The other day, we had an interesting cash situation develop. It's a very common thing for businesses to do. We've grown at a stellar rate. We hired twice as many people in the last six weeks as we hired last year. And the last year's replacements, the last year's hires were actually to make replacements. This is all new. Very unique opportunities coming. Some of our other customers finally firing on all cylinders. People finally realizing the recession just meant they weren't spending money, not that people didn't have it. People still needed projects done. And so we're working, and it's great. And we actually couldn't afford to hire two more people. It was a really weird situation. But we had to turn away business at one point. And things have worked themselves out. But I'm watching, and I'm going, our rates have increased exponentially, thanks to understanding where we sit in the market are the people that we have working for us are doing phenomenal. And we've got everybody billing. I was billing that week, scared everybody in the company. But we're going, and I look at the cash and realize, it's going like this. What's going on? Well, there was some serious market forces at play, some serious things about taking on much, much larger and more stable clients. But of course, the more stable it means, the longer they decide to wait to pay you. And so you look at cash and go, wow, it's not that nobody's missing an invoice. Even if things work out well, it's going to get really interesting. And so I sat down one night, and I sent out this very long email. And immediately got an email back that says, thank you so much for sending this. That helps so much. I was deathly afraid to send this email because I didn't want people thinking we're in a terrible shape as a company. Oh my god, you should be afraid. But there was a reality there. And I've learned this lesson time and again. And what happens? I forget it. So I keep this constantly playing in my head. You cannot overcommunicate. People want to understand where things are. Customers want to know when something's going to work wrong. I seriously almost thought about playing an anthrax song. But then I feel like most people would be lost on. Anthony would get it. We were talking about restructuring companies and how we're trying to work things around. And everybody, when they start to own a business, realizes, I just want to code. I just want to do this. I don't want to be the man. But what's interesting is being the man is like saying, I don't want to be a parent. How many here are parents? OK, out of those, how many desperately wanted to be a parent when their first kids came along? Yeah, just a couple. I sure as hell didn't. We bought a house in a neighborhood and I made the famous statement, I don't have to worry about schools. We don't have kids. We had a bathroom without a shower. It was just a tub. And it was a very deep one. And my wife looked at me and she was like, one of these days we're going to have kids. And for the whole pregnancy thing, that just ain't going to work. OK, we'll get there. Two months later, she's like, we're there. So scared out of my mind. I just was in the middle of changing careers. I decided I didn't want to do sales. I was bad at it. Actually, I was good at it in a lot of ways that I didn't want to be. But I hated going to work. So I was in the middle of career change and I didn't know what that was going to mean. I was actually going back to school and we found out we were going to have kids. It was the scariest thing I could have possibly done. And I remember going, good Christ, I'm not even an adult yet and I'm going to be responsible for telling somebody else how to become one. I started reading everything I could possibly find on parenting. Boy, there's a lot of information you can't unlearn. Magazines, books, the expectant father, the expectant mother. Again, a lot of things you can't unlearn. I'm sitting in a lunch room at the place I'm working. This guy walks up to me and he goes, what are you doing? And I explain to him and I'm like, I'm absolutely panicked. And he goes, it's an interesting thing about parenthood. When your kids are toddlers, you're a toddler. When your kids are adolescent, you're an adolescent as a parent. You're never going to know everything. You're going to grow with them. Wow, it's amazing. Let me tell you, being the man, it's not a bad thing. Being a dad, it's the most amazing feeling in the world. The lows are low at times. For surgery, my daughter went into, they were just putting her under for a scoping thing. It wasn't a big deal. I've never felt a darker place in my entire life as I did that day. Yeah, stop talking about it, getting emotional. But you know what? Watching her ride her bike the other day by yourself, the smile on their face when I get on Skype because they want to talk to me, there's no feeling, no drug in the world that can replace that. Watching somebody at a company who you saw in a job that was demoralizing to him, you sat and had drinks with him in a bar and realized, this guy's amazing. And he's so depressed. You have incredible friends with him. And all of a sudden, your client needs their first technical person. You're like, I know just the person. I think you need to take a chance on him. And you go to him and you say, I've got this opportunity for him. And he goes, I can't do that. Bullshit, you can't. You're incredibly smart. You just don't have the confidence behind you. I get to work one day after he's been working on this for a while, and I chase his ass out of the place because he's been there all night. Had to teach him the whole work-life balance, which I've not taught him very well. I watched him sit up and give a conference talk the other day as an edge case member. And I tell you what, it was a very emotional time. The tears, the just, my god. Here's somebody you've helped enable. Here's somebody that you've just put in the right place with the right people. You get an email the other day. And three people have come to a decision. They're like, look, we saw this missing. We stepped in. Can you say yes or no? Really? Had somebody pull me aside the other day and said, you know what? I have an idea how to change the company. And I think we'd all benefit, and we'd love it. He cared enough to go, we should move some things around. Not because he's miserable, but because, you know what? Some things could be better if we went this way. They cared just as much as you do. It's amazing. So think about this and realize it's probably different than you realize. This company had gone through a restructuring and splitting into teams and then realized that they brought it back together. It wasn't working well. And they asked themselves the hardest question. Why did we do this? Not what are the justifications we came up with for doing this? I could justify 10 or 15 reasons for buying the iPad because I'm a good sales guy. In reality, I wanted one. In the same vein, they looked at each other and he said, you know, we realized we were looking for a simpler time. We're reflecting on the time when we were 12 instead of 30. We didn't hate where we were. We were just arbitrarily trying to get back to a different time. Times change. That's OK. Understand where you are. Understand what's going on. Understand your true motivations for what you're doing. I said this word yesterday, this phrase. Yes, it's attributed to me. Go figure. Because if relevance felt like edge case would be really weird. Actually, it'd be kind of cool. When I first started, one of the reasons I started the company is because Stu and Justin were starting relevance. And they said no when I asked them for a job. They pretended it was because they weren't hiring, but I know the real reason. I didn't know enough about Scotch at the time. I spent a lot of my career building edge case chasing relevance. I spent a lot of my time as in my career being envious of Avtiva. There's a difference between envy and respect. But I realized that the last cluster meeting, not actually this one, but the one before that, and something I couldn't figure out how to articulate until this one, I looked at Justin and I said, I love the fact that I've always gone after you guys. But I finally walked into this meeting and I felt like edge case. We were us. We had an identity. When you grow up and you're an adolescent, you chase after your heroes. For me, it was guitar, it was long hair. Hairbands in the 80s. Guys that dressed like women and thought they were cool. I swear to God it was. Never forget Dee Snyder talking about it in an interview, a singer for Twisted Sister, going, imagine trying to explain to your eight-year-old that your daddy used to dress in drag and he was the cool man on the block. But I realized the irony of me liking hairbands, trust me. That's not lost to me. Anyway, you meet these people and you think, my God, they're so cool. You see these people and hopefully some other people don't just choose musicians as heroes, but they choose other people. And at some point in your life, you understand that people become fallible. A lot later in my life, I got to go out drinking with Skid Row. Massively freaking cool experience. No Sebastian Bach wasn't there at the time. He was off playing, I think, Jesus or Jekyll and Hyde on Broadway. But I went out with these guys to a bar and it was fun and we're hanging out. And all of a sudden, I watched and went, wait a minute. I got him in my hotel. I had actually chased after these guys because I found out they were touring for Kiss They're going to stay with me. Got him in my hotel, which was a crap property. We were out drinking. They were away from their family. They did this all this time and they're trying to milk a time that's no longer there. And you realize their life sucks. They had a really cool couple of years, but overall, is this a lifestyle you want? But you start to realize people are fallible. And I'm not saying that the people that I've respected and their life sucks, it's just their life is different. And as a kid, I grew up and I ended up with my own identity at some point. When you start a business, it ends up the very same way. There comes a time we have to start looking for your own identity. There's a lot to be gained from chasing after other people, but there's a lot to be gained from going, I am me. We are us. We know what we do right. That's not a statement that says they are wrong. We are right. It's a statement that says we know what we are doing. We know who we are. We are comfortable in our own skin. Competition is good. This has nothing to do with that. Copy and paste error. That was kind of funny. Respect is key. That pretty much sums it up with your clients, with the people that work for you. Respect is the ultimate thing that's there. Respect is not words that you use that say I respect what you're doing. Respect is saying I trust you in what you're doing and letting them do it. And at times watching them fail and fall because you know that that's the lesson they need to learn. Or you know because if you were in the same situation and had the same motivation, you know what, damn it, you'd do the same thing. You have the power of 2020 vision. You have the power of not being emotionally invested in that idea at the time. And you can give people instructions, but having respect enough to let them do these things. Having respect enough to go up and tell people what it is that could be corrected because you would want somebody to tell you if that needed to be corrected in you. You know your friends walking along and they've got the toilet paper hanging off of their shoe. You tell them, yeah you make fun of them first, but same thing happens in work and in life and having that respect for them. If you don't respect your clients, you're in a bad place. If the jokes start flying in your company about what your clients are and what you're doing, your jokes start flying about your customers. Take a step back and ask why that's happening. It can seem fun and camaraderie at the time, but it's a signal of a deeper issue. I've known this before, I've participated in those discussions, and in retrospect, if I had acted upon those discussions, we would be in much better shape. Understand what's happening there, understand what's going on with it. People are not resources, I wish Dave Hoover was here. I have this problem of saying resources a lot, and every time I do, he's like, you mean like oil, like gas, like resource planning. You trying to figure out how many computers to buy? But I'm okay with making that mistake because I don't feel that way. People are not replaceable cogs. We have a business model built upon team development. We have the ability to swap people in and out because everybody at the company can contribute and move projects forward in their own way, which is great. And I'm not telling my clients, if this guy moves off the project, you're screwed, but I'm gonna do it anyway and try to sell you on it. I'm not saying that at all. We have a certain base of things that we can all do. But in the end, don't forget that everybody contributes and has their own passions and motivations. Understand that your job is not just to give them a paycheck, salary only goes to a certain level. Happens with all of us, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Again, my sister would shudder if I actually mentioned that, but I mean the psychologist that she is, but there comes a time where salary and all that gets you what you need and gets you comfortable, and then you need something extra. I'm the same way. Yes, I'm a business owner. Okay, it wouldn't be bad to get three million bucks, right? But that's not what I'm doing. Building the job I always wanted to work for. Well, what's that? I want to do interesting things, somebody said earlier. I want to do interesting things. Nobody here would deny that idea. Well, you know what? Work doesn't always provide you with interesting things. So as a company, find outlets for it. Realize that a hack day is not for everybody in the company. Realize there are other things. We participated in Y-Day, which one Vandenberg put together, one of the most amazing ideas that came out of last year that I was excited about, but we got together and we took a day off as a company to celebrate the spirit of the innovation that Y brought to the industry, to our industry, our micro industry. And all of us got together and we were, okay, what are we going to hack on and this and that? And Jim, one of the most amazing developers out there, what does he do? He pulls out his ukulele and writes a song. That was cool. Unfortunately, he didn't bring the ukulele, which I keep harassing him about, but at some point you need to hear him play the ruby song. But understand what motivates people and try to play with that and help them understand that. But they're not resources. And in closing, no matter what happens, be brave, take those chances, but be realistic about what happens. There's a lot more to business than just doing it better than your boss did. As parents, we realize it's much different to say, I can do what my parents did and then you look around and you say a word and you go, crap, I can't believe I just said that. Because you hear your mother going through your voice and you're like, how did that happen? There's realities of sales, there's realities of marketing, there's realities of things you might not be good at. Be realistic about where your skill set lies. But don't be a chicken about it. Thank you very much. I'll be open for questions. Timer says, five minutes. Come on. Oh really? Anthony. White Snake. White Snake. Here I go again video, that's all I gotta say. I wanted that dude's drum set. And the other guy's girlfriend. Anyway, yeah. It was a very unfortunate event with one person that we had to let go. We realized on a maturity level, there was an issue that needed to be resolved. And it was the hardest decision, by far the hardest decision I've made today to date was to split ways with him because I was incredibly close friends with him. But he was too immature to understand where he was and he needed a wake up call and we tried to give it to him and it didn't work. So we had to let him go and we parted ways with him. In a sense, firing him. Still hard for me to think about this day, but the coolest thing is he's in another company right now after having been at three different places and he's thriving like nobody I've ever seen. The environment he's in is perfect for him. He's part owner in this company, he's doing amazing work. Great. The other person, a couple years later decided, you know what? You guys sit me down, you explain things and I go, Eenie meenie minie moe, we're like, yeah, we know. And he's like, I just don't wanna be a business owner, which we knew from the beginning, but we had no reason to let him go because he was doing amazing things, but he just wanted to be a developer, so he left. And at that point, Ken and I looked at each other and said, do you really want in? Yes, I do, I love what I'm doing. He says, do you realize I've never held a job more than three years and this is three years in one day, I said, I know me either. Every year we look at each other, we're like, we're still setting a record. But we made the decision we were gonna be business owners at that point. We were gonna take this thing seriously. If we could code, it would be great. If we wanted to do it, we're good, but we're not gonna depend on it. There's a great book out there called E-Meth Revisited. If you own a company, I can't believe I completely forgot this whole part of the talk. If you own a company, read this book because there's a difference between owning a business and owning a job. My job is to work myself out of a job every single day. I did it with a salesperson in the States. I'm going to continue doing it at each stage of the game. Because at any point in the time, I need to be able to take a month off, not just because it'd be really cool to go, hang out and live the life Anthony does in Hawaii or France or something, but because I don't want the company depending on me. I want this to be a longer lasting thing than me. So does that answer your question? Yeah. Awesome. You're full of something. Full of something. Some of us are designed to do small companies. Some of us are designed to take it farther, but there's this big stretch. I do that all the time. Here's my five year plan. I had a plan for one year for the end of this year. We hit it last month. It lasted a month. I have five year plans that I'll bring up with somebody at a conference from the company and they'll look at me and go, huh. I have a lot of ideas, but in reality, I want to create, I had to bring it down to a simple thing because every time I'd set a plan, the plan wouldn't make sense. The plan would be partially arbitrary. In the end, it came down to what is the value? And I thought, I want a company that lives past me. I want the 10 year company that can support other people. And I want to continue what I love doing, which is creating things. Whether that thing is software, whether that thing is jobs, I want to do that and I want to continue doing that. And I want to educate people on the passion of doing what we do. And so it had to come down to a simple version of that the same way I had to figure out what my checkpoints were in the business. And I'm trying to find health monitors and I'm trying to find the whole thing. And it simply came down to that idea of is that the company I always wanted to work for an MIS slave owner. It helps guide exactly how much I get paid. It helps guide exactly how much we take out of the company and it helps guide the day-to-day decisions about where to buy furniture and things like that. So it had to be a value statement. Some people come up with plans. I would love to figure out how that works because it doesn't for us. Life seems to move a little too fast. Come on. Um, no. Something happens and we decide maybe this wasn't a good idea at first. Our plan at first was don't be more than eight people. And we turn around and went, whoops. I'll challenge them. Maybe it is that the plan doesn't work. You're very right and that's a great point. So I'm not valuing the lessons I have learned from that process. Anybody else? That's a damn good question. How do you know you're not a slave owner is a question. No, no it has to do with me feeling like I own the people that work for me. The people that have chosen to be in the company is a very different statement than the people that have to work for me. If I were to sit them down and show them everything, which we are very open with finances, except the salaries, because we don't want those hard feelings that you can't unlearn. If I were to sit down and tell them everything, including salaries, would they be happy with the decision or not? Last year somebody saw me give a talk at the company one time. The guy had been working for us for a year and he looked at me and goes, I now understand what it is you do. I thought, wow, but I do a shitty job of explaining. Apparently my life looks a lot easier through Twitter than in reality. But it's a softer thing that I can't tell you exactly how, but it's a feeling. And it's putting myself in somebody else's shoes. I am out of time. I will be around drinking heavily for the rest of the event and would be happy to talk more. Thank you very much.