Hey Reader,
Happy Saturday!
I’m going to change things up this week, starting with giving a little behind-the-scenes look at how I’m approaching strategy in my business.
There are three pillars to what I do in my company of one:
- I coach talented, mission-driven founders to help them reach their potential as leaders, scale their companies, and make more impact (and money)
- I make Good Work, a podcast of long-form interviews with talented people using their careers to make the world a better place
- I write this newsletter about reaching your potential as a leader and making impact at scale
Coaching
Coaching is the key to everything. It’s what produces all of my revenue and pays the bills for our family (alongside my wife’s career as a marketing and communications leader).
I have a max client load of 15 founders. I coach on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a max of four clients per day. Founders pay me $3,000 a month. This is an excellent business model when you do the math and time calculations. It gives me the freedom to work on long-term projects with the rest of my time.
I have a nearly full client load with room for ideal clients when they come my way. Speaking and word of mouth are primary drivers of new clients. The podcast and newsletter are secondary drivers / leading indicators of new client demand.
Strategically, I speak at 4-6 events per year, proactively ask for referrals from existing and prior clients, and am working to make a world-class podcast + newsletter to drive long-term opportunity. This is humming, and I feel great about it.
Good Work: The Podcast
I’m now in my second month of making the podcast. Here are the early results:
- 8 episodes published / 15 episodes recorded
- 26,500 audio downloads / 8,500 YouTube views
- 3,300 average audio downloads per episode / 7,400 max / 1,400 min
Typically I’d measure podcast downloads over the first 90 days as the cutoff. We’re still well within that window, having only launched the show 38 days ago. I’d guess that I’m sitting at about 5,000 downloads per episode in the first 90 days.
For comparison, my first podcast I made back in 2012 had just over 5,000 downloads in all 37 episodes. I’m bullish on the momentum and know that this thing is as small as it’s ever going to be. The first month has gone as well as I could have reasonably hoped for.
Strategically, I’m focused on making every episode the very best episode it can be given the constraints of recording remotely and fitting within a two hour recording block. I’m learning how much time it takes to do sufficient research, how many recordings I can realistically do in a week at my quality bar, and what types of guests are most interesting and fun for me (and you).
Starting in July I’ll shift into growth mode on top of continuing with the recording flywheel. Part of that effort will be recording more episodes in person (I did the first in-person episode yesterday with my friend Nathan Barry, ConvertKit’s CEO).
The Newsletter
Writing the newsletter became a net negative energy source for me some time in the past couple of months (especially compared to the podcast). In typical coach fashion, I sat in my backyard and stared at the clouds yesterday while thinking about why.
Here’s where I landed: each Friday, I open between eight and twenty-five tabs to read in order to find three things worth sharing with you. The only reason I read online is to share things worth reading here.
The best newsletters feel energetic, interesting, and unique because they are the curated outputs of a creator’s existing workflow.
My weekly workflow looks like this:
- Listen to 25-50 hours of podcasts to prep for interviews and learn
- Coach 6-8 entrepreneurs in deep dive hour-long sessions
- Read books (about .5-1 book per week)
- Hang out on Twitter and interact with other smart humans
- Write for the memoir project I’ve been working on
Compare that to the structure of the newsletter:
- A quote from a book (I’m reading anyways, but not always books relevant to a founder or creator)
- Three links worth reading (I don’t read anything online on my own)
- A mini-essay from me (perfect, I take a lesson from every coaching session and generalize it)
If this newsletter were designed around curated outputs of my existing workflow, it would be:
- Lessons from working with founders — a series of bullets or short paragraphs on the core lessons I took away from coaching sessions
- What I learned from the podcast guest of the week — this might be something like 3-5 takeaways or a curated list of their best work around the web, etc
- Quotes or lessons from what I’m reading — my best notes and quotes from the book I’m reading
- Best of Twitter — maybe one or several things I found especially interesting on Twitter
It’s the cognitive load of reading just so I can look smart enough to share things worth your attention that is out of alignment. So I’m not going to do that anymore.
I’m going to run some experiments with the format of this newsletter for the next month. I want to do that in partnership with you. Hit reply when you really enjoy or hate a particular issue. Tell me what you like and what you don’t like.
Help me make something that perfectly hits the overlap of the byproducts of my workflow + the things you find valuable as a founder or creator.
Since this has been navel gazey (which I hope is still valuable for you by revealing another founder’s thinking), let me leave you with something more aligned to the normal value you expect from me.
Five Lessons from Founders This Week
1. Being a parent or grandparent is one of our most impactful roles in life. Every hour we spend working is an hour not spent with our children and every hour spent with our kids is an hour not spent making impact at work. The key here is to make conscious choices about the balance between work and family and then communicate those choices and the reasoning behind them to everyone involved. The decisions you make can change in seasons rather than being permanent. More here and here.
2. The problems you choose to work on in your career are the most important points of leverage on the impact you ultimately make. Picking a problem area and a solution set are critical elements of founding a company that can transform a piece of society. Julia spoke eloquently on this in our conversation.
3. To achieve what your company is capable of, you have set an extremely high bar of expectation for your team. You should reward people who meet that bar and give them runway to grow until they reach the edge of their competence. And you should let people go who can’t perform at a high level so they don’t discourage the people making the biggest difference.
4. Ask for help. This seems so basic. But so many entrepreneurs have old embedded beliefs that they either can’t get the help they need or that no one else will do it as well as they could. Identifying what help you need is a skill. Asking for help is a skill. Handling rejection and disappointment when you ask but don’t get what you need is a skill. Ask.
5. The decisions you make today create decision debt later. Make decisions now that align with your future vision to the best of your ability. Front-load the hard part of decisions when you know what the hard part is. Choosing not to address the hard part now means you won’t get to choose when you have to address it later.
This newsletter is going to to get more valuable with time, not less. I know that the energy I feel towards it and put into it will dictate the value you get out of it.
When I started early this year, I knew the most important priority was being consistent. Now that I’ve been in your inbox every week for 20 weeks, it’s time to put the same level of strategic and critical thinking into the format here as I did for the podcast.
Let’s create something exceptional together.
Much love and respect,
If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a founder friend. You can also recommend me to a founder or creator as a coach.