Takeaways
- Joining a company that is on the path of a revolution and making a meaningful contribution is valuable.
- Being part of a small company allows for personal growth and learning in various areas of the business.
- In a small company, your contributions matter and you have the opportunity to work with rock stars.
- Working in a large company can lead to specialization and silos, hindering innovation and effectiveness.
📖 Buy "Build" by Tony Fadell -
https://www.amazon.com/Build-Unorthodox-Guide-Making-Things/dp/0063046067/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2GEU170W71WGG&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Rs-FvZmSQsSu1X8DcQQ1ncFIlz7afDm_wNmFKKG-4ntqHeB4ALGPThHxvmZY3loQYTOMgcvu5gTY6KxgFgITlSUitY_qievRXBbHkg2a-x_eblYpwRKNe264L3x3OHRrq3cm88AvYnl5QHF-xtkoIY7dcRrRnQ7A7uNhnIYwRG7jnukmQuLKKehaxDhja0-6cUXLVEVgVPE1lf1ZMFkVTrQr6EJS6U-KKxVwxDEexPw.UsuRPNIJgNmexH3e_xuAfp_GZKxkxlKHikXxLFTX1P8&dib_tag=se&keywords=build+tony+fadell+book&qid=1722454453&sprefix=build+tony%2Caps%2C75&sr=8-1
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Chapter Markers:
00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - Book Discussion: 'Build' by Tony Fidel
02:02 - Building a Business of 30 to 100 People
02:57 - Working with Rock Stars
04:03 - Joining a Revolution
05:07 - The Value of Small Companies
06:58 - The Difference Between 2D and 3D Learning
09:04 - Participating in Different Areas of the Business
12:10 - The Limitations of Large Companies
14:04 - Conclusion
- Are you gonna be able to get through this episode? - No, I don't know, you're throwers. - Aww, this is unleashing leadership, I'm Travis Moss, CEO of C Planning Group, they're always here Dave Nerci, Chief Operating Officer C Planning Group and this podcast is all about how we implement takeaways from great books into our business and today we are talking about the book "Build" by Tony Fadal and our takeaway, a business of 30 to 100 people building something worth building and a chance to work with rock stars versus being a pebble bouncing off an elephant. - I'm pretty certain that is verbatim his words, I love this one, we're gonna have some fun with this one, I don't know Dave, you may get to rest your voice on this one, I'll let you go first. - Yeah, this is a good one, as always though like or subscribe, give us a thumbs up, show us some love so that other people can find the show. We do have a sponsor for the episode today, it is not Nest, Nest is not sponsored. - Coming soon. - Coming soon or iPhone, it's not your apple or whatever, no, just all kidding aside, it's a huge podcast, 2,000.3 podcast of the year for all categories like Bull podcast agency, where we focus on helping you get more out of your money and life, check it out, bitchasuits.com or wherever podcasts can be found, all right Dave, a business of 30 to 100 people building something worth actually building and a chance to work with rock stars because listen, if you're in small business like that and the thing is growing, the only way you can keep up with it is by consistently creating rock stars or bringing rock stars and we know this, we're in that, right at that threshold right now where it's like you have to get the rock stars. - Yeah. - So, and then that becomes a recruiting tool because then you're like, we got rock stars, you know, this is who you're going to come work with, we talked a little bit a couple episodes about what you do, where you work and who you work with and learn from matters, go join team of rock stars to become a rock star, right? - Yep. - If you want to learn how to be a winner, play on a team of winners, not a team of losers, but anyway, something worth building and a chance to work with rock stars versus being a pebble bouncing off of an elephant, which is just like the line of the entire season I think. - Maybe what a great transition from the last episode with the man who comes up with. - What were we talking about in the last one, the man who's making his own, he had the pebble. - Yeah. - He was the pebble bouncing off of me. - This was my journey, I went from pebble to aspiring rock star, right? - There you go. There you go. - Well, we're all aspiring rock stars, I mean, the greatest rock star is still an aspiring rock star. - Exactly. Yeah. Very conscious choice of words there because you're always aspiring to be a rock star. But yeah, I mean, when you're at a company with hundreds of thousands of people, or even a thousand people. - Or even a thousand, yeah. It's very easy to be a pebble and you're just going to bounce off. - Think about it. It's really hard to make a really meaningful contribution when you're buried in the sea of who's that, right? And so, if you have an opportunity to join a company, that is, what's the word? Start an evolution or a revolution, right? That is on the path of a revolution that is trying to make a difference for their customers or trying to change their lives, do something unique for them, really help solve a problem or deal with an issue. - If you have a chance to start, if you had a chance to be one of the first employees at Apple or Amazon or IBM back in the day, or Tesla, when Tesla started, or PayPal or pick a company, Microsoft, where would you be now? You'd be anywhere you want to be. That's the answer, anywhere you want to be. - Exactly. - Under 10 employees, companies, a lot of times, too small to really figure out. It's a little bit of a gamble and that's where you really get to believe in the mission and the leadership. By the time you get up to around 30 people, that's a legit company now, right? And that means there's most likely some pretty significant growth going on. So you buy into the leadership, you buy into the management, you get to be a part of that core team that does something amazing. - Yeah. - And that means your contributions, when you have 30 to under employees, your contribution still really matters. Nobody else will throw the work, too. Dave, you're in charge of this. We can't afford to hire five managers to do your job so you can golf. - Right. - Right. There's no figure head position. Every position's got to be performing. So it's going to matter. And that's going to take you, I mean, like resume building, connection building, wherever the other people that company goes, not to mention stock opportunities, all that other stuff. I see, and we've seen this with recruiting before, so many times people are worried about what the company's small and that other company's really big and prestigious. Yeah. And they don't give a shit who you are. - Yeah. You were the first one out there. - You were the first one out there. - Yeah. - You know what I mean? Like you don't matter at all. - Yeah. - Versus you join a team of 30 rock stars, you're going to matter because you're helping the rock star. They'll go you as, you are the reason why I can go home this weekend instead of pulling an all-nighter. - Yep. - They're going to care what you do and how you do it. - Yeah. I am having kind of like an aha moment in my head kind of combining some of the last episode of this. So I made the statement which I still stand by and believe in the last episode with management consulting. One of the like sayings there is every year in the consulting world is like five years in industry, right? And we explain that, the whole in industry thing. So listen to the last episode, if you missed it. - I see what you just did there. - Yeah. Yeah. But I still believe that statement, but now the aha moment in combining all this is you're going to get the same thing at this, you know, company of 30 people because things are moving so fast. You're like you said, hey, you know, Dave, you got to go do this. We don't have five people to do it. Figure it out. - I see what you're talking about now. So you're going to the experience you're getting, the skills you're developing, the like on the fly kind of like, you know, critical thinking and stuff. That's going to be five years or more of experience in one year. Now the difference, which is the moment here in the in this example and why you should look for the revolution company and the company of 30 as opposed to management consulting is because what you're learning is the 3D stuff where a lot of times of management consulting, it's the 2D stuff. And that to that answer, the other question you asked at the end of the last episode. What's the hard part of transitioning back to industry from consulting? It's going from 2D to 3D. - Yeah. Yeah. Cause you know, you can see the car, but now you're working on the car and that's very good. - Right. - You know, you know, the engines under hood, but the first time you got to pop it up and figure out, you know, even where the whale or the air filter is, it's hard. - Yeah. Like you could, you could stand around a nice fire, but can you make one? You're like, you're like, yeah, you are not going to make it fire. - That was the same. - Had to say it. Yeah. - Yeah. We'll come back. We'll have to get Jeff on for that one. He was the. - Yeah. So Jeff, our VP of financial planning as he's planning group at Dave, we're down for our Bflow event, which was a couple episodes ago. We talked about the Bflow event. So check it out. But they come down for the Bflow show and they're going to make the fire, the bomb fire after the thing. Dave, you could tell the, you could tell it was better than I do. - It was, like you said, a shit show. It was the consulting came back up. - I give you guys a stack of like little pieces of cardboard already. I give you a fire starter stick that like a season stick. - Yeah. - And a torch too. - And a twee. - Yeah. Everything. - A solo stove. Shout out to solo stove, right? You're doing it in a solo stove, which like can burn anything. You could have put like a rock in there and it would have caught on fire. - Yep. - And I show up and first of all, you guys are trying to like, you're trying to distract me. You say people opt at least. - We sat one of our other guys just like, Hey, take them off, Matthew. We're not ready. You know, in our defense, it was a, it was a long day of some fun activities. We were just like, let's just throw this down and hope it burns. - You put the stack of cardboard down flat. You put the fire stick on top and you lay it on long time. - No, no. - And you let it and it burn all, I get back there and you go, the fire stick doesn't work. - Yeah. The conclusion was it was a faulty fire stick. - Yeah. That wasn't the case at all. That wasn't the case at all. - That was great. - I'll spare you on that one, but it was a shit show. - Yeah. - The news is I showed up, we got the fire started very quickly. - Yep. And then we enjoyed it. - Yeah. You got to talk to the fire gods. You got to get used to that. - That's right. - But, you know, what, where I wanted to go with this episode, I was thinking was Tony talks about this in his book about how he wanted to know how marketing worked. He wanted to know how the engineering worked. He wanted to know how it all worked. And because of that, he would be able to create these better products. Because engineering, they just want to make cool shit. Marketing wants stuff that they can sell. Right? And so he had to learn how the business works, how's the money work, how's the legal stuff work, how's all that work. When you're at a small company, there is nobody else to just be on those teams and do that stuff for you and just have you sign something. You actually have to be involved with those, even if that's not your job. So you have an opportunity when there's 30 to 100 people to participate in those things. We have it even in our company with our specialized teams, where we have people from every single division working on teams that are focused on things way outside of their expertise. But they get this broad exposure so they get to learn and understand the business. The bigger the business gets, the more narrow the teams get. Right, from a standpoint of what they're working on and specializing in for most organizations, admin people only work on admin stuff versus us. We'll bring admin people into discussions with all different kinds of things. Because number one, we don't have enough people to say we only want tech people working on the tech team. Bring the admin people in. One of the things that teaches you is the value of other people's opinions who aren't tech oriented but can say I have a problem because I'm not tech oriented and this is really confusing. I mean, a better user experience with this, but the other thing that it does is it exposes them to it's okay if you learn how to type better or you learn how to use Excel better. Look at what this can do for you. And you get that with a small company, with a big company, you're probably not going to get a lot of those opportunities. Right. And I've been at two Fortune 500 companies. I mean, that's the reality in them. As you go to the sales meeting, that's it. Don't even ask questions. I saw somebody one time stand up and ask about how a certain type of insurance product worked. And I literally got chewed out by the investment people saying that's not your job. Your job is to build a relationship. You go to that meeting, you learn how to do that. The invest in stuff you leave to us will take care of that. And it's a big company. They can do that. They don't give a damn if you walk and they don't care if you know or not. That's that person's job, that person's territory. And there's a bunch of smart people over there working on that. So you need to go away. How backwards is that? Well, that's why these big companies die. I mean, big companies get fat and happy, you know? Everybody gets their territory. Nobody has to, you know, you lose nimbleness. You lose awareness. I mean, this creates opportunity for other companies though. When you have organizations that get so large that they start to become lots of many companies within it, that themselves are kind of have their own little fiefdoms, their own silos. You're real kind of, the entrepreneur type of spirit goes away, but also your innovation dies. For your ability to take innovation actually, I mean, look at Google. Google created a company that has all these extra, you know, long term things that they're trying to create. They've never created anything. All they do is burn money. Right. Well, why? The more dislocated you get from the real world and understand how everything else worked, you put all the engineers in a great, you'll come up with cool shit that nobody wants. Put all the salespeople in a great, you'll come up with cool pictures that doesn't, and none of this shit will work. You got to, you got to understand how it all works and you got to understand the business economics. Great. You come up with something really cool you think you can sell. You can build it, but you can't build it cost effectively so people can afford it. Right. So come on, we all got to get together. We got to understand how all these pieces work in order to be really effective. You get to learn that though, I think when the organization is small enough that you're invited to the table. (upbeat music) (record scratch)
