dnsUNFILTERED: Richard Washington, Tick Talent

[00:00:00] Mikey Pruitt: welcome everybody to another episode of dnsUNFILTERED. Today I'm joined by Richard Washington, who is the talent connoisseur coming from jolly Old England. Richard, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[00:00:12] Richard Washington: I've never been described as a connoisseur, but I'll take it so I'll give you a very potted history.

So I'm in a lovely place in the south coast of England called Bourmouth. Seven miles of golden sandy beaches and a little bit of a tech hub, but nothing like London. And I spent my career in tech, sales and marketing in agency land, not in recruitment, but doing go to market, outsourced services from lead generation through to quota, carrying inside sales and everything paid media in between.

So my job was always to hire people for our business to then work. For clients on their accounts. So we have to be really good at hiring amazing people, finding great people. We grew that business from a single site operation in the UK to being a multi-site operation around the world, which meant that I had this opportunity to work in the US For anyone watching the video, I've got my Fins, helmet, fins up, not right now.

Fins up maybe when this gets released. As well as in Auckland when we expanded into APAC and building a site over in Barcelona to go and get a different access to a talent pool. So got this kind of global perspective around what works in tech, what works with people, how do you build and scale business units.

But then after 12 years in that business, I burned out and I realized that I got into a role that wasn't. Very full of the activities that I loved where I was in flow. Probably only about 15% of my role was really, I truly where I truly loved. So I really wanted to become an entrepreneur, but I realized I didn't have the skills.

So I found this incredible entrepreneur who had a portfolio of businesses. One was an angel investment fund, one was a D2C agency and e-commerce, which I'd never been in, but was really fascinated about it. And I helped him and the other co-founder as part of that business to scale that business from 10 to about 30 people.

We created these systems around recruitment and he said, Hey, if we are gonna do some stuff together, I think it should be in talent. You've got this talent for talent and you've got some systems which could be turned into services that we could sell to other people 'cause it would be really valuable for them.

So we created a business within his portfolio. We did that for a year, proved the concept, and then I spun it out to be my own wonderful little business called Tick Talent. And now we service. Early stage tech companies, finding them, entrepreneurial executives, leaders, and salespeople to help them to grow.

[00:02:44] Mikey Pruitt: That was a spectacular introduction and I wanted to point out that Richard AC actually hosts his own podcast called What Makes UT Tick coinciding with his business name at tick talent.com. Sure. So it might be hard for Richard to. Answer the questions on this episode, but we're gonna do our best.

[00:03:02] Richard Washington: I'm gonna flip it and I'm gonna ask you some, Mikey.

[00:03:04] Mikey Pruitt: Okay, that's totally fine. Acceptable. Acceptable. So you mentioned this term intrapreneur. When you were introducing yourself. Yeah. And that really struck a chord with me about how, really scaling your business quickly in the startup space requires, entrepreneurs within at the head of a business unit. Yeah. So can you explain what entrepreneur means and means to you? Yeah, for sure. I just wonder, is it a term that you'd heard before, Mikey? No, I have not. I have heard a few terms that were similar people and it started with people getting burned out and they were in like founder mode and they were trying to do everything.

Yeah. And then they were looking for people and often gravitated towards people who were similar to them. Also entrepreneurial could run with the reins of something. So when you, I actually saw you comment. From Who was Adam? Anyway, the R bt B guy r yeah. R btb.com guy. But anyway,

[00:04:00] Richard Washington: Adam Robinson.

[00:04:01] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. Adam Robinson. So that's where you piqued my interest and I dug in and I was like, oh yeah, this is gonna be a great interview.

[00:04:08] Richard Washington: Yeah. Yeah, sure. It was strange. Yeah, it was strange. I commented on it. First time I had

[00:04:12] Mikey Pruitt: heard intrapreneur.

[00:04:13] Richard Washington: Yeah. I had it. I had it. Relatively recently too.

And I've just taken the term and just grown from it really. And Adam talked about in that post about how he's looking to hire entrepreneurial people for it, for his stage of business, which is a startup, like 20 million a RR. And my old CEO, this incredible entrepreneur who I joined to learn how to think like him and, take that level of ownership told me about this term, which is a lot of people aren't entrepreneurs.

It takes a really special animal. You know this from all the people that you speak to in the partnership world. You have been a founder, you have run businesses. It takes a special kind of mindset to be able to go. I'm gonna go and literally be totally self-sufficient. I'm gonna put everything on the line, money, reputation, time to go and take this idea out into the world.

And then to get other people to be bought into that idea. Customers as well as teams to grow this movement around this change you're trying to make whatever those fundamental drivers are, which is often a desire for more freedom, whether that's financial freedom, purpose, time, relationships, or just because they love the challenge of building businesses.

But not many people want to take that level of risk. Or they dream of taking that level of risk, but they just haven't got the right idea or they're maybe missing some of the skills like me back in 2018. So he said, but there's lots of intrapreneurs and intrapreneurs are people, and there's lots of different ways of defining this, but it's fundamentally, if you think what a founder loves is someone who cares as much as they do.

Works as hard as they do, but brings a different set of skills into the business. So they're not just hiring someone to go and delegate stuff to like a mini me. They're looking to bring an expert in who fills a big gap in terms of what they're trying to build. And that can bring back information and education and skills into the business in growing the strength of the team, which is what a team's all about.

So for me, entrepreneurs are people who are entrepreneurial. But they act inside businesses to build businesses, take new products to market, grow globally. Maybe it's start a podcast within a business. The people who just want to create something but prefer to do that as part of something bigger than themselves.

[00:06:43] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. To be an entrepreneur, you really have to suspend your disbelief and accept failure because it's likely going to happen in some manner. Maybe not total failure, but some type of failure is gonna happen and it takes a special person to be able, willing to accept those risks. And the, but the term.

Entrepreneur really resonates with me and the audience of this show. Sure. 'cause we're like a bunch of tech nerds. Yeah. And dealing with networks and we're used to dealing with the internet. Yeah. And also intranets. So there's a lot of what I, a word that I hate Synergy between the words.

[00:07:16] Richard Washington: Yeah. No it's a, to be fair, I've never made that connection and it.

So true. This is, that's prob I

[00:07:21] Mikey Pruitt: just thought of it too while you

[00:07:22] Richard Washington: were talking. That's probably why

[00:07:24] Mikey Pruitt: it really struck me when I

[00:07:26] Richard Washington: read it. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. I never, I've never made the connection, but it's exactly that. It's people who wanna build a worldwide web inside of business.

[00:07:33] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. So what do you so you're really looking for the entrepreneurs for other companies.

Why do you think or do you think that's necessary to succeed or is just easier to succeed with entrepreneurs? It depends,

[00:07:48] Richard Washington: like most things do. So what I really mean by that is it depends on the size of the business. So if you think about early stage businesses, a lot of the mistakes that get made are that they go we need now a sales leader or a marketing leader.

And we are in this space. And in this space there are these two or three big, very famous global brands that have this incredible reputation. So let's try and get someone from there, and then they go and try and find someone who's operated at this completely different level. Maybe it's a public company with loads of resources.

Who have achieved these incredible things, but maybe they're looking for something a bit more early stage to have a bit more impact, A bit more, say, maybe they're a bit frustrated with the red tape that exists inside a larger organization. Maybe there's a likeeven that's changed, but they aren't ready to become a entrepreneur, but they want a bit more of that early stage buzz and excitement.

Some of that magic. Exactly. But it's very easy to be attracted to someone's resources. What early stage businesses don't have is resources. So you need people who are resourceful and it's a very different type of person who is a world class operator in a larger business, where they're utilizing all of the complex resources and stakeholder management to be able to pull together a load of people to achieve something incredible for clients than it is someone who goes, this thing needs doing.

It's not in my jd, but I'm gonna go and do it. And I'm gonna do that too. And I'm gonna do that too until I'm ready to go and scale it to someone else. And I, we are gonna have to be scrappy and I'm gonna have to think differently and be a bit innovative and maybe take some shortcuts as we rapid test this idea to see even if what's worth moving.

In big businesses, they can't change that fast because once you've told your shareholders and the market what you're going to do, you have to do that for 12 months. Yeah. There has to be a really good reason why you don't, so you can't just pivot and change. Whereas in early stage businesses, particularly at the kind of.

Naugh to 3 million. You are changing constantly. Your messaging, you're changing constantly. Your understanding of what your ICP is. There's so much iteration and failure experimentation that you have to have someone who's very open to failing and is very open to taking on a huge amount of responsibility themselves.

For me, they're two different types of people.

[00:10:18] Mikey Pruitt: Perfect. Lemme get let my cat out. I dunno if you can hear.

Yeah, that cat, she's. So I had to let my cat out. I'll edit this piece out.

[00:10:42] Richard Washington: Don't worry. My wife from a dog hotel, so we've got five dogs running around the house every day. Nice. It's impossible for me on a be to be on a call without the dogs going.

[00:10:49] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. So with these entrepreneurs, what are the traits that they have?

Like what do you look for and how do you spot one?

[00:10:58] Richard Washington: Yeah, it's a great question, and I don't think it is a case that you go, here is the 10 things that you're looking for inside an entrepreneur, and let's just do a survey, get 'em to answer yes or no, and if they tick yes, then it's fine. The biggest thing is that they're gonna be super excited about this challenge because the intrapreneur is driven by the same things the founder's driven by.

They want freedom. So one of the challenges with an entrepreneur is that you can't micromanage these people. You can't go right? I need you to do this way. Follow this playbook, follow this script, follow this system. Do not deviate. You need to give them free reign. 'cause one of the drivers for them is being trusted to go and find autonomy.

The how to have some autonomy probably when they do it. Certainly they would like to be able to control the sort of projects they work on, what they say no to. They're good deleters of distractions, so you need to find someone who's very open to taking a huge amount of autonomy and responsibility over themselves.

They were able to make decisions by themselves without having to constantly ask for approval and constantly just tell me, is this okay? Shall I do that? It's just someone who's a bit more, it's better to seek forgiveness than permission. So that's one side of it. They're a different animal, but the other side is they are incredibly high level operators, very driven by execution.

So these aren't people who just spend all day in strategy and then get into analysis paralysis. They are massively driven by taking action and going testing hypotheses, and going and getting real time feedback, but they won't stop until they've got an answer to a question. Until they've got a conclusion.

Even if that's failure, they're just gonna keep pushing through. So that's another a massive driver. And then it's the things that I talked about. They have to be super hard workers and they have to care deeply, but that's just not, what I mean by that is, and it's a challenge. This is where it's really hard.

There aren't people who just care more than others and who work harder than others. It's context specific. So for example, if you put me in a situation where I need to go and produce a. Huge spreadsheet. Lots of pivot tables and formulas. You're gonna be asking Chad t for a lot of help. I'm gonna be like just in a, just a world of pain doing that.

So I would probably come across as someone who's not very good, who's pretty lazy, who would procrastinate against that task and not produce the best possible result, probably make some mistakes. Whereas if you put me in a place that I love where I'm in flow. Then I'll be someone who you might call an A player.

Like I'm totally driven by finding creative ways of solving this problem. I'm bringing my energy and my passion to it. So you're trying to find people who deeply care about the challenge you're trying to solve in the world, who can really get behind it and become a bit of a gravity ball where they bring other people through their energy towards what they're trying to accomplish in the world.

So there's all these soft things, but you can test for them. By making sure you do a couple of things right upfront. One would be total clarity on expectations. Where hiring always goes wrong is expectation management. If you tell people, here's where we are with our product, here's where we are with our funding, here's where we are with our revenue, and the reality is the product's really not that good.

The marketing doesn't really exist. The customers that they're referring, that they've won, some of them are already given notice. They've got a crazy churn rate. When they get into it, they're just gonna be like, this is not at all what I signed up for. So you have to be very clear around what you can't do, what you want to do, where you are today, what the problems are, where you need them to get focused on, and what the upside and the opportunity and the vision and all that wonderful long-term stuff looks like.

But if you get that stuff upfront. Then people are volunteering with eyes wide open into that scenario that they can go and put their heart and soul into because they will commit like a founder. But if you tell them a full set of truths and sugarcoat it, nothing worse than killing the motivation of someone, than presenting them with a reality which is far lower than their expectation.

[00:15:14] Mikey Pruitt: This is great for me 'cause I feel like I'm fitting this mold. So you're like describing what, I'm always trying to figure out what I do or what I am.

[00:15:24] Richard Washington: So you are an evangelist, right?

[00:15:26] Mikey Pruitt: Yes. That's my title

[00:15:28] Richard Washington: here. And you've created this podcast. So tell me about that. Oh, you're gonna psychoanalyze me now.

This is you. I'm just wondering you've talked about, you are resonating with this, it feels like I'm describing you a bit, right? Which I think, which is why this language is so powerful because people could just go, yeah, that is exactly how I've been trying to articulate like myself and the value that I've got.

But how did that come about? Did they say, Hey. We'd love you to come in and we'd love you to create a podcast and here's how it's gonna look. Or did it start completely differently?

[00:15:57] Mikey Pruitt: Obviously completely differently. I came in as a engineer on the engineering side, DNS culture. Yeah, I think I was hire number 13 or something.

So very early. Yeah. I did wear a lot of hats like tier two tech support. DevOps engineer. Then I became product manager, and now I'm in marketing. But I'm like this odd thing that no one really knows what to do with, but I'm also really good at a lot of things, yeah. Things like this podcast.

And we, I specifically serve a lot of our partner community MSPs. Yeah. Value added resellers. Especially those MSPs, they're very entrepreneurial. They have to be, they were a tech person. People ask for computer help and then they realize, oh, I can make this a business. And they're like, sometimes accidental entrepreneurs and a lot of them are stuck in this like one to 3 million a RR revenue range.

Sure. Which is very common in the MSP space. Sure. They're ambitious to break out of that. And I feel like what you're talking about hiring that entrepreneurial spirit to head up some business unit is the way to break out to that. So I'm just very excited to bring this message to that audience.

Yeah. And that is what I guess someone at DNSFilter saw and me to go. De give to bring messages to our customers and prospects.

[00:17:19] Richard Washington: Yeah. They couldn't have picked a better person. You resonate. Oh, thank you. With people, you connect with people, you're passionate. You were a business owner before, right?

You had an electrical business. You've been director of some charitable foundations. You have owned everything inside businesses and have to go and rally people and get passionate about it. With much, not much resource. So someone saw within you that ability to go and take that kind of level of ownership and care and with more resources around you and some support, and then letting you run with it, you will create something out of nothing.

[00:17:52] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah. And it's funny, people

[00:17:54] Richard Washington: of gold dust,

[00:17:55] Mikey Pruitt: I just these MSP founders tend to have a hard time letting go of things. I'm like I can do that. I can make the thumbnail for this episode. I can do whatever. I can create the blurb, the description. Yeah. But, maybe you're not best suited for that.

[00:18:09] Richard Washington: Yeah, true. But why don't people delegate? It's one of the biggest things for a founder to let go of. Particularly, it's their baby, right? And often it's their family security is tied to it. The stakes are very high, but if you haven't hired the right people and you start giving people responsibility or the opportunity to take responsibility, and then they underwhelm.

And they make a mistake and they make it again, and then it causes this problem with your team or with your customers. Your reaction to that is gonna be, I've noticed a pattern I need to do with things myself. If you want something done right, you've gotta do it yourself, and then you are just a bit screwed.

You you are in this scenario where you feel like you are the best person in the business at doing those things. Can't build a business like that. You have to hire people that when you're watching them work in flow. Once you've given them the tools and the resources and the support and the expectations and the clarity, you are wowed by them.

They just wow you. You are watching them, and it's I cannot believe this person can do that. I could never do that. And if you get those people in different places on the pitch for you, then you create this team, which is much stronger than the founder by themselves. And in my experience, probably the number one reason why.

Businesses don't break out of founder sales because they just don't hire people who have the ability to help them to scale beyond the

[00:19:28] Mikey Pruitt: founder. So let's say you are one of those businesses trapped in that, average space and you want to break out and you listen to this and you're like, okay, I agree.

I'm going to go find some entrepreneurs. You find them you bring them on board, you try to set your expectations, and then you try to get out their way. What do you do then? Like, how do you not get your hands dirty? Do you have advice in that realm?

[00:19:55] Richard Washington: I think they have to get their hands dirty.

There's definitely a transition that happens. You can't just go I've hired the right person. Now I'm gonna get out their way, and I can just go and focus on all the things I wanna go and focus on. There's gonna be a big period of education and transition. You have to educate. It's like partners, right?

What's one of the big problems in the partner community? 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our partners, or in a lot of businesses. 90% of our revenue comes from 10% of our partners. Why? 'cause a lot of people sign up partners, they go, brilliant. Signed up. We'll check on you in a year. Show me your deal res, show me your revenue.

Why didn't you do anything? Why didn't you use your MDF? We forgot you existed. Exactly. So it is the same you. You don't just hire a partner and then expect them to be successful. You don't just hire a salesperson and then suddenly they start hitting quota. There is gonna be this period of. Them learning your business, having no expectation in terms of the outcomes they're gonna go and deliver.

If they make a great Im immediate impact, fantastic. But you have to give them all of the opportunity to learn and the right sort of person in an early stage business, if you're paying them well, we'll have that kind of like self-starter, here's the plan I need, here's my own plan to go in.

Breakthrough in your business. Maybe they do their own, you know what, 10 80 plan, and it's cool. From this point then we're gonna be ready to go and take it over. But you have to involve them in that process. I think when it doesn't work, is that if you bring someone in and the expectations are not clear around what they own, what their swim lanes are, what the outcomes we're trying to achieve are, what resources they do have, what they don't have.

What needs to come true for them to go and unlock that next level of resource to go and grow. Because we are cashflow sensitive and we need to make sure that we're spending money on the right things and not betting on bad things and continuing to burn. Once those expectations are clear, then you can treat it like individual projects.

Let's go and do work on this project with this outcome, with this goal, we test some hypotheses and then if we achieve it, fantastic, then we move on to the next thing. If we don't, we go back to the drawing board. And if you break it down into specific outcomes that you're working on together with really like partnership, level of communication around the problems that you're facing, then you've got a really good chance of getting there rather than here's the year one goal.

And then, you just try and do all these things at the same time and then get a feeling it's not working. They get a feeling it's not working, and then you decide that the relationship's broken. So I think you have to break it down into very clear outcomes. Responsibilities, activities, put a bit of a smart plan together, basically.

And then treat them like a partner. Yeah. Maybe create a plan together,

[00:22:34] Mikey Pruitt: perhaps.

[00:22:35] Richard Washington: Yeah. What's better than that? People, it's if you're building a territory plan with an account executive, if you said, here is your territory plan. The account executive is not gonna buy into that.

Whereas if you say new quarter, build your territory plan, we'll work on it together, let's coach you, but you give them ownership of it, it's much more likely to stick.

[00:22:52] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. Let's talk a bit about this entrepreneurial kind of culture, but like in the frame of a bus, a grow, a growing business.

Yeah. I'm thinking of Nvidia with their CEO, Jensen Wong and Brian Chesky from Airbnb. Sure. Have been, Nvidia has a very flat executive structure, so like it seems from the outside at least that Jensen Walk has. 40 or so intrapreneurs that report directly to him and they just go dominate in their specific business unit.

Yeah. And similar strategy for Airbnb. They're back to basics, like back to startup slash founder mode, like whatever. Is that something that you're seeing too?

[00:23:35] Richard Washington: Yeah, I think so. It's like the, we all have these hero, larger scale operations that we emulate. Same as Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos says that he doesn't want executives sitting in meetings learning about the brief.

You read the, the five page document before you let the most junior speed people talk first so they can get their opinion across. And then the most senior people talk last and Jeff Bezos doesn't talk. He's the very last person to talk. So he's encouraging this level of high level of responsibility and ownership within his business.

I think there's some golden lessons that we can learn from businesses who have been that level of that achieve that level of success. So I think it's the same principle. The worst case scenario is that you wanna hire all these people 'cause they're entrepreneurial and they're very talented and they've got a track record of doing things themselves, self-starters, all that good stuff.

And then you have the founder is the first person talking in every business meeting, commanding the company meetings, taking over sales calls, taking over client interactions, trying to do everything themselves. That person's level of motivation and belief and confidence will die very quickly. Whereas if you do the opposite, which is you are the last to talk, you let the other people talk first, you create an environment where their time is.

Respected and you protect their time. You not only give them the freedom to be to take ownership, but you respect their time in a way that you're not filling their diary of 30 hours of meetings a week and expecting them to go and be an effective coach to your team or to do a great job of managing your accounts.

[00:25:09] Mikey Pruitt: Exactly. It's funny, the, you are tick talent is really focused on startup talent, early stage. But now we're talking about how late stage, very successful businesses are also using this same model. Do you think that's like a, something that just happens naturally or is that something that's more like in vogue at the moment because.

People that are, high functioning have realized that, oh, that actually did work better.

[00:25:40] Richard Washington: That's a wonderful question. You've gotta take every company as an individual. I think why we are drawn to those stories like Nvidia, with the way that he approaches leadership and that he, cleaned more toilets than anyone else in the whole company in my whole life and Jeff Bezos's strategy around, being the last person to talk.

'cause we know that's the right thing to do. And for years, businesses haven't operated us that way. You have these dictator style leaders who just drill fear into everyone, tell everyone what to do, hold people to account without giving them decision, making power and wonder why they've got a toxic culture.

Or they promote the wrong people into leadership positions who haven't really been enabled, their accidental managers, who then don't have any of the coaching disciplines and the coaching frameworks and the leadership skills to go and build that next round of leaders and create the right culture and environments.

So there's a systemic problem around the way that we promote leaders into businesses and then enable them to be successful, give them the skills that they need. And then create an environment where there's succession planning, more leaders through the business. There's this whole culture of you are not good enough.

You missed your number. Bam, you're out. 17 months is the average tenure of A CRO today. And you see all these people getting RIFed by companies and fired to just be really blunt about it 'cause they didn't hit their quota, but the manager stays in place. So there's this whole problem that exists in the marketplace.

We all see the statistics around the amount of teams who are hitting quota right now, but it's always. There's 30% of teams hitting quota and 70% are missing it. You don't talk about 70% of companies are famed, hit their quota, and you don't really talk about the number of companies who are shutting their doors.

Just about the ones who aren't making IPO and aren't going public. I really believe there's a fundamental shift that's starting to happen inside businesses, and particularly a lot of these bus bigger businesses who are starting to riff large numbers of staff, and then those people are creating startups.

You see these wonderful infographics of like the alumni of Open AI people Yeah. Who are starting their own AI businesses. It's 50 businesses that have been created from the people who've worked at OpenAI. And that's a really new company. Yeah. And there's all these, when you see that, you're

[00:27:50] Mikey Pruitt: like, oh, three people from OpenAI started this new thing, you pay more attention to it.

'cause you're like, theyve been in the trenches.

[00:27:57] Richard Washington: I think this is gonna be stories like, toast, DoorDash, you see them all. They've got all these companies that are creative. So I think people want more freedom. Everyone would love to be the master of their own destiny. We came from a society where people had a craft, the Japanese call it Ikigai, but it was a craft.

You were a career, I don't know, blacksmith, you were a career butcher. It was like what you did, your family did, took pride in it. But now it's like we just chase this new thing, either because we want, we don't really trust that there's a level of. Security in businesses, so we just bet on ourselves.

Look after myself, I am the most important thing, or it is that external factors mean that you don't have that security anymore. It all is pulling us back to this. We wanna be much more in control of our destiny, but we need teams. I read a really interesting book recently, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, love and Work by Marcus Buckingham.

Wonderful book. He was a really big force in Gallup, who's one of the big research organizations in the world. And he's written this book called Love and Work, and he talks about an example in the book that really resonated with me, which is the oldest drawings in the world can be found.

Where are the oldest drawings in the world? Capes? Absolutely. They're in caves and there's art as old as 48, 40 8,000 years old. Which is absolutely ridiculous, and those cave drawings are often depicting a certain scene. And do you know what that scene would be?

[00:29:32] Mikey Pruitt: I'm picturing like Sun. The Sun and people reaching for it.

But

[00:29:36] Richard Washington: tell me, okay. Oh, that definitely what you think of with like Egyptian and Mayan art and stuff, right? Yes. But often it's humans and animals in a certain scene. What the human's doing to the animals. They're eating them, they're haunting, right? Yeah. So the earliest pictures that we drew as people are of a team, and one of the earliest drawings that was ever found in a cave had humans with animal heads.

And they think that the reason for that is because it was the characteristics of those people, the strength of a lion. The wisdom of an owl or whatever the indigenous animal is worth in that region. So people knew back then that we had people who had different strengths, and if you combine them together, you can create this ultimate team.

But in business, what we've done is we've created a role with a very clear responsibility of a job description, and we try and hire 10 people who perfectly match the jd. That's not how people work.

[00:30:32] Speaker 3: You

[00:30:32] Richard Washington: have people who are good at different things to achieve the same outcome. So particularly if you talk about salespeople.

Some salespeople are just closers. Like they get the thrill from the close. Some love to educate, and they're really getting into the technical detail. They geek out on that stuff. They connect with people about that. Some people are totally about relationships, but they all get to the same outcome in different ways.

If you measure them in the same way against the same MA matrix and KPIs, some of them would look like they're terrible, whereas some of them would look like they're great, but they could all be great at achieving the outcome. Or we try and get everyone to be a 360 rep. You're responsible for self gen through to close and maybe even renewal.

And we're going, you are not generating enough pipeline. And it's because I'm terrible at six. At three of those six jobs. So I think there's a huge part here, which is about what are the roles we create in businesses for people? Is it this one size fits all and account executive and our business has this let's set of things and they have to be perfect?

Or do we go, we're looking to get this outcome achieved. We need someone that's gonna take the level of ownership and care to go and get the outcome. And we are really happy to have different strengths within the team. So it really comes back to, at its very core, the fact that we've almost thought now that a team and like team leadership coaching and team culture is a solution to the problem that exists in business.

We've always needed teams.

[00:32:01] Speaker 3: But

[00:32:02] Richard Washington: people have just misunderstood that recently, and I think that particularly in an early stage business, you are trying to build a team where everyone has different strengths and the strengths of those people together makes you 10 times more powerful than one person trying to tell everyone else to do it their way.

[00:32:20] Mikey Pruitt: So autonomy and individual creativeness and, execution may have always been and always will be the makings of a great team, but it's easier to spot in our current age in the early stage company. Larger companies may have just realized this scenario is just true and it doesn't.

There. There is no middle. So we've been, we've been chasing the wrong thing for maybe 20, 30 years,

[00:32:51] Richard Washington: I really believe. So I think it makes, when shareholder value became like the most important metric, then where do people come on that list? It's Simon Sinek says it, doesn't it, if you, if your customers come first and your people come at least second,

[00:33:04] Mikey Pruitt: What do you think the best roles are to grab those entrepreneurial types?

Like what head of which business unit?

[00:33:13] Richard Washington: You need entrepreneurs in all business units where you want there to be innovation and culture. Bill. Otherwise you are relying on the entrepreneur to set the tone, which they definitely need to do, but they can't be like the master, all things, and you, they can't be good at everything.

So I can't think of a department where you wouldn't want someone who's highly entrepreneurial. There are roles that are more akin to it, where you get to be more creative. So certainly on the marketing and sales side, it's really important. You've got people who are highly capable of solving complex problems.

Then you get roles that are more operationalized, like operations and maybe Rev ops, customer success finance. But I would argue that those people are just solving problems in different ways. They're more systemized in their way of thinking, but they're solving equally complex problems. Just their solution to those problems isn't to just to create some magic and use their personality.

They're creating a. Systemized way of taking a customer through a set of problems. So I can't think of a role where it's not relevant to hire people who take that level of ownership and care and build a team and a culture and innovate to feed the wider beast, and to make everyone in the business more successful.

I think it's a big difference, right? If you think about, yeah, I would agree. If we're going back to like caves, we lived in tribes. It wasn't like every family was its own tribe. It was like we formed these tribes. Yeah, groups of families. Very few people wanted to be the leader. It took a lot of risk to be the leader.

You're probably gonna die, but everyone wanted to be part of a tribe that was strong and safe, and they had a clear role and a clear purpose. If not, you were called an outcast. You were out there, you are offending for yourself. You were either like a, a lone wolf. You're a, you're, you're off on your own thing.

Just fending for yourself. You're probably a criminal outcasted from society. But in reality, most people want to be part of a tribe. And I think that entrepreneurs are those people who take that kind of in entrepreneurial mindset level of leadership and ownership, but they love to do it in a group of people.

That's where they're happiest. And you need all different types of people. To make a very strong tribe.

[00:35:25] Mikey Pruitt: That's really interesting. I think it makes me think of a show that my wife loves to watch, like a survival show where someone goes off on their own and they survive in the wilderness and the snow and get their food.

And they're very lone wolf types, very, not very. Happy in society, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. And if you survive the longest, you get paid money, like half a million bucks or a million bucks, whatever it is.

[00:35:49] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:35:50] Mikey Pruitt: And it's always funny when they get later in the game, some of the people are, that are very doing well.

They're, eating, they're healthy they're getting fish and bunnies and whatever. And then they realize that they. Don't belong there anymore. They want to be back with their tribe. Yeah. Like they are. And I look, when I see those moments, I'm like, you just won, man. Like you just won.

You just your whole life. You just figured out what it's, what the important thing is, which is being with your tribe, your family, your community. And it's like amazing to see that transformation. And then they're like, I don't need a million bucks. I wanna go home.

[00:36:34] Richard Washington: So true. Yeah. So is it called Survivor of that program?

[00:36:37] Mikey Pruitt: Alone is that one, but yeah, alone. Okay.

[00:36:39] Richard Washington: I'd like to see it, but it just makes, it makes a lot of sense, right? You strip away everything. That's what people care about. But we're just in a world where all the incentives are about our personal gain, and often it's a zero sum game.

We are competing to be number one, and if you're not number one then you are no good. And if you're in the bottom 10%, then you're really at risk. Why is there a bottom 10% of teams? Because we're measuring them all against exactly the same KPIs and putting them on a leaderboard just seems wrong.

[00:37:06] Mikey Pruitt: Yeah, for sure. So we've been talking a lot about the kind of founders and the people hiring, looking for these entrepreneurs. How do you become an entrepreneur? Is it something you can become. For sure.

[00:37:21] Richard Washington: Yeah. So I don't think everyone wants to be, and I think that's fine. So there are a bunch of people who are just, their relationship to work and the importance they attach to work and what work means for them in their life is just a means to an end.

And it's probably the vast majority of society, they go to work. To get money to then be able to go and spend money and time on the things that they love. Boring. True, right? But it's the majority of people. We need people like that. We have to have it. It's just the reality. But you don't often hear them like talking about work with that glint in their eye.

There's a wonderful quote I read in the book called By Good Drive by Dan Pink. So the book Drive by Dan Pink, where he talks about a quote from WH or. Which is you need, I'm gonna say this again. You need not see what someone is doing to know if it's their vocation. You need only see their eyes. And it's true, right?

When you're talking to someone who loves what they do, like on this podcast when I'm talking to you, it's infectious the way they talk about it. So I think anyone that has that kind of level of excitement around what they do, and it doesn't have to be like this extrovert personality, big energy type people.

Introvert people have this just as strong, if not stronger, but there's that level of focus and connection with their task when they're doing it there in flow. If you feel that way about your job, about the activities that you are doing, it's natural that you'll wanna be the best you could possibly be around those things.

So therefore you'll be more creative. Therefore, you'll take more ownership. You'll want more responsibility. You are naturally volunteering for those tasks. They give you strength. So if you are in a place where that is how you feel about it, then it would be only natural that the company would be like, this is an amazing person.

They were a bit of a gravity bull. If we give this person some ability to take some more responsibility, they will be this infectious person who's gonna bring other people along on their journey with them. So you naturally become an entrepreneur. When you find flow, because the company will want people to be like you and you'll become a bit of an ambassador.

That could just be that you're a mentor to people. You don't have the title of like leader. You are just someone who's trusted to do trainings and. Evangelist and coach people, or it could be talking about

[00:39:40] Mikey Pruitt: me again, we're not talking about me here, Richard.

[00:39:42] Richard Washington: It could be the leader who actually has the responsibility of other people.

I think it's really hard to be an entrepreneur if you don't feel that way about your role. If you, it seems like drag

[00:39:55] Mikey Pruitt: almost every, not everyone, but a lot of people probably have a. Role that is perfect for them that they may never find what it sounds like, sad reality, right? Unfortunately, isn't it?

[00:40:07] Richard Washington: It's really hard if you're in that situation where you don't love what you do, but you really want more money, you really want more responsibility, you're just gonna get more burned out. Those things aren't gonna make you happier. An extra 50 K might same seem great, but if you are like having to trade your happiness and you're getting burned out, it's just not worth it.

Like your person with the million in the scenario.

It's not that important at the end of the day, what, where we're in flow, where we're losing time, where we get energized. That's worth everything to us because it gives us this purpose coming back to Ikigai, it's like what the world needs. And if we can all try and help people to play positions as part of society or teams or tribes, companies where they feel that kind of connection to what they're doing, it's only natural that you would give them the opportunity to take more responsibility.

I

[00:40:54] Mikey Pruitt: think that's what people are scared of. Like they think the thing that they're most in flow with is not important to the world. But then you see like things like YouTube taking off or TikTok or whatever. Yeah. And per a person like, doing a Rubik excuse as fast as they can on video, which seems like a very stupid skill.

Sure. However, they have millions of followers, millions of people getting joy outta watching them do this task that they effing love. Yeah. That is what the world needs. Like the thing that you are in flow with. Is what the world needs.

[00:41:30] Richard Washington: Yeah, for sure. And a lot of those things, right? You might not have that following.

So you might love Rubik's Cube that much, or you might love a computer game that much. There's a comedian in England called Jimmy Carr and he's very offensive, but he's also a bit of a genius. So when you hear him talking outside of his standup show, it, which is very soon gonna get canceled he talks with this incredible level of wisdom and he talks about video games or a proxy for career.

So why do you have all these young people who are spending so much time immersed in video games? It's a proxy for a career. It's a proxy for the games. The level of the game is a becoming a leader, earning more reputation and getting more responsibility. They're just doing that instead of finding their flow.

But I think if you can feel that way about a computer's game or a Rubik's Cube, once you find the right thing the world needs. And that you can make money from. Then suddenly, all that passion can absolutely be translated to that new thing, but you're gonna be doing way more good in the world, which is way more energizing and fulfilling than you just getting that com, level of completion on your game and unlocking that new boss.

[00:42:39] Mikey Pruitt: Awesome. I think we should stop it there, Richard on the high note. So thank you so much for joining me. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Try not to psychoanalyze me on our way out, if you don't mind.

[00:42:49] Richard Washington: I will do my best.

[00:42:52] Mikey Pruitt: Cheers Mikey.