SHORTS 15 | Ben West, Creating Your Dream Company & Great Culture

Welcome to the Loco Shorts Podcast from Loco Think Tank. In this podcast series, Loco Business Developer Rory Shah will help unfold bite-sized business learnings through the crazy experiences the business owners face along their small business journey. Listen in and listen up because these short business stories may just have the secret ingredient to taking your business to its next level of success. Today on the Loco Shorts Podcast, we have Benjamin West here today. He is the owner and operator at Radial Development Group. And what they do is they help people who are overwhelmed and confused with technology in a lot of different ways, and they help them understand it and use it to their benefit. So Ben, thank you so much for being here. I'm excited to unpack your crazy business journey. So welcome and tell me more about yourself and about Radial Development Group. Yeah, thanks very soon. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, I thought I'd leave because I was pregnant. So yeah, how did you start Radial Group? Right. So back in 2014, I was doing a lot of freelance work. I'd been working in a consulting space for a while. I had a couple of people who I knew in the community. They were sort of in a similar space. And my co-founder, Marshall Smith and I, decided in early 2015 to do the thing that made most sense to us, was to start a new agency. And our goal at that time was to try to approach the freelancing market and try to provide an agency service catered to people who are hiring freelancers. We've learned a lot since then. It turns out that it doesn't work super well, but we have started a lot of really exciting things along the way about how to start an agency and what agencies are good for and do when they're feeling. So what were you doing before that to make you realize like, hey, let's go this route. Let's pursue owning a business in this area. Sure. So I've been a resident of Northern Colorado in my whole life. And so I've always kind of been thinking, what am I going to do in Northern Colorado? How can I create something that will mean something? Prior to that, I was freelancing a lot. I found that freelancing was a good way to lose my shirt, but now I've got a good way to make money. It was not like a good way to take vacation or to take care of myself. It was hustle, hustle, hustle all the time, which is great and fun until you have other responsibilities and commitments and trips. And then they start taking a back seat and sort of wonder what you're doing here life. And so the biggest emphasis for starting a company was to try to rebalance things a little bit more and try to create more of a kind of company I want to work for and kind of create the kind of work environment I was interested in rather than always like sort of being in the rough race and always wondering when it was going to end and when I was going to get a break. When I was going to make money. And I think radios have actually been really great in that regard because I do get a take a break and I do get to make money. And like with the pandemic, it's been really essential to be able to sometimes take a personal day here and there and say, you know, I'm just not going to be able to do just not handling this right now and be able to step back, something I could probably never have done as a freelancer because it would have affected my personal bottom line in a way that was, you know, you know, things like that. But just this week, even being able to say, you know, I just, not cutting it this week, being able to take time off and know that there are 15 other people who are going to make sure the business just keep sign going has been new. How did you make that transition in your first few years of business? Because tell us how long have you been in business with Radial? March 23rd will be our sixth anniversary. We're really excited. I think it's a really huge milestone for folks. All right. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. The way that we made that jump was was fraught with problems. We tried it early in 2015 and found that the people we had hired weren't actually able to take over our job functions as well as we hoped. Some of the way we made it work early was that my co-founder and I had enough shared vision early on that if I could make a meeting, he went to the meeting instead and came out of it with large of the same impression and put into it large of the same thing I would have taken. And that was really essential. So I needed to co-founded it. We really, really got what we're going to do. We'd probably talked about it six months before we started it. I really, really, really clear-cut idea of what this whole company is. And so that became sort of the underpinning for how we've gotten there now is really continuing to really focus on having a shared vision for everything that we're doing and knowing that everyone's on the same page means that I don't have to worry that if I take a couple of days off the company will lose the plot. And I think that that's way more rare than I would have thought when I started a company and it takes way more work than I would have thought. But that's what I would say is probably the key idea is making sure that your vision for the company is something that's shared with everybody who's there and that people are going to carry on doing the things that need to do, whether you're there or not. I love that. How do you find that person? There's not a lot of ways that I feel like I've gotten lucky, but this is actually probably the luckiest I've been. I randomly met my co-founder on a Skype call introduced by an awkward friend we had in common in Twinsville. And he moved from Alabama and we just started hanging out and we happened to be kind of headed in the same place and space and time. And we ended up together at the right time, both of us unemployed at the right time, who was very, very lucky. I do think being willing to be vulnerable about what you want and being willing to really talk to the people around you and build on a systemic relationship to the essential to finding that founder, I don't think you can speed it your way to the ideal founder. That's just not something that's going to work out. That's what it has to do with being interested in building communities and being able to build trust beyond just your business experience. We were practically in separate for the first couple of years. I had the good fortune that he was single at the time and I wasn't. And so he came over for dinner most nights of most weeks throughout the first 18 months of business. Oh nice. Continue to talk about where we were going and what we wanted for hours and hours and hours or even beyond like operations. And I don't know if we could have done what we've done that we hadn't had that. I think that's important too because I mean what you're saying there is like you were people first and you happened to have similar paths forward and passions and interests and skills of course, but like you had dinner together and you were able to be co-humans and then I think that's a great foundation. Well, I think it's one of the biggest mistakes I see business owners start off on the wrong foot with is people first is something we carry into this now it hasn't even lost that. We're still people first even now when it comes to how we're dealing with our other staff. This day we we listen to this really inspirational video. Some wore along the lines of talking about how people aren't in droids and if you treat them like androids they won't perform like androids and then you'll be disappointed when we've taken it very much the opposite direction. We have a thing out of this crisis, notice for people, the idea being that the quality of our work should be reflected in how accessible it is to staff but also in the impact that makes on people who use it and I think that to extent we can also say radials for people although that is a market as well because we're definitely focused on hiring people. We believe that each individual exists and has a particular quality that's unique to them that adds something to the business and it's really easy to crush that and it takes a lot of work to really preserve people's own identity and their individual capacity to contribute and it's actually been the thing that's grown our business more than their technical performance or skills or the fact that they show up on time and it's these other things absolutely that dynamic to each individual person brings business and being able to take that respectfully and incorporate it into what we do has been absolutely sent to the how successful. That's fantastic. I want to ask you some more questions on your culture but first will you kind of set this stage to tell our audience more about what you do, your products and services? Yeah, so I find that the thing that we do is about two cognitive leaps from what most of our customers need. There's a sense in which we are clever copywriters taking your ideas and putting them into a medium that allows those ideas to take form and shape and to grow and to make you money and to reach your customers. The nuts and bolts are we do software and firmware and all kinds of other creative technical work but our primary focus in business is to basically fill in the gaps between what you need now and what you know now to get from where you are having a technology product you've created with, we hope a great deal of our help, not just because a great deal of our help costs money and therefore is profitable for us but because we want to be a great deal of help to non-technical founders who say, hey I really want to create something I see this problem, I imagine a solution, I want to test that in the market, I read the air crease book about Lean Startup and I wanted to run a Lean organization but I don't really know how to run any part of a technology company, I can sell this product if it exists, I can tell you what it needs to be and our team helps to fill in the gaps in product development and project management in agile methodology and software development technology and all of these other things and so it's really easy to sort of lump us in with a lot of other technology consultancies or a freelancer and say well I want someone who can write software and sort of this monkeys on typewriter's model creating software that we really used to expecting from an agency that I think we try to avoid because we probably spend some small minority or kind of actively writing code, we spend most of our time ideating even as developers, even if our only task was to create software itself and the project management and the product management was done by somebody else, the amount of time we spend actually writing a software is a small fraction of our time, we spend almost all of our time in the software development space and this is true for software developers across the industry, the average software developer price spends more than 50% of their time making decisions and the other part of their time actually implementing the decisions because the reality is that in many respects when it comes to technology, when you're designing a business solution, it's really easy to say well this seems like it has a technical solution and I don't know how to solve this problem, so I'll just hand this problem to the tech guys and they will fix it where sometimes the problem is that actually the thing they want has like significant cognitive dissonance, they can't resolve like these two potentially two contradictory ideas and the technology won't solve it because it's not a solid problem. On the other hand, there are highly solid problems or technical problems to be solved and deciding how you're going to approach the problem, how you're going to solve it technically is the decision making process and so I think there's a tendency not to see software developers as decision makers and as an organization, we not only want like that decision making process to be something our customers understand but we don't want to just be making like the little tiny decisions allow us to grapple with the realities of the problem but we also want to be part of the discussion when it comes to designing something will be easy to implement technology, something that will be useful to people, something that will make sense when they use it so we work with like external UX UI, behavioral design people, make sure that that stuff works well or with project management people or limiting the scope of the decisions that need to be made, which helps make the decisions easier to make and make sort of flow of development go better. With that. With the whole process through. Yeah, so thank you for sharing that. I think that's kind of my perception of this world I know nothing about like you put this big hairy question in there and you get this nice, um, deliverable out but like the middle of that then like that's that's your service. How do you yourself and like how do you teach off like teen like how do you teach that like step-to-step decision making that seems I don't know. So on the one hand the step-to-step decision making if you get computer science degree or you go to one of these software boot camps or whatever that is honestly what they teach you when they're teaching you to write software. Most people could put the code in who wouldn't do anything but they could put the code in and learn the way that put the code in in the matter of hours. Learning learning the the actual things that you do is a very small time commitment. You can you can teach yourself to write some code if they say probably in a weekend. Making code that's useful requires understanding the complexities of the environment that you're in, what can be done, what's available to be done, the different structures, ways you can structure, the kinds of decisions the code will be made because you're not only making decisions in the real time of here's what the code will be like but you're making a whole bunch of hypothetical decisions. I think I think software developers are probably more prone to anxiety because we spend so much of our day imagining what could happen. Analyzing if this than that decision trees. Literally literally working out the potential decision trees trying to hurt how to limit the scope of the decisions that a that a user can make so that they can make make good decisions and to make decisions the software's capable. Do you find yourself like making that decision like when you're driving or like when you're like choosing something to eat for dinner? Do you like get overwhelmed? I don't know that that's true. There's definitely a lot of things strategies I've had to develop as a software developer where the decision fatigue and I the decision fatigue is something that plays leaders. You know you're starting a busy lot of decision fatigue. There's all kinds of things you have to do but I tell new developers because we hire mostly junior developers and trained them to be seniors but I tell them junior developers I say one of the things you're going to want to do is plan dinner before you go to work in the morning because by the time you leave work the biggest decision you're going to be able to make is whether you're even going to be willing to eat that because because by the end of the day you do not want to make another decision. I had some people who didn't take me seriously and then they started experimenting and said you know my evening goes a lot better when my partner decides what we're doing for dinner and I don't. It's just immediately better. I know for me personally if the option is to choose what to eat for dinner or not to eat dinner I'm going to choose more often than than not to eat because the energy it takes that point to make the decision about what the eat is more than it will like I'm going to be a losing proposition and so it's that decision making process. I don't know that I spend a lot of time anxiously separating over what I'm going to have for dinner or about what I'm going to wear although I do tend to wear a lot of the same things and that's probably an outcome of I don't want to make more decisions. But the fact the matter is that the decision-steak is a really big thing because you are deciding not only what's happening now but trying to figure out everyone else's decisions later and decide what you're going to do about it. So there's all this hypothetical decision making even beyond the do I want to structure this this way or structure this that way which is its whole own decision making process. That's a trip yeah it's so funny to think about that it's something I haven't necessarily thought up before but yeah decision-fetchie I hear that. So then I want to go back to kind of the growth of your business so it sounds like you were ready to to create your own thing to have your own schedule to be able to relax properly and have vacation time. So what was it like kind of scaling your business bringing on people training them? I think you personally have a passion with educating. So talk to me just about like how you grew your business and your culture to be what you envisioned it. Right so that's been complex. I know that the first couple of years both my co-founder and I were really working 45 and 50 hour weeks most of the time. That time that that time it was something we had to wiggle down but as we tried to bring people on to to work on things for the company we had to we had to make sure things got done. Now that was the thing we spent more often that we spent our weekend making sure that the work that didn't get done during the week that we did before the next week started. So that was one of the biggest things that we did but it was still probably less time than we were spending as freelancers working on these things between working on marketing things like selling ourselves and completing work and selling you know, educating with clients and running else. I think it actually was a reduction in how much time it was. So there was that part of it was just, I don't know if you have to just put the time in. As far as like building the team, with a service business like this we're never going to see like a big profit hockey stick. It's very sort of stair step, almost ratching our way to the top. When it comes to this kind of business we make more money when we grow people but we can't hire people until we make more money and so there's this sort of, it's not really catch 22. You make it a little bit of profit each time and you reinvest it. This is a common investment strategy but we probably the first best thing that we did was we hired our now director engineering Rebecca Vetter early in 2016 and Rebecca was way more organized and on top of things and largely more disciplined than I was certainly and added that additional element but was also a very capable software developer when we hired her and we were able to give her a lot of responsibility and able to just scale back and so I think those initial hires are super important being able to work with people early on who were just going to make you more successful. And the next thing that I know that we did that really really mattered was much more recent. For a long time when we hired I would meet with me as a candidate and we're like wow this person is so qualified. They're going to think we're full of it. They're not going to call us out for our BS and they're going to say this operation is the total disaster and so we didn't hire them and tinging our mindset about how we want people to call us on our BS and tell us how we could have done this whole thing better and to have them tell us the ideas. Say this doesn't have to be disaster we can fix it has been has been a tremendous improvement and not only the people we've hired but in the business um we we not only take that um as an opportunity and sort of the off-handed sort of when people bring things up talking about it um but one of the other problems with scaling your business is you become management and when you become management you immediately start developing a really critical knowledge problem. You know what we actually know everything is going on and you can micromanage everybody which I can't recommend to you at all to find out or you have to find other ways of solving a knowledge probably how about how well is the business actually running running? Are our customers happy? Are we delivering for them? What are what is they're seeing? Will we deliver what's actually happening? What are the decisions that people are making look like? And so having scheduled one-on-ones is really important. We've done that more recently as we've promoted Rebecca to director engineering in the organization um it's something she's really passionate about staying connected that way but we've had starting early early early on we've had weekly retrospective meetings um involving as much of our staff as we can designed to encourage engagement and to ensure that if problems exist that we're we're um servicing them. We're we're also used that that conversation is really great for building trust trust becomes a really important part of sort of the two-way street of making your business run because a lot less checking and verifying and things you have to do when you can trust your staff and they perform better consistently when when they trust you and so building that trust has been good and then particularly during the pandemic um retrospective has been really essential to morale. The idea that we have this time where we probably spend the good third of the time celebrating our wins during any any perspective period and I think part of that is the fact that we tend to solve the problems so most of what we have to talk about is the wins um but we do spend a fair bit of our time talking about what of our wins look like and so I think that that that concept process of celebrating what we're doing together is a great way of really reinforcing the power of our team and I think that that really drives the success for business and so I would say those things have been really essential to um growing the company um and then finally as a tech business you know we're hiring from a talent pool that is absolutely too small um is that regional or that's like that's just kind of understood industry. The US the US Department of Labor Statistics suggests that we have about half as many tech workers now that we need and that in 10 years we'll need 10 times as many. Wow and so trying trying to work with that kind of a problem space is really difficult. We see a lot of tech businesses who are who are trying to hire from the top of the pool um in terms of technical aptitude and technical capacity um and one of the biggest things we've done that's allowed us to grow is that we hire primarily people who are entry level into the field frankly most of our customers are startups they're solving the first problems of their thing of their startup they're not actually operating at scale um you know some of our biggest customers maybe have 40 or 50,000 users which is a lot we're excited about those customers or we're not talking about millions of users for most of our customers and by the time you get millions of users you're going to want a much larger staff working with us and so the result is that a lot of the work that we do from one start of next next is really very similar in terms of how much technical capacity it takes and it's not very much and so being able to hire entry level people and give them experience in the industry and to kind of let them cut their teeth teeth it's good but it also allows us to actually approach that enormous hiring problem and say oh yeah well um we try to we try to restrain our hiring pool for a company of 16 to 100 people or less when we do a hiring round um and that we potentially have that many interested applicants um is a huge deal considering the number of tech startups who say well we just can't we just can't find good people but we're finding with people um who we could hire and who would come work for us who have master's degree as in PhDs um who would who would love would love to be on our team um so it sounds like you're getting decent talent some top talent and it's like with your culture in place it sounds like you're creating a place where they're they're professionally nurtured and I imagine they'd want to stay for a long time um yeah one of one of the biggest challenges was hiring from the top of that pool is that the top of the hiring pool for technologists is burnout or cynical they're tired of feeling used by companies and spend um and so they really don't want to invest in people who are less experienced than them they want to go go to work either job and go home and honestly as a person who's burnout and cynical um I share a lot of that idea um but as he said I am really passionate about teaching and I think that's the thing that saves me from that in this case but by starting with with more junior talent we create this culture that everyone is expected to teach um because everyone has been taught and so as people become more experienced we don't have any of that intrinsic reticence to oh well I don't want to share with you because nobody ever helped me um we instead we have instead we have the opposite of um because I came to this company and they helped me get started I want to help everyone else get started yeah yeah it's something that I think a part of someone has talked to you term university culture and the idea that that the the employment experiences at growth experience where we help each other to grow um they're really important like idea or radial and it's something that we've really baked into our culture um in an intentional way and how many people do you have now on your stuff um so our our entire employment is 16 one of those people um is a copyrighter we're actually spending out a new business designed to help you business tell us the story uh this year um so that's one of them uh one of them is a a former veteran startup CTO guy who actually does sales for us um which is really fun because it means that our customers first contact a someone who's been around the block and so yeah I've seen some startups I've both had a few um I kind of know what's what what makes sense um which I think is great we do a lot of work he does a lot of work he has nothing to do with sales um and in fact titles the the director of product success the idea being that the his goal is not just to pitch our you know potential clients say how can we help your startup succeed and if the answer is oh you need technology services or project management services or product management services you know we have team people to do that um so those those two people aside we've got four people who are effectively doing development of radio um I spend most with him editing so I only I'm really only doing development when I'm teaching um at this point so and what is that like now being in like the management position versus where you've come from like being being in the trenches during the work how are you able to strategize on the business and I guess even like what are your next big milestones sure um I can say that it's hard that rather be coding uh it's definitely the things where you can be the change you want to see in the world but you may not get to live to see the change you wanted to create um in some ways I've created a company I want to work for but I don't actually get to really work that company in the same way I can't really be in it in it um and so that's a challenge as far as like the big milestones um trying to figure out how to diversify what we're doing um or how to approach our market better is one of our big goals for this year um trying to self-software services led to a lot of really bad relationships with clients who are less clear so we're trying to re-structure to focus on how we can bring expertise and if what you need is an advisor who can execute on things that we're a great partner if you just need someone to whom you can bring your fully formed idea and have us sort of printed out like a 3D printer um that one that's not going to work particularly well um and two there are other people who are going to be happy to tell you they can do that and you should definitely work with them and call us you know when you need technical help an expertise in solving your business problem um and trying to figure out how to do market so that's that's really our goal for this year is to have a do a better job of cracking that nut we have spent the last six years working really hard on that and it's hard problem most of our peers in this space say they've largely given up on trying to solve that problem and are very much basing all of their sales on relationships and the idea that we want to base this on someone who's looking for the right things and seeing how to connect them is something that I don't know that anybody is really doing in our space but we want to be able to figure that out if um and so that's kind of our goal for this year um I'm I started on a book project that hopefully hopefully I'll finish before the end of next year as a new writing a book as I'm writing a book about how to be successful whether you're a fry cooker or 4500 CEO and trying to figure out how to um cut out the survivorship bias or the the um the attribution bias that comes with being successful um in writing the book and say here are some things that are not things I got lucky doing where I could draw a clear lie between I did this and I got this result and so trying to write a book about that and a lot of the book is focused on knowing yourself and knowing your strengths and leaning into them which I feel like is an underestimated challenge I think that it's easy for us to tell ourselves uh story about ourselves that are nice but not necessarily true um and it's really easy for us to ignore truth about ourselves that are nice but not necessarily obvious and so the book is uh fundamentally about journaling your way to success but uh I sort of sort of planned a barrier to lead a little bit and say here are some things from writing activities you could do and oh by the way if you make a long term practice with these journaling congratulations um because firstly I struggle with habits so I don't have a a journaling habit but I do have a bunch of things that oh I'm stuck what do I do next and oh here they're writing activity I really do or here's a thought process I'm going to structure my thinking into that will make me able to find the answer to the question yeah do you have other tools that you use or maybe even you you've framed out in your book that you'd recommend to other business owners and obviously they're going through a lot of different things as a business owner and different stages of growth but any quick tools or tips come to mind in addition to journaling oh yeah one of well I've really almost all of my tools come down to journaling um I would say I would say there's a really simple one because again all of my journaling ideas are not about this habit tool this is what I did today but very much about I need a structure to put my thoughts into order and so one of the key things I recommend to somebody um is that they write down their priorities um and basically think what everything that they're committed to right now and put it put it down and then rank them ranking them become super important what is your most important priority right now of all the things committed to what's your most important thing and then to start at the bottom of that ranking when I was you have to rewrite it so you can do that and to start walking away from those commitments I've committed doing this thing I'm going to call this person and say I've committed doing this but I actually really need to step away I need someone else to do this until they have a list of five or fewer and to realize that even a favor list of five probably a number four and five aren't realistic commitments for them they're probably not going to keep those it's really difficult to have more than about these significant minutes and then if you if you pretend that you have more you're going to disappoint yourself as much as you're going to disappoint the people you've committed to and I think like that reality check has been really really important to me say who is that I've promised myself to that I'm actually going to just fail and some people can beat that some people can do better than five but that takes a really powerful personality like incredible level of discipline to be able to figure out how you're going to beat all those commitments and so that's like what I would say as a founder because you're going to make so many commitments as a founder people I know I have to manage those commitments is absolutely essential to meeting the ones that matter because if you don't track which ones matter you'll meet the ones that are easy you'll meet the ones that are like like in your face you'll you'll basically live in a in a world of the fire line on all the time and never actually really choosing what you do but just putting out the closest fire and I think that that's really dangerous because it doesn't give you the space to look up and say well five years from now we'd like to be invested in real estate so that any of our business gains can be rolled into a vehicle that will grow exponentially whether our business does or not that we can leverage into business success in the down years like that's the thing you that's the thing you can think about if you actually like prioritize thinking about things but if if you're you're so busy trying to put up the next fire kind of like solve the next problem there's no way to even evaluate is my marketing work there's no way to evaluate is my staff actually happy am I on the verge of losing everyone quitting in the fire storm it will destroy my business if you're just trying to put out you know play whack them all with your problems because running a business is quite a bit different from going to check you choose I would definitely say so I I love that I think it's really practical and I think people get overwhelmed with the day-to-day and it's like oh there's so much going on right now but it's like well I love what you said it it's what matters like well I yeah those emails or like getting that report out or like sending that social media posts like yeah but that's like not getting you to that like next key thing so I think that's really helpful um so you're saying like getting it all on paper looking at it reprioritizing and then like what would you say like kind of month to month or week to week do you like revisit those those values or how do you stay true to them well like like I said I'm really terrible with habit and so I don't say I don't say months and months a year you're anything I say when you're panicked about how many things you're committed to and how am I going to get it all done at that moment in time and not a moment later stop right there and do it um because because it's sort of like it's sort of like when you're driving on black ice if you if you have a moment you realize oh hey I'm on black ice the first and most important thing for you to do is to ensure you're in control of your vehicle and do your best to bring you to full complete stops you can like evaluate what you want to do for the next thing so you can like be clear headed about it um and I think that that's true when you make a lot of commitments you find yourself suddenly on black ice all of your priorities are suddenly slipping you're not sure where you're going to get traction um it's important to stop and say where is it I'm trying to get to and am I going to be able to get there safely and do I need to maybe take some precautions make sure I get get where I where I'm trying to go and so I think that um I think to build what I call a priority budget and basically budgeting down the things that are extraneous expenses the expenses of um for your commitment is really essential to actually meeting the commitments you care about um this is I think how so many businesses think like families is because they never evaluate what they're doing they say well of course I love my family I see them for part of the weekend and um but they never access to down evaluate how important are they and what other commitments am I willing to actually uh walk back spend time with my family to do the same thing um and it's something we see a lot of I think in up to the media is we'll talk about business business people onto your stealing your um yeah it's like at that hustle you know if you're not hustling and grinding you're not doing it right you're not working hard enough it's like well you don't have to be 10 out of 10 so um then my my next question for you would be uh just to kind of get under the hood a little bit of what you've been through like what would you say is the most challenging situation you've been through as a business owner and how did you come through it yeah um 2016 was was the hardest we ever had hit as a business um just it was it was the perfect storm of things that could go wrong um our sales process was working and our business wasn't working early that year uh so it was hard to sell because we weren't really sure if we sold something that we'd be able to actually execute it and so we walked back from a lot of sales we probably could have made because we said well we're not really sure if we're going to purchase from um because nothing we're doing right now is working so maybe nothing is working and it might have been a good time for us just to call the quick decisions failed um in many respects in 2016 again um so that that contributed to um both a lot of burnout financial challenges to just not making sales um and so in the fall I think September October 2016 we had to lay off people we'd hired that year um which sucked and I don't ever want to do that again I think if we ever approached that again um we have enough sense of how the business is working that we will probably we'll probably just close if we ever actually get that it was just too hard um that's not something it's not a road we want to go down again and so after that um if that wasn't enough my co-founders house up fire oh um on on election night of all times um in 2016 and so um and so we were we were you know um it was a day we we finally made our first like our first big sale in four or five months that same night um you got a phone call from the fire department away back from the sale um we um yeah it was it was a disaster and so coming into 2017 we were in no position to be anywhere near running a business that supported other people's livelihood um it was just it was just completely out of the question um and so I had a staff member who um had been suggesting for several months that I was struggling and um that perhaps I had a two-dialist that was getting longer and never getting anything done on and so um I made a respects um so I promoted her I gave her basically total control of the company getting in 2017. I said I'm not doing a good job um there's never been a better time than now than to experiment with what happens with someone else front of this company um and that that was super good in the sense that there's no question that sales she made saved the company um and there's no question that some of the changes she made were essential this is success we see now in terms of managing benefits prior to that we had unlimited vacation um starting in um starting in 2017 I think we cut that down to six weeks which actually increased the amount of vacation people took which was actually good and it also meant that on the balance sheet we knew how much um vacation liability we have which can't really essential to managing that down in a way that can be all to say oh hey guys maybe we shouldn't all take our vacation the same week during July maybe we should actually like we just spend this trip here um and so that's um that's something where um like that change was really essential and um we didn't do that long-term I felt like I really recovered by it middle of the year uh ultimately the company that we were running wasn't really the company um that the first time I put in charcoal under run and they also didn't want to go back being a developer on the team because the promoter developed it other than six months um and so when she quit um mid-year um uh she uh she went on to do other things and she's now running their operations we thought right super successful um it's a really amazing app ambitious go get her a person um I don't know how to say what I really want to say here um but that that process is so essential to my recovery um from the burnout I was personally experiencing um it was essential to my co-founders recovery from the fact that he couldn't live in his house six months um due to renovations and reasons um and it was so essential to recognizing some key weaknesses in organization that I had not addressed in the first half of um well really two two and a half two um at that point and um um and so like uh in late 2017 in some ways we started a whole new company of radio um and it's been on much better footing since um much much much better we've been much more careful by managing finances and we've been much more careful by managing culture we've been much more careful about so many things to make it successful and so I think one of the things I would say is it's really important to be able to hand off your business to people you trust um to run it because sometimes you're just not up to it and being able to do the potential but also picking the right people and knowing what they're gonna do when you do that is good um managing your burnout down before it becomes a big enough problem that you just have to hand off brands and not really look back um the way that we did um it's probably not the best choice uh in terms of um running the business the way you want to see it run um but it was the thing that saved us that you um and so honestly even even though there are lots of caveats that that type of thing um the fact is always it's better to hand off your business and I able to run it to someone who's invested in the success then um to hang on to the reins even though you're not really driving it first yeah that takes a lot um I can't imagine what you and your partner were going through and I'm sure that impacted the team as well in a lot of different ways so I think it was pretty substantial and um obviously business changing that someone else was able to step in when y'all are going through a lot and then to learn so many countless lessons from that moment in time that of you know you've applied to your business now I think going through that stuff is critical and also like what we're doing here is like sharing that it's you people make mistakes no doubt all the time and to learn from each other and be stronger with that it's it's important to share them so thank you for doing that Ben is there anything that you'd like to leave our audience with any last words of advice or encouragement or crazy stories um I mean I probably don't have any end of crazy stories we're kind of a crazy organization and we really celebrate the crazy a little bit um but I think I think the biggest thing that I would share with people is that um I spent a lot of time in last six years learning about what we have and what we have extra of and what we can afford to share um I've also been really really cognizant of the fact that um that my that my experience of of generationalism is that I was deprived of a lot of the opportunities for mentorship but I think are really essential to important success um as something that I'm trying to change as I look forward um and become one of the older people in society um yeah I mean I'm in my mid but um the fact the fact the fact of the fact is the appropriate older people but the fact the matter is that lots of people are coming up um and I've got 15 years of a head start on them at least um on the business um I'm running and things I can I can tell them and teach them and then I'm happy to do that if they want to know um what's going on in the world and what I've seen and what I've been through um and so um I have like my calendar is super open and so um getting in touch with these three straight forward um you can actually reach out to them and link them and say hey I heard you on this podcast um and I have questions and it's really super easy to get on my schedule um that's not to say that necessarily it will be soon but it's easy um to get on my schedule um and just said about hey I have these questions or I have these ideas um and I would love to be able to give any of my open time slots to people who I can answer questions for and talk more about stuff um the other thing that we do is an organization is if you're starting out in development or if you're a freelancer or if you're like I'm tired of working on my own and when I get stuck being totally by myself um reaching out to me um from that role this is the usual um we have a whole program we've run called the radial guest program which used to be like on-site in person when any of the things that we did were those things um but we do have the ability to add you to our slack say hey if you have questions you can out here and get answers to the things and so those are two things that we have um in surplus that we can give first um we're really excited to be able to do that and definitely if there are people who say I'm not sure what you do but I have this need our director of product success success is happy to help you get connected if you just are not finding your business resources that you need whether they're I don't know how to mark the saying or any product people or I need to do behavioral research or whatever um if you're starting a business in technology and want some help and connections we'd love to be a uh sort of a nexus for that to be able to connect you with people who will help you make your business successful if we can so like those are some areas in which we would like to be able to contribute without really asking anything return except that when someone asks who did this favor for you that you will say oh yeah well it was very helpful okay with this device you know that's awesome Ben thank you so much and thank you for being generous with your time sharing your stories and also your resources as well sounds like you've got a lot um at radio development group that you can to help the community with and you've got some time the team to help others um before you go will you just let people know how and where to find you if they'd like to get connected yeah um um we're we're easy we're on we're radial dev group on twitter um you can email me at at radialdevgroup.com and uh or you can go to our website radialdev.com and show a contact form we'd love to hear from you um hear what you're doing what you're working on um that would be involved thank you for listening to today's episode of the local experience podcast this is Kurt bear founder of the local think tank and host of the local experience and i'm here with Rory Sharr local business developer and host of the local shorts episodes we hope you heard some new ideas and business perspectives in this episode our mission and all that we do including this podcast is to share collaborative business ideas and solutions that uplift the business community subscribe and follow us where you listen to podcasts to get new episodes as they are released curious about local you can learn more about us at localthinktank.com where you'll find more information about our chapters business resources and events for business owners and key leaders if you're looking for perspective accountability and encouragement along your business journey why not apply for a chapter near you today why not why not why not we'll catch you next time on the in-depth local experience podcast with me Kurt and with me Rory for bite size business lessons in the local shorts bye