Stop Selling Your Solution. Sell The PAIN.

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. The first thing anyone here is about your company is the brand name and your messaging. Developing a corporate brand identity. Training your team to understand and internalize it, and creating multiple versions based on who you're talking to is crucial to your success. Remember, we spoke about personal branding before with Stacey Cohen from episode 39. So, if you haven't heard it yet, go do it now.

Sean Weisbrot: In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to handle these things with Hope Timberlake, the founder of Forte Consulting, which helps executives hone their team alignment, branding, presentation, and other various leadership skills. More specifically, we discuss what is a corporate brand identity. How do you develop your corporate brand identity? What is the logical order of how to establish a corporate brand identity? How do you differentiate your messaging based on who is the audience? Why you should create a repository for messaging. How do you test your messaging for clarity? How do you train your team to parrot your messaging? Why you should use video to train for messaging. How do you put it all together to develop a pitch deck and talk to investors? And what is the best storytelling formula? So, thank you to Hope and I hope you enjoy the show.

Sean Weisbrot: This is something that is really personal for me. You know, studying psychology and the identity of your brand and how I've put it into place for my own company recently, and how it's completely changed the way I think about my company. So yeah, welcome to the show.

Sean Weisbrot: So, before we go any further, why don't you tell everyone real fast what it is you do and a little bit about yourself that makes you the right person to talk about these topics?

Hope Timberlake: So, for the past 15 years, I've been working with companies to help their leaders communicate effectively when they are pitching the companies to investors to inspire an all hands and to really sell their products, sell their vision, whether it's on stage with customers or at industry events to be thought leaders. But actually, before that, I was doing work with doctors and really talk about how doctors can. Effectively communicate to early-stage breast cancer patients. So totally different audiences, but equally important to be clear, persuasive, and informative. It's been a fun journey.

Sean Weisbrot: I've encountered multiple doctors with horrible bedside manners, so hopefully you were able to help at least a few doctors for the rest of their career.

Hope Timberlake: One doctor at a time.

Sean Weisbrot: So, let's get right into it. What is brand identity?

Hope Timberlake: So, the idea of your brand is you need to know who you are, and the really clear on how that impacts everything you do, from how you operate to how you sell, to how you produce, to how you are seen by customers, seen by investors, seen by employees. And it has to be really tangible and contextualized. We spend a lot of time and a lot of money on branding or outsourcing branding, and we get these beautiful decks in return. It's like, here's our brand, but if you can't clearly, concisely, and effectively communicate that to potential employees or to investors or to your customers, it's just a beautiful piece of paper.

Sean Weisbrot: How does a company develop their brand identity? Are there any exercises they can go through? Things like that that’ll help.

Hope Timberlake: Yeah. So, there are all kinds of analyses you can do where you can look at where you land in the landscape of those around you and why you're different, why you're better focusing on your vision. What is it that you hope to see a lot of exercises around identifying your perfect customer, your perfect receiver of goods, and lots of different brainstorming and activities that you can do to really flesh out who are you targeting? What is your vision for this archetype customer and where do you fit? Compare contrast with those around you, those in the market.

Sean Weisbrot: What would be the first step? Because you just explained a few different things that somebody would do. So, what is the logical order?

Hope Timberlake: So, I always want to start with your target customer, your target audience. And I think that's true for anything. Whether it's your branding, whether it's your communication. But think about who you're speaking to, who you're trying to persuade or influence or sell to, and spend a lot of time with that archetype and a lot of time figuring out who they are. Everything the fun exercises around the economy, naming them, thinking about what they do in the morning. Even if your customer is a purchaser of enterprise software licenses and you want to think about what does that person do when they wake up, how do they get to work?

Hope Timberlake: Or if they're virtual, what do they do before they log on all the different decisions they have to make, all the different stresses, all the motivators? So, what inspires them? What fears they have and make it really concrete? So, you actually want to visualize a person. Think about someone you know or create an archetype where you're really getting into. How is it that this person is benefiting from what I'm offering? Always start with your audience. Always start with the person.

Sean Weisbrot: So, it's interesting you mentioned thinking about the way that the purchaser thinks. I was just listening to a podcast episode on another podcast called Marketing Spark, which was fascinating for me because the guest was talking about how he scaled two companies from zero AR to 100 million AR, and his secret sauce was, he said, the problem that companies have in the sales process is that they're focused on closing the deal, but oftentimes the deal gets stopped somewhere along your process and you don't know why. And the reality is the person on the other side is running around the different people of the company that would be using the product to try to understand if it's actually valuable to them.

Sean Weisbrot: So, if you want to close those gaps, you need to learn from them thinking about what their process is so you can remove the obstacles before they appear. And so, you talking about trying to understand it's totally relevant and I love it. And that episode really changed my mind of how to do it because. I pride myself on trying to put myself in other people's shoes, but I never thought of doing that for the sales process in terms of this, this B2B purchasing stuff. And it actually gave me the idea to possibly hire whoever the sales manager or the sales director might be, might be someone who is a purchaser for a company before.

Hope Timberlake: Yes, I love it. I think that's great. I think that's idea of like anticipating those obstacles, recognizing what they're facing. And really like that holistic approach is, is so informative and important to think through.

Sean Weisbrot: In brand identity, you have the messaging that you're going to use, you have your core values, you have a lot of these kinds of nuances. So how do you take a brand identity and differentiate it based on who you're going to talk to, whether it's your buyer, your team, or your investors?

Hope Timberlake: I think that's a great question, because I think a lot of times people just take it and maybe change 1 or 2 words. But again, I am such a believer in that empathy, that audience analysis, and thinking about what's going on for a potential hire. So, let's say I want to take my brand identity. And my biggest pain point is I need employees, I need good employees, and I need to think about like, what is the market look like? Is it a employees market where they can get any job they want?

Hope Timberlake: Okay, so then what do I need to do to make my brand impress them? Interest to them? So, what are their pain points? What does motivate them? What's interesting to them? Because you might think like, okay, I love that my brand focuses on sustainability or environmental causes. And that's something that's so important to me. But if we're dealing with, uh, you know, a group of people who's looking for competitive, uh, salaries and things, you know, there's a disconnect.

Hope Timberlake: Now, that's a pretty crude analogy. But the idea being really think about who this is, am I trying to appeal to customers? Am I trying to appeal to other people in my space to look like a thought leader? Am I trying to appeal to, uh, employees? Who am I trying to appeal to? And yes, use your brand messaging as the skeleton, but you want to really flesh it up, if you will, or populate that skeleton with all the details that are relevant to your audience versus just trying to approach it as one size-fits all.

Sean Weisbrot: Are you saying to create a kind of three of the different pieces of information? That you would use and then have it based on the messaging type. So, for example, like let's say, I know that my company has two main products and there are five features in each of those products that I'm going to be marketing to people. Right? Whether I'm marketing it to an investor or marketing it to a team member so that they understand what we're building and why we're building it, or to a potential buyer, how is this going to help you?

Sean Weisbrot: Right. So, the investor, how is this going to make you money? So, you have like this centralized document that says this is the essence of what we're trying to describe. And then okay, team members go and differentiate it. Go think about how's the best way to make it sound to these user types. Right?

Hope Timberlake: Right. That repository idea is a beautiful one. And I think the other step is going back to that first step of like what are the user types like. Let's really personalize it. Let's really be clear. Let's get those pain points. Let's get those motivators. And now let's get that brand messaging to meet each of those archetypes needs.

Sean Weisbrot: So, when you understand what your messaging is going to be and you've figured out how to differentiate your messaging based on the audience type, how do you test it to make sure that it's actually the right thing being said?

Hope Timberlake: I absolutely believe in evolving, tweaking, continuing to iterate. So ideally what you do is you find the low-hanging fruit, you find the people who are the safest bets you try to find. You don't want to go with your highest potential. Customer and let's be like, let's try on some new messaging with you. Let's find somebody who you feel like, okay, he's a sure thing, or you already have a relationship with them. They trust you. Let's see if I can try it on with them and test it out a little bit.

Hope Timberlake: Pay attention to what resonates. It is also that piece of really being externally focused in body language when they're not when they grimace, when they ask more questions, when they literally or physically lean in, or when they seem to step back. And ideally, if you have a strong enough relationship or trust with them, you can ask them, okay, so I love that we're aligned.

Hope Timberlake: I love that our product meets your needs now that we're going to move forward, what is it specifically that helped you make that decision? Or how will you communicate this decision to work with us to those at your company? So, get them to, you know, by using effective or provocative questions. Get them to tell you what did work. I wouldn't necessarily poke holes and be like what didn't work, but just to find out what pieces did resonate.

Sean Weisbrot: So, when I was doing the brand identity for Sidekick, I, in my own planning, had an idea of what I wanted to call certain features in order to, well, not only have the names of those features inside of the product when the user is trying to go to that part of the platform but also for the marketing purposes. And I decided to ask the team what they thought of those names and other people that I had already talked to about Sidekick, what they thought of those names, and I gave them other options. It's like, so if you were thinking about this kind of a product, what of these like four items, what these four options do you think makes the most sense to you?

Sean Weisbrot: And I found that actually I was really wrong on the naming of my features. I had like overwhelming evidence to support that I was wrong on multiple feature names, and so I changed it in order to improve the marketing. We haven't started marketing yet, but in preparation for marketing, that testing was really important for us to figure out. For example, the main part of our system is called a space. Originally, I wanted to call it organizations, and when I started doing the questioning of potential users as well as friends and family, etc., people who've used Slack and Microsoft Teams, they're like, I don't understand what an organization is. I was like, okay, well, like slack uses the name workspace and we're an organization because you could be a community, you could be a company, you could be a classroom, but you're an organization of people.

Sean Weisbrot: You're something, right? Where slack says your workspace, slack has communities, but they ignore the needs of community. Community, Slack's they just focus on the paying customers. So, we wanted to be more inclusive of that, and I thought organization was a better means of doing so. Well, people overwhelmingly decided that the term space. Was better. Why? Well, it's a community space. It's a company space. It's a classroom space. It's an educational space. And so, I was severely wrong. And we went back and fixed everything. And that was really helpful.

Hope Timberlake: Who did you ask and how did you ask them?

Sean Weisbrot: So, first of all, I asked all of the team members from Sidekick, and I asked people who were other company founders, who are potential users, who I've befriended, you know, over the last few years, people who've been hearing me talk about sidekick for a long time, as well as people I've met, you know, dealing with the podcast who are guests and other people like yourself because they're all potential users as well.

Hope Timberlake: Right. And that's a nice, diverse swath of people. So, it's not just going to the same group and getting one answer. The downside of asking all the people we work with, and all of our potential users and all of our potential customers is sometimes we get a really a wide assortment of answers, and then we have to decide and make prioritizing decisions around which one are we going to listen to and which one are we not going to listen to, but it's nice that you've got some consistency and what you're looking for.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I think I got about 80 responses and I think there was like almost 70 of them said spaces.

Hope Timberlake: That seems overwhelmingly clear.

Sean Weisbrot: One of the problems that companies face is standardization of messaging across the entire organization. So, once you have your branding done and you've tested it, how do you enforce it so that, you know, it doesn't matter who from your company is talking to, whoever they know what to say, when to say it, and why they're saying it.

Hope Timberlake: Yeah, that's an excellent question, sort of a multi-part answer to that. And one is I would question if everybody's saying it differently, then either the messaging is too complex or too abstract, or they're just not being indoctrinated into it. So, if we know that it's not too complex, we've confirmed that this resonates with the people when they're hearing it. You know, check mark on that. That's great. If we know that it's not too abstract. Again, that seems like the complexity and the abstraction are kind of the same sides of it's not resonating for some reason. So, we need to make sure it's really, really concrete and clear. So, once we're sure that's happening, then there needs to be some version of onboarding, if you will, of the message.

Hope Timberlake: And this is so challenging for busy entrepreneurs or growing companies. Because the last thing you want to do is spend a lot of time training. You want to hire someone good and you want to get them up and running. But those are the types of things that will pay off in spades. If you spend that time to really get everyone vetted on the culture, the messaging, and how we're going to present ourselves to our customers in the world, it's going to save you time. In the long run. It doesn't feel like it when you're putting out fires, products not working. This is happening. You need to hire 20 new people yesterday. Why would you want to spend time really training or onboarding people about the messaging? But it's so important.

Sean Weisbrot: How exactly can you train them?

Hope Timberlake: Yeah. So, that's it is if it's really clear and concrete messaging, I would absolutely have some versions of having them do it, having them try it on. I'm a big believer in the experiential not so much with customers right away, but having some exercises around. Okay. So, we've got we've hired three new people this week. Let's get in a room. Or maybe we only had one new person this week, but we wanted to have a team meeting where a small company with only ten people. Let's do this. So, Sean, you're brand new. I'm not going to pick a new first, but I'm going to I'm going to talk to Paige, who's been with the company for six months.

Hope Timberlake: Paige, why don't you tell us how you're going to talk about our company to a customer. Or you go, all right. Now, Sean, you're new, but let's have you do that same conversation to new employees. Let's hear how you do it and make it more of a workshop environment of like, try it on so that we're all learning from each other and we're all standardizing how we say things because like I said, you know, things evolve, right? So, we might have this beautiful branding that six weeks later it might need some tweaks. So having those kinds of exercises where you can have a whole team together is really effective.

Sean Weisbrot: Now, how do you do this in a remote environment where you can't see your employees or your team members face-to-face?

Hope Timberlake: Oh, but you can see them on the little Brady Bunch squares of whatever virtual tool you're using. I mean, I know what time zones and a lot of companies are geographically distributed. Now. Let's just say it's messaging. We might not need to see each other. It's like, okay, everybody's on Zoom for 14 hours. We could do this as an audio call.

Hope Timberlake: Everyone knows in advance, hey, we're going to just we're just going to standardize and pressure test our messaging among our team. That's the name of this exercise or the name of this meeting. And we can do it as an audio exercise because really, a lot of the messaging is about the words and less about our facial delivery or any of the body language.

Sean Weisbrot: I would like to push back on the audio only because you mentioned earlier being aware of the body language of the person you're talking to, to make sure that they understand the messaging. And if you're trying to train someone and you can't see their body language, then how are you supposed to help them correct it in order to be better at what they're supposed to do?

Hope Timberlake: If you're at that point where you're training people or standardizing the message, it may be that we want to clarify the objectives and get it to a place where we are really making sure that our message sounds the same from person to person. You such a visible bias that I might be like, oh, I really like Sean. So, I like what he's saying, even though I'm not actually truly fully listening to what he's saying. So, if we're trying to make sure that all of us. Are consistent with our messaging. We're going to be more observant or better able to listen if we don't have the visual now. Absolutely.

Hope Timberlake: When we're trying to pressure test these messages with customers or with friendlies, I'll call them or, you know, the low-hanging fruit. We want to see the reaction of our target customer. We want to see the reaction of those people. But within our own team, we should be able to listen and have that sense of, let me be really critically listening to the consistency or the inconsistencies that exist among our team, as we each tried on with a different subset of stakeholders.

Sean Weisbrot: I want to mention a parallel to this. I haven't explicitly trained the team on our messaging yet, because 90 plus percent of the team are developers, so they are not normally used to communicating to others what we're doing. But what I do with them is I communicate what we're building, why we're building it, and how it's beneficial to the users we're building for so that they feel connected emotionally to the product, because oftentimes they're so busy looking at the code, they're not busy thinking about the experience on the front end that I would be looking at as an actual user.

Sean Weisbrot: Now, granted, once we start to use our product, hopefully, it'll humanize it for them. But what I do is I have a very specific onboarding process for the developers. And then when someone new joins someone who joined recently before them is responsible for mentoring them in getting them going for the first month or so, and they seem to really love it because they know that there's people they can go to ask for questions where they know if there's a question about the users or interface or experience, they come to me. If it's a question about the code, they'll go to our lead architect.

Sean Weisbrot: If it's a question about their specific operating system, they'll go to another one of their team members. If it's a question about the back end, they'll go to this person. And so they feel really connected instantly to what we're doing. And everyone is open, you know, and friendly and all that. And I believe that that parallels back to the messaging and all of that, because it's the culture of who we are. It's the culture that we as a company are developing. And the brand messaging is a really important part of that company culture that will become more important for us as we build a marketing and sales team over the next year.

Hope Timberlake: Yeah. And so, I think that's exactly right, because you don't need to have every developer in a room if they're not going to be the ones actually externally communicating it. And at the same time, it'd be kind of a fun exercise to know, hey, how would you describe what you're working on and how it will impact a customer? That right there could be really telling around how clear it is, what you're developing and what you're building and how much they know. Did the lead architect did a good job of setting the context not to, like, throw them under the bus, but just to get a sense of like, what is the developer's understanding of what they're working on?

Sean Weisbrot: So, I would say, at least in our situation, the lead architect. Takes what I tell him I want to build and turns it into documentation with endpoints and makes it make sense to them for implementation purposes. So, through him, they don't see the higher-level vision. That's what I give them because the product is my vision. And so, I'm driving the interface, the design, the experience, the usefulness, the purpose behind what we're doing. And therefore, I feel like it's my responsibility to communicate that to the team.

Hope Timberlake: But it’d be interesting if you even ask them, because as much as you're sharing it with them and so they're getting your vision, I'd be so curious to hear in their words like, are they getting it now? A lot of times, developers and engineers, they just want to focus on the task at hand, but it's still just sort of a fun exercise to be like, oh, why do you think we're doing this? Or what do you think someone using our space would need? And it can be illuminating, or just a fun exercise of curiosity of like, what do they see is the vision, and how are they helping to build this?

Sean Weisbrot: Would you do this on a 1 to 1 or in a group?

Hope Timberlake: I mean, this is the thing, entrepreneurs are so busy, right? You can't go one to 1 to 1. Having said that, if you're doing sort of skip level type meetings and you have an opportunity to work with someone who's hands-on with a product, and that's part of how your culture is, and you can bring that in or weave that in as a question. Sure. But otherwise, I think it can be it can absolutely happen in a group setting. And it doesn't mean that you need every single person to answer the same question, but it's just more like, we want to show that we are attached and all of our pieces have some connection, point or connectivity.

Hope Timberlake: And if in an all-hands meeting we have or we create all-hands meetings, if we're not in another place where we're doing all-hands meetings, and that's part of the exercise is all right, a couple of people let's, let's, let's figure out how you're communicating what you're doing. If when you go home at night, you know, what are you telling your parents? What are you telling your friends? And that alone can be interesting to see. Like are they? Is their message clear and sure they don't. Their message might not need to be clear forever, but it's still really interesting to hear what it is that they're saying and what resonates. And that can help inform how good of a job you're doing overall at sharing your vision.

Sean Weisbrot: It's something I'm going to add to my list, definitely. I want to try this and see. I know I've communicated to them, but I've never really asked them to parrot it back, so it's definitely something to try. So, we've talked about creating your messaging, diversifying your messaging, testing your messaging, and training your team using video. Is there anything I'm missing?

Hope Timberlake: I think it's always interesting if you can pull off the focus groups and all of the that that piece of can we actually so we can do all the, the whiteboarding and the archetype thing and figure out who the customer is and pain points and all that and like what their obstacles are and trying to eliminate those. But when you have that, those groups together if we want to get input from a select number of our target customers, that can be really useful. Obviously, it can help to determine the features or the names of the features or, you know, more, more details about the product, but it also helps you. How do you communicate this?

Hope Timberlake: And it can create loyalists, you know, you show that you care and then they can be investors for you. Of course, it does take time, and not everyone's going to be willing. And you want to make sure it's truly the right people, not just the yes people or not just the dissenters, but that those exercises aren't always done because we're in such a rush to monetize for good reason. And those are opportunities that could make the experience better, or the long-term viability of the company better. If we just take that time to hold focus groups and get input from our target customers.

Sean Weisbrot: So, I want to switch focus slightly and talk about using everything you've learned to build and design a pitch deck so that when you talk to investors, your messaging is clear. So how do you develop a pitch deck? What are some things that people should put in the pitch deck and, and what are the things that they should be focusing on when communicating branding and things like that to investors?

Hope Timberlake: Yeah. So, pitch decks, there's always, you know, there's all kinds of formulas that you can find online and what to include and what not to include. And be very clear, having said that, really being able to hold that conversation as a conversation rather than as a presentation. So ideally you are able to distill all of your best ideas. What's the value proposition? What do you know, what are you sharing that makes you different and will make them money in 90 seconds? Can you clearly communicate what you do, who you do for, and why they'll benefit while they make money in 90 seconds and then open up that conversation so that if they have questions, you can you can pivot, you can go through, you can get them engaged?

Hope Timberlake: And a lot of people resist that advice because they're like, well, no, no, no. Because if I give them the floor. I'm missing an opportunity to show them all of the things that we've done, all of the benefits, all the reasons why we're a market fit. And I think that if you are engaging them, getting them curious, maybe even they go straight to the hard questions or they're poking holes, but that means they're engaged. It means they're thinking about it. It means they're curious enough to want to learn. And ideally, it's because they see that there's something there. If they really hated it all the way, hopefully they wouldn't take the meeting.

Hope Timberlake: But they might just, you know, sit back and just tune out. So, yes, you should have a full pitch deck prepared that covers off on all the things that you'll find. And the truly anyone can Google all, all the different elements of what you need to have your competition and your all of the finances and all the different things that you need to include in a pitch deck. But I really believe in the storytelling element of how can I tell a story? How can I share this vision in 90 seconds, and how can I engage them early? How can I intentionally that some information that they will immediately jump at like, well, wait a minute, what about this? Or wait a minute, I know some other companies doing this, those types of obvious questions that might arise. Sometimes it's better to leave that information out and get them engaged, that you're having a conversation.

Sean Weisbrot: I love creating mystery. So, when I was in college, I studied, so obviously I was studying psychology and I got into the pickup artist-like scene very, very briefly. I realized what it was beneath the surface and I decided to walk away. But something that they promoted was the idea of creating mystery in your engagements with people as a means to hook them in to. It's kind of like a like a NLP exercise, almost. Um, so I agree that could be very valuable in basically. As you said, creating and telling a story in 90 seconds. So that you tell them all of the really important things. That gets them interested to want to know more. But not everyone is really good at this. So, what is the best storytelling, uh, formula that you found?

Hope Timberlake: Yeah. So, it's, you know, again, going back to your psychological principles, there's some version of fear or some version of pain. And we really want to emphasize that often we focus way too much on the solution. And while that's intuitive, like here we are, we created a solution. We really want to paint the picture of what it's like to not have that solution. What is happening right now that makes this so important right now, that's dire, that makes this timely, and that piece of focusing on that pain point, on that, that potential loss is much more effective than all of the bells and whistles and reasons why your solution is bright, shiny and perfect.

Sean Weisbrot: So, it's really interesting because what you said reminds me of the Net Promoter Score, where when you are trying to gauge the level of emotional buy-in to your company and your product is by asking them how they would feel if that product went away. And so I think that's really interesting because I have failed in the storytelling element when pitching investors.

Sean Weisbrot: Definitely, when you give me 30 minutes, I'll talk your head off about what we're doing and why we're different and therefore why you should invest. Let's say, who's investing in your company? Do you have users yet and do you have revenue yet? And when you can't say yes to one of those things, sorry, come back when you have those fulfilled. So, it doesn't matter how amazing your product is, investors don't care unless you fulfill at least one of those things.

Hope Timberlake: Right. And so that, yes, that is a challenge. And sort of ideally to get there, you do want to have that messaging down in a couple resources that I think your listeners would like are that I just stand by are Chip and Dan Heath. Books there's Made to Stick was an old one, and there's The Power of Moments, which is slightly newer, but they just talk about some of these psychological principles in a really compelling way. Talk about them as sort of like business light books. They use dozens, if not hundreds of examples from corporations, but they make it so that you realize, okay, what's the tie here? And the tie is often counterintuitive.

Hope Timberlake: So that idea, like we all know that we want to talk about our products because we're so excited about them, because they are so special because they can fulfill these needs. But when you look at the successes, it's often the losses now to get those initial investors or get your revenue. It's hard. It's a little chicken in the egg, right? We we can't get that until we have the investors and we can't get the investors until we get that. And that's luckily a problem. I don't I don't face as much, even though I am my own. I'm a solopreneur. I don't have to get investors buy in. So, I do have big empathy for that initial phase problem.

Sean Weisbrot: So, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you wished I would ask?

Hope Timberlake: I don't know anything else that I'm going to contribute to this conversation, other than I want to hear how you implement these ideas on what works for you and what doesn't. So do like a follow-up of here's what I tried, here's what worked, and here's what failed.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. So, our weekly all hands, I don't even call it an all hands. I just call it a tech call. And since everyone is in tech except for the CEO, and even then again, he still plays a role in tech decisions too. So technically it's it's an all-hands, but it's not. I will give the team a report of what I've been working on for the last week because oftentimes they're so busy thinking about their position and what they're doing that they don't get a chance to see what's happening beyond the scope of their daily existence. And so, I'll say, I've been talking to the lawyer about preparing better employment agreements, and I'll be circulating those to you in the next, you know, five weeks. Or I've pitched five investors, three said this, two said this, I'm going to follow up, and blah blah. So, I really give them like a detailed look at what I'm doing.

Sean Weisbrot: That's the first thing that everything. And I try to cap it to five minutes max. And then beyond that, the lead architect will give his own report of what he's been doing. The QA manager will give a report of like how many things were tested and how many things passed, how many things failed, the velocity of the testing, things like that. And then each team member will talk about what they accomplished last week, what they're going to accomplish this week, and any blockers to that success. And that's really it. And so, we really for ten people we get it in under an hour.

Hope Timberlake: Great. And I would just weave in a little vision or a little, you know some version of like that macro with the weekly or biweekly type of reminders. And I feel like that even if it's just two minutes worth of, hey, Jose, what's what are you seeing as, I don't know, some question, some profound question of like, how do you see our company evolving six months from now?

Hope Timberlake: Or some version of let's yes, get all the tests done and let's elevate it in some way that makes it so that we're like, all right, there's a real purpose here, or there's a real vision here, or I'm just curious what Jose thinks is the next step for us in six months. Um, those are just fun exercises, and they're helpful as you build the company so that you're bridging that gap between the vision and the execution.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, definitely try that out. I so I do also have a weekly written report for all of the team members. And the report stays the same. But basically, I ask them things like, uh, on a scale of 1 to 10, what is your overall like mood, mental clarity, focus, things like that. How many hours do you think you worked? It's okay. Like be honest. Um, you know, if you write 30, like, I'm, you know, I'm I don't care. But if you write 30 consistently. Okay, maybe I'll have a problem with it. So, like, how many hours do you think you worked? What is the percentage breakdown of what you did? Like? You know, I spent 50% of my time documenting code, and I spent 50% of my time writing code.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay, fine. What was the hardest thing that you dealt with last week? What was the most challenging thing or what was the best thing you did? What was the most time-consuming thing you did? Is there someone from the team that you want to give praise to? Is there someone that you want to criticize? How can we improve your work experience? And so, some of the people will write. Like they'll give me real information. Some people won't give me anything. And that also tells me, long term, who is thinking like a manager and who's thinking like an employee. Who am I going to be more likely to give opportunities to?

Sean Weisbrot: So, when we are coming to a new release, or when we're coming to focus on a new feature set? At that point, I'll say to the team during these calls, by the way, if you look at the issues on the board, we're now starting a new feature. This is why we're building it. We are building for agile teams. And so, I am trying to change my mindset to be more agile, where I used to prepare three months' worth of documentation and issues and all that. Now I'm trying to do it like two weeks at a time. So, okay, I know the team is going to be working on this in the next two weeks. Let me create all of it at once, disseminate it one time and let them do it.

Sean Weisbrot: And when they're getting close to finishing, let me get the next set. And so, this allows me to focus more on the here and now and the what's right in front of us, but then maintain this larger vision for them to see. So, they know what the overall thing of what we're building is. They can see our design system, they can see all of the designs that are on the Figma board that we have. So, they can see the whole picture. They know exactly what we're building, or hopefully, they understand what we're building and why we're building it. But right now, we're focusing we're focusing on this piece and why are we doing it right now? Why is this the right order for us to be building this thing? And I think that keeps them focused on, you know, what's going on right now.

Hope Timberlake: I love it. I think that makes perfect sense. And I like that you intentionally made that pivot. That's a good sign that you're able to adapt and see what you need to do to get them motivated, to get the organization moving, and how you want to move, I love it.

Sean Weisbrot: It actually took me several years to get to here because I was learning about project management and product management and UI UX design. I was learning about all of these things after I started the company, I started with no knowledge, and this is the first team that I've built from scratch. I've worked in several companies where I walked in as a manager of companies. But it's different when you walk in and when you start. And so, I had to learn about how to be confident in myself and what I'm doing in order to then be able to disseminate that information properly. And I also do talk about personal things with the team.

Sean Weisbrot: So, like last week, I was like, hey guys, I'm not sure if you realize, but I wasn't really available this past week and that's because I was dealing with a divorce. It sucks. I'm not going to go into the details of it, but I just want you to know if I don't really answer you very quickly, it's probably because I'm thinking about something else. At the moment I am working on the company, but I'm also dealing with this thing and they're like, yeah, fair enough. Thank you for telling me.

Hope Timberlake: Yes, exactly. That's great. Well, those are good leadership traits, and I look forward to seeing how you guys progress with your spaces and with your product.