Fractional
Fractional
Jay Rogers: The Pareto Principle
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Lance and Joshua invited Jay Rogers, the co-founder of 521dimensions.com, to share about his approach to fractional work, async remote work, and how the power of saying no has transformed his business.
Shownotes
So she's like judging like Captain Crunch.
SPEAKER_02Be
SPEAKER_00careful. Captain Crunch is like my whole childhood wrapped up in a bowl of milk.
SPEAKER_02Hey, I'm all for it. But it's even like they went all out. They got LEDs. They're doing video podcasts.
SPEAKER_03What is the general opinion on granolas?
SPEAKER_02I haven't even listened to an episode yet because they're going, they're recording like five, they're going all in. They're recording like five episodes and then they're going to start releasing them. So I have yet to hear this masterpiece.
SPEAKER_03All right. So for those, I just press record because we'll, we'll figure out our intro here in a second. So the podcast, when it comes out, will be called Snap Crackle Pod and this is your wife. What, is there a monetization model or are they just talking for the fun of it?
SPEAKER_02Oh no, they're just, they're just passionate about cereal. It's just something So I've
SPEAKER_03had a discussion with friends for a while now that there should be a cereal coffee shop that you basically just go get your cereal in the morning at this place or it's open year round. And but it's like a coffee shop, but not coffee. It's cereal. I like why doesn't
SPEAKER_02that exist? Didn't Michael Scott want to do something like that on
SPEAKER_03The Office? Lance, you want to introduce yourself briefly?
SPEAKER_00Howdy. Yep. I'm Lance calling in from the local library today. So enjoy the ambiance of library lobby. If
SPEAKER_03we have some background noise, this is not Lance's normal setup. He has a fantastic mic setup. We'll forgive him because we support local libraries. They are a part of our company and all that. This is episode, I'm getting lost on my numbers. What episode number is this? 14, 15. We're getting up there somewhere. Do you know Lance? I want to say it's 14. eight hours while we just sat and chatted the whole time. But welcome, Jay. It's good to have you here.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, thanks for having me. No, my wife truly enjoyed her sleep on that flight. So she was probably grateful that my chatty mouth was not next to her during the whole
SPEAKER_03flight. And what was so cool about us meeting is Jay's like, what do you do? I'm like, well, I work at this company called Automatic, which is not a name brand recognition. People outside of tech have never heard of it. And he's like, oh, yeah, I've been to one of their meetups. So we're like, all right, we've got to be friends. And so we just started chatting. And over the years, we primarily have just sent almost like long email letters back and forth to each other, like in the old days when we were kids. And I wanted to have you on because Lance and I love talking about so many things about business and how it ties with relationships and personal. Jay and I have also had some similar conversations. So that's what we're here to talk about. I have a loose agenda, but I know you have some ideas. So welcome.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, for sure. No, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_03I'm going to start off with a kind of of a very simple one, and then Lance will kind of probably go back and forth through the agenda. But Jay, interject at any point if you just have something cooler that you want to dive in with. Can I start off with this? Do
SPEAKER_02it, yeah. You gave me kind of a feeling of what fractional means, but in your terms, what does fractional mean? Because you kind of pointed me at like a fractional CFO is what you mentioned, something like that.
SPEAKER_03I'll let Lance answer that first, because we've been working on this identification for a while. What do you think it means, Lance?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I took a pass at putting this into words. I published an article called The Rise of the Fractional Executive. It's on my website, LanceHRobbins.com. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Sure. But basically the premise is that this is somebody who fills a strategic role with an organization. but not as an employee, right? As an independent. It differs from a consultant because consultants basically only focus on strategy, right? They come in, they do an analysis, they tell you what to do. And an employee or a freelancer comes in and you tell them what to do and they do it. So a fractional is someone who comes in and brings that consultative strategic vantage point from the experience that they have and from their point of view across the industry because typically they're working with multiple different organizations. So they have insights like a consultant would, but they also have built in the capacity and the chops to get in and put their hands on stuff and get it done. So they might come in, they might lead a team. Like if you're a fractional CFO, you might come in, you might take over the finance team. You might, you know, if you're an early stage startup in your fractional CFO, you might actually operate as the finance team, but you are also filling that strategic role. So if you think about a triangle of freelance, consultant, fractional, fractional is where both the strategic and the implementation come together.
SPEAKER_03And Jay, I just dropped the graphic from the article that we'll reference that you can kind of pull it up. We'll also have that for people listening that shows the Venn diagram between the three that he just described.
SPEAKER_02Oh, fantastic. Yeah, because when you kind of gave me that tip of, okay, I kind of started getting an idea of this. And Lance, I did check out your website. It's way cool, by the way. And I was like, okay, I'm thinking that this is going to be something that I can really relate to because my entire career has been fractional. And even being, quote unquote, on my own, I still serve a fractional role because we're only a two-person company. So... That really makes you wear a lot of hats and wear a lot of different roles.
SPEAKER_03Actually, this is perfect timing. Let's go into that. Let's just hear about what you do. I'm very curious.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I started back in IT consulting. And my current role now is we're doing 521 Dimensions, which is a consulting agency. We're just a two-person bootstrap company. And we have another brand that we call Server Side Up. That's kind of like our educational resources. We post tutorials. We have a book. We do a lot of open source work. And a lot of people say, and I use this very loosely, like, oh, that's so cool. You work for yourself. But at the end of the day, like you know being a consulting agency it's like I have 18 different bosses we're a two-person team and none of those bosses talk to each other and they all want everything tomorrow and for nothing which hey I get it but it is a very stressful position to be in especially when you're trying to work in like a long-term engagement of implementing like a massive software project you know like something like a core billing system like that isn't something that's written overnight so it's it's a lot of effort and you know when they it expect a lot of things to be built and you have other things going on. You have to be pretty honest and pretty flexible with things that are thrown your way.
SPEAKER_03I've got to ask a couple of questions here just to learn a little bit more about your business. Have you applied the Pareto principle to the 80-20 rule, like 20% of your clients often bring in 80% of the money? Have you already applied that to what you're doing?
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, I'm trying to stick to your agenda. We are here to do whatever sounds fun
SPEAKER_03for us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So what we've learned over the years, so we're actually going to be turning 12 years old next month and it's flown by. The biggest thing, especially being a consulting agency, you get into this pattern of trading hours for dollars and it's very stressful. I've worked with a lot of bigger agencies out in New York City and things like that and just witnessing the pressure and those amount of scenarios on larger Fortune 500 companies, you really have to be in a big grind. But when it comes down to you're working within a two-person team, you really have to be very selective. And what we found is this balance of understanding the true Every dollar that you collect from a customer has a different value. And since we are only a two person team, it puts us in that power of let's choose what we want to work on. And that's where we've actually stripped it from 18. And we're focused on only two projects now, which was very hard. The power of saying no. is very important because it allows you to open up and say yes to other things. And that's what we've been learning of trading hours for dollars. Giggle, giggle, you get the cash flow coming in. But longevity, when you're looking at the full picture of your business, what's that dollar worth after you work for it? It's just worth what you just gave away. And so that's what we've been working on with writing a book, writing software as a service. Those are assets. And we're doing the strategy of a one-time sale because I believe that I could get somebody to spend $150 one time, then $5 a month kind of deal. And, you know, but then also have that longevity for like a software as a service to, hey, we have a customer base that's residually paying us. And that's a really important strategy. I'm going to
SPEAKER_03just jump in with another question. Feel free at any point, Lance. What's the partnership like with you and your partner?
SPEAKER_02I'm super blessed. So when I started in tech... I actually, actually just starting on being on my own, we'll just call that right. I, I, Started working for my parents' manufacturing company, and it just didn't go well. It just wasn't my passion. I remember my neighbor Jared coming over one day and bringing a Windows 95 disk, and we reformatted my computer, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. From that point, my passion was in tech. So I got to know the IT guy that was servicing my parents' company, and he got me connected to work for the company that he was working for. Problem was, I didn't start until that And in that time over winter, he started his own business. So now you have this guy who's now servicing my parents' company that's no longer with the company that I'm now working for the next summer. When there was a server outage caused by this original company, my dad had to break it to him. Hey, we're no longer using your services. And guess who got the boot 10 minutes later from that company? It was me. I got fired because my parents no longer went with that company. So I was at a point of like, okay, I can either... I can either go get a job at Menards, which is a lumber store in the area, or I could go to Walmart. Yeah, yeah. Or I could go to Walmart. And I was just like, you know what? Screw it. Let's just try it out. Let's just build something here. And, you know... bootstrapping has always been like a true passion of everything you know of just starting simple and just continuously snowballing with what you have to just kind of make it happen and that's kind of like what we've embraced across all of our products and making sure that we can maintain our control and have our freedom too.
SPEAKER_00I'm really curious to go back to this trading time for money scenario. We've talked about this over and over again on this show. Yeah. So what I hear you saying is that you're creating products, whether it's a software product, it's a book, it's an educational resource to stop the time for money scenario. trade-off is, is there anything else you're doing? Are you billing? Are you billing client services by the hour today in any part of your business?
SPEAKER_02So originally we did start with, yes, just straight up hourly fees and it works well, but it becomes a problem a long time, a long term because you will hit your burnout. Um, And so the true answer for us is to change into where you're doing a monthly residual. But honestly, if we wanted to be an agency, which we don't, we just want to keep our customers and keep them happy and keep quality relationships with them, the best way if we wanted to be the best agency would be those residuals, but you have to be committed. And so that's where... Staying at something hourly gives us a lot more flexibility because it's like, well, hey, you know, like we'll bill on a project, but it's very like we start the project at this time. We end the project here. Here's what's included. This is the money. So the engagement is still in our control. And so to go to those monthly residual things possible, but. we would much rather have it in an asset, you know, like something, our product that we're doing is for developers called Bugflow. That's where it's like, well, this thing's just making money on its own. That's actually a really interesting
SPEAKER_03perspective because you're okay, like just running hourly because your long-term goal is more about the assets you're going to build. And so you don't need to make it perfect to get the exact like top dollar out of like monthly residuals with your clients because like they're paying the bills right now, but I'm guessing that's not where 10 years from now you want to be.
SPEAKER_02For sure. I've worked with a number of agencies across so many different parts of different economic statuses throughout the country and the world. It gets a dangerous game when you start looking at customers just based off of how much money they have. I've just been very fortunate, both Dan and I have been very fortunate to just work together and find people that work well with us. And that's the most important thing. So I always say, set your relationships first. And then, unfortunately, it is reality. You can't do all your work for free, but... we're very fortunate to have the customers that we have and take good care
SPEAKER_00of them. And who are your customers? What does an ideal customer look like to you? If there's somebody out there listening and they're in your profile, who are they?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the one guy that we're working with, him and his wife, it's just another two-person team. He's a self-funded bootstrapper. Started off working as a full-time job, started a YouTube video on the side. Um, he, he runs Rick run good.com and you know, what he did is he, he built this whole golf data stuff and took off to the point where now he's a CBS sports consultant for, for the whole golfing franchise. So to, for him to be invited at PGA and just start up on the side, like a very impressive, uh, and fantastic individual to work with. And, you know, the, the other guy that we're working with is a guy named Joe is a friend of mine locally. And same thing. He's self-funded. He's got the freedom. He's got the experience. We're building him a product called Nucleo, which is an internet service billing platform. And it aligned a lot with our values of where we're big believers in the tech world of not just putting everything into the cloud, like it's self-hosting, all this other stuff. So it's always about what you have that product market founder fit kind of thing. And just even on our client projects, like, is this something that fits with us? Because we've had great opportunities come up to us. But since we're able to keep our team small, just to just Dan and I, it's easy to keep two people
SPEAKER_03busy. And are you just running hourly with both these clients, these ideal clients right now?
SPEAKER_02Um, there, yeah, it's, it's hourly. And then, you know, we, we basically go into like an architectural fee, which that, that, that ticks off a lot of people to be quite frank, you know, in order for us to give you a price on something, I'm a very tangible and detail oriented person. So that's the thing that stinks about tech, right? Like, Oh, I want to build an app. Well, you can't really hold the app in your hand unless if it's, you know, I guess you could claim a phone, but even that, like you can't hold the code in your hand. So I spend a lot of time documenting and that's kind of like the architectural fee. And with that, we, we go through like an hourly deal, but then once we hit a point of, okay, this is the problem, we clearly focus on the problem and here's the solution to everything, including designs and all this other stuff. This is exactly what you're going to get. That's, that's a fixed price. You know, a lot of people, a lot of people vomit at that, right? Because they're like, Oh, how do you, how do you not do scrum or agile or this, that it's just like, well, it, whatever, pick the tool that works for you. There's a hundred hammers and we all hit the same thing. Like, Hitting it a different way isn't the wrong thing. All
SPEAKER_03right, I've got to just deviate here. What are your thoughts on Agile?
SPEAKER_02For sure. I don't know if I've ever been a part of a project that's been true Agile. Can you define for the
SPEAKER_03audience what Agile is supposed to mean? And then I want to, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. Oh, dude, it's going to be such a bad definition because like my understanding of this is the thing. I cannot define it because I don't think I've ever been a part of a team that's properly done it. And, you know, my experience with it was, you know, the waterfall methods, the devil and blah, blah, blah. And you got to you got to make sure that you're you're meeting every week and and you're you're changing things every day and you got to maintain the flexibility so You're constantly solving that problem. We kind of took a hybrid approach. I felt like Agile was just kind of like this complete loosey-goosey kind of thing, and we just spent a lot of time in meetings. And then the waterfall method is like you're trying to predict every millimeter of landing on the moon, and you have no idea how to get there. So we just kind of took this base camp approach of if a release is going to be six weeks or more, I was going to ask if you use the shape up method.
SPEAKER_01You got to trim it down. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I don't know if we follow like a defined method, but the way that we do it is we, you know, we're 12 years in or coming up on 12 years into this business. Just putting it into a scenario of, well, okay, we know if this is going to be bad to add this, or, you know, if we can get it out the door faster and start using it, that's our number one goal. I would much rather, I explain it like football. I don't know if people watch a lot of football on here, but think of it as rather than sitting at the 20-yard line and trying to throw a Hail Mary and trying to get a touchdown, I focus on four plays to a first down. Move it forward. That's my approach to a project. And there are going to be things. As you continue in that project, you're only going to become smarter every day. But still, at the same time, I... cannot stand sitting in meetings talking about what we're going to do. And you mentioned this about synchronous versus asynchronous.
SPEAKER_03Let's go right into that. My priority. What do you think about synchronous versus asynchronous? This is a massive topic here on our podcast.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I would say your best method is going to be asynchronous first. That's the first tool that you should grab. But there's also very complicated things. Synchronous should be scheduled. You know, if you're working with somebody and they're in their brain space, they're in their creative zone, it is very bad for you to call somebody and take them out of that space. I'm a huge Basecamp fan. And, you know, I think as Jason Freed might have even said it of, you know, work is like sleep. If somebody is waking you up every 20 minutes, you're not going to get a good night's sleep. And so that's where synchronous is great. But you can't just... fit life into those two buckets either you need to have spontaneity and that's like something very important for me to have because the best business ideas between dan and i have always been spontaneous conversations so it's the discipline of knowing of like you know I've really got to get something done, but we're vibing on a pretty cool idea. You let it roll. But then there's times where all of a sudden Dan and I are starting to talk about the doom of AI and how it's going to take over everything and blah, blah, blah. It's like, Dan, we've been on this for four days in a row. I'm like, we've been on this topic for four days in a row. I better get back to Figma and get something done.
SPEAKER_03Do you and Dan work remotely from each other?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And you know what? I just realized I never answered your question on partnerships before. But yeah, so I'm very fortunate. I met Dan as a random roommate in college. I actually applied to live in these suites on campus. They were just being built. I went to University of Whitewater and they're building Staren Hall. So I applied a year and a half in. I had three other friends. And all of a sudden I got uh a letter a week before saying i got a new roommate and knowing res life That was something that I was like, okay, I know they screwed up. I know everybody that I'm living with. And sure enough, one of my friends was like, dude, I lost my job halfway through summer. I have to find a new place. So knock, knock, here comes Dan with the thing of computers. And he says that he likes red hot chili peppers. I'm like, dude, we're going to get along great. So that's where we met, staring 521. That's why it's called 521 Dimensions. And yeah, he's always had a dream of living in California. So he picked up in 2015, moved to California, and we've been 100% remote ever since. And yeah, like he's well, he was actually supposed to be back in for a wedding this week. But unfortunately, I think there was something with the FAA and United where all these flights got canceled. So unfortunately, you know, I won't see him now. But yeah, so like we get together maybe once a year, but we we video chat. all the time. And we're talking with each other almost every day. And to be frank, I mean, it isn't all just roses and daisies. You know, like when we started off as a partnership, it just came down to, well, what do you do? Do you do 51 and 49? And then, you know, you talk about the shotgun method of, well, one person has 51% of the company. And then, after like two years, that one or that 2% flops over to the other person. And then that's how the contract's written. And, you know, we both looked at it and we're like, regardless if we have 51 or 49, if we lose the other partner, we're screwed. So we just did straight up 50, 50. And we're like, this is how it's going to roll. And so after college, we moved in as roommates and that was unique because it was, we were, roommates, we were best friends, And we were business partners. So it's like there was a lot of interaction and we had no idea what was going on. Right. Like I just turned down a corporate America job with like full insurance. It was the 22nd best company in America to work for. They're so proud about that. And here I am living in this like college town apartment making five hundred dollars a month and I've got an air mattress like and then like Dan and I have no idea what we're doing. We're trying to bootstrap this company. So, yeah, like things things figured itself out, obviously. When we went remote, we made one major mistake. A, we both work from home and especially with people working from home. I always advise people. make sure you're staying on top of your healthy routines. Because when the stress of the computer is right off of your bedroom door every day, and when you get into that mindset of like, oh, I'm awake, I'm going to figure out, or I'll just answer this one quick email, and then I'll go take a shower. And then all of a sudden, 5 p.m. rolls by, and you're like, oh, crap, I didn't even feed the dog this morning. You know, like something like that. Like, it's a very... nasty thing to get into. So when you amplify that, when Dan first moved to California, we struggled because we would never video chat. We would just talk over the phone. And I guess at the time, I mean, that was around like 2016, 2017, there's video chatting options, but it wasn't as what we have post COVID, right? So we would just talk over the phone and that really drew us apart. because we weren't seeing each other's reactions. It's kind of like texting, right? There's a lot of room for misinterpretation, especially when somebody says something and you don't see their facial reaction, you lose a lot of that delivery. And it finally hit a boiling point where we almost didn't make it. And it wasn't until we just said, okay, like we were both going through like this identity crisis because we put our identity into the company. And then once we hit that boiling point, it was healthy for us because we both took a step back and we're even open with each other. Maybe this isn't going to work. And then we put the identity and who we wanted to be. And then we made sure that the company fit into that. And that is what fixed everything. And then we just wrote everything down, what went wrong, how we solve it. We video chat, we stay in touch. And even with him being over 2000 miles away, like he's still my best friend to this day. And it's because we almost lost each other. We both, you know, it's easy for you to be like, oh, grass is greener on the other side. But as soon as you walk up that hill and see what that other side of the hill looks like and know that once you go over that hill, there's no going back to what you had. We both really appreciated what we had. And that's what really grew our business partnership.
SPEAKER_03That that's amazing. Um, I I've got more questions, but Lance, I want to give you a chance.
SPEAKER_00Good. Not worried about that. Um, wow. That's a great story. Um, it's kind of a, that's, it sounds like it's a scary place to say right at the top, at the crest where you can see both sides, right? Like what if I would have gone down the other side, right? Like imagine the loss. Um, how do you, um, how do you, as, as a fractional, um, microagency, I guess, for lack of better terminology. How are you finding work? How are you finding clients? You just shared how you stripped down from 18 down to two. If you need to add a couple of clients to your portfolio, how does that happen for you?
SPEAKER_02Well, the biggest thing is that where we started was actually volunteering. And that's where, you know, when Joshua told me that he worked at Automatic, it was like, dude, I volunteered at WordCamp. And that that was huge for us because, you know, that was back in the day when I was sleeping in the apartment on the air mattress. And then it wasn't until we went there and we just started helping out, not just attending events like that. Like conferences are great, but the best thing that you can get is to just go help out because then you meet the real core motivated people. And that's, that's really got us connected. Then all of a sudden we went from sleeping into, you know, in this apartment in Whitewater to taking the train down to Chicago and we're meeting downtown. And then it was just like, holy crap, this is crazy. I'm a nobody kind of thing. And you went through that. It was cool because it's like, wow, now we finally have money. But then you realize that money is not the most important thing. So then when you deal with other customers that just... just yell at you because, well, a project scope should be free. You should just tell me what the price is before I pay you. It's like, sorry, man, I'm going to put probably about 80 to 100 hours of my life into this document. I don't want you to just tell me that it's going to be too expensive. So finding work, start off by doing You know, just volunteer at your events. The book has helped us out dramatically. Dan is like a machine. He just creates content like crazy. He wrote some 500 page tech book. And it was cool because it's like this cool technology. But what helped is it kind of established our method. And we were also experts of our method. So when people buy your book and then they contact you that, hey, we really like your mindset, it was very easy for us to onboard them as customers because we didn't have to sell them anything. It was like, oh, you want this? Well, we can give you this. You know, just creating content is huge because... It gives you a personality and establishes the authority for you and your own methods that you're creating. And honestly, the methods that you create may not only be the best thing, but that's what I learned in open source by putting myself out there and being vulnerable. I learned so much from other people. Be like, hey, did you ever think of this? I'm like, oh, crap, I didn't. And that's a huge help.
SPEAKER_00I want to rewind back to the concept of healthy habits when you're working from home. What are some of your healthy habits? What are the things that you do to break up your day? How do you keep sanity? I mean, I see you're in a co-working space. Maybe that's important for you to get out in a different environment. But what are the things that are not work that you love?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So that's, that's a very important thing. Age is any sort of general getting out of the house. Every doctor, you know, will recommend that, you know, a half hour walk is considered cardio exercise, something as simple as that. You know, I'm a dog dad. So, you know, when I have a little huddy buddy with me, you know, he's a little black lab that has like endless energy. Okay. Let's just take them for a walk. That's super healthy. Even if you can be creative with your meeting time, you know, like I said, okay, well you know, video chatting is important if you're working with a partner remotely, but you know, maybe there's times it's just better, you know, just do like the Steve jobs method, just throw in some AirPods and just walk down the street and just meet that, just talk remotely. So it all just comes down to diet and Exercise, you know, just the really fundamental foundational things and just getting out of the house and just socializing with people because when it hit. Sorry, I was waiting for that moped to go by. When it hit about. When COVID started in March of 2020, that's where it was really depressing because they were defining quarantine. And it was just like, oh, this has been the last eight years of my life. This is what it has been. It was weird because my friend Bevan, he literally built this building by himself. And all of a sudden, I was the first one to move in. So while everybody was just kind of getting out of the office and figuring out how to work remotely, I was actually getting into an office. And for me, at least for my personality type, having a separate work environment, not at home, helped my mental health dramatically. It was able for me to just leave it all bottled up and I can close the door and just even a short commute, a break from it is very healthy in your mind as well.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's fantastic. I know Lance has an office where adjacent to his home that he walks between. I'm curious, how does, how is that for you, Lance? Do you feel like that's not enough or is it just right?
SPEAKER_00Oh, to me, that's just right. So I, I have this, um, I don't know if this is a good thing or not, but it's an uncanny ability to just kind of like tune out the world around me. So there are days like if Sophie's going to go for a walk or something and I don't have a meeting, I'll just sit on the couch. Right. So I'm like physically present where the kids are. Um, but I am completely like checked out from what they're doing. I can write a blog. I can answer emails. I can do all kinds of stuff. It's like I have life-canceling headphones on.
SPEAKER_03That feels like a good thing with what you're doing. It feels like a superpower,
SPEAKER_00actually. It's a unique thing. So I can do that. So for me, I don't really need a huge degree of separation, but it is really nice that I walk out the door, I go 10 steps, and I go to the office that's built onto my garage, and I have my own separate space. I can even lock that door. There's a podcast or an important meeting going on. They know, hey, Dad's in there. The door's locked.
UNKNOWNYeah.
SPEAKER_00And I do have sort of this like checkout zone I can go to. So that's really, really helpful. And then when I go in, I leave my, 90% of the time, I just leave my laptop in there. Like it doesn't come in the house a lot of the time. So work stays there a lot easier.
SPEAKER_02I've seen this huge wave of this like trend of people ordering like construction containers and putting it in their backyard. And I think it's way cool because even just a, You know, even if it's five steps out your door, it's still a physically separate space. And the most important thing is, is that it's setting expectation. You know, like we need to be husbands. We need to be friends. We need to be sons, you know, like all that. But at the end of the day, it's like we also need to go to work. And that is a really important thing to just have like, hey, everybody, I'm here. You know, obviously, if something dramatic were happening, come on in but it's not like hey you know like you know when my wife lost her job bless her heart she was super nice to me but it was like always just asking me questions on hey should I do this today it's like do what you want I just need to finish this design kind of thing so
SPEAKER_03I have a friend who shall rename he shall be unnamed he described to me that it was driving him crazy that his sweet wife was like hey can what do you think about this she just she saw him there physically in her space and she was So excited just to interact with him throughout the day. And he's like, he felt bad that he started getting snappy to her. She wasn't not doing anything wrong whatsoever. And so finally he had to say like, Hey, I'm in don't talk to me mode. And like, this is where I've got to focus. And it's interesting. I've been also a little snappy with my wife and I've gotten better at saying like, well, Maybe I shouldn't do this, but what I say is like, I, I can take breaks and come talk to you, but if you interrupt me during one of my breaks, I hope it's an emergency. Cause that really like messes up my, how I'm focusing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, for sure. And you know, at the end of the day that if somebody is next to you and they want to spend time with you, spend time with them, you know, like that's the most important thing. Like every, every day is a huge blessing. So I felt real bad saying those types of things. And you have to be disciplined too, of even though that you have to, I have this space that you're not just like some, you know, gremlin troll going in there and be like, no, I'm working. It does come with discipline and balance. And, you know,
SPEAKER_03go ahead. Actually, I highly recommend this book in a different way. Stephen King wrote this book called On Writing, where he just describes himself as a writer and what he did. And he's like, life is more important than my work. If my kids need to come in and interrupt me and say, hey, dad, can you take us when they were little? Like, hey, can we go do this thing? He's like, the answer is almost always yes. Like, yeah, I'm a writer. Yeah, I've got this important business, but it's not as important as my wife and kids needing me. And I really appreciated that balance of, you know, he still would get about four to six hours of work of writing a day. But if they need to cut out and go to a baseball practice or whatever, he does it. And that was encouraging for me to see from someone who I view as very successful, there's a balance in it.
SPEAKER_00Oh, for sure. I wonder if there's like, I don't know, I almost want to use the word privilege to this though, like where I think it's easy for Stephen King to say, oh yeah, I can take off. Like what hurt is that, right? But what about the solopreneur who's like trying to get their business off the ground and are they going to make bills this month or no? I
SPEAKER_03would say having been in both, I've been in a position of privilege and also I've been in a position of absolute stress and chaos and like, don't talk to me. I've got to work. Um, so my experience is when I've been like that I got sick twice in a month I got incredibly stressed I was just like knocked out flat on my bed because of I've got to push push push don't talk to me and I just disappeared for a month and I told my wife that and that was not sustainable instead what I found is I hit a point every day where I know I'm just done and I understand it though Lance because I've been in that absolute tension and stress of I literally have to have money in my bank account in a week leave me alone everybody I've got to figure figured this out, but it's not sustainable past maybe a couple of days.
SPEAKER_02No. Yeah. You have to accept your limit. That's the most important thing. And the more that you accept your limit and you understand that there's creativity to solve those problems, then the answer is discipline. Like when you I was getting interrupted all the time. It felt like I lost control of my day as soon as it hit 9 a.m. Because, you know, we work in a thing of where Dan is a very good programmer and it takes a lot of brain space to develop stuff, especially like when you're doing like data efficiencies, all that other stuff. So that's what we focus on was just making sure that Dan's in a good brain space. I am forced to be in like the UI design. My passion is like the nerdy server stuff, but I was forced to be in UI design. So now I'm using, I go from left brain servers to right brain, like art almost, but then I'm also doing customer support. I'm doing payroll and accounting, you know, all these other roles on top of it. And then, you know, making sure that I'm supporting Dan as well. Like it gets pretty chaotic. So in that chaos, I accepted, I can't get mad because people are wanting to talk to me or people are asking for help. It was like, well, what can I do? What's in my control? And I just started waking up at 4 a.m. It sounds miserable, but honestly, it was like the best thing ever. Like if you set your body clock to get up early, I would go for a run. I'd go for a 5K run in the morning at 4 o'clock. I'd come back by 4. 4.30, 4.45, I'd be up showered on the computer. And from 4.45 until 9 a.m. was the most productive time. And it was cool because I had the freedom and flexibility to do that. And if you're going to work for yourself, you need to take advantage of those things. Because if you don't, you might as well just go work for somebody else because... you get a lot better health insurance benefits. You know, like, I mean, I'm very fortunate that my wife has a good job and they have good insurance and they're a large company because if you're anything less than 50 employees, there's no such thing called negotiation on a health insurance contract. So, you know, just keep those in mind. But What I also learned in that by getting up at 4 a.m. is I wasn't being a good husband because I was going to bed at 8 o'clock. What kind of party pooper is that? Then I just found this really good balance. My healthiest days now are I text a group of friends, hey, I'm going for a bike ride. Anybody want to join? I'll have four or five friends join. I say, okay, 6 o'clock my house. We just go for a 20-mile bike ride. Come back. It's 7.10, 7.30 by the time you're all wrapped up. And then on the computer I go, get everything done, just understand I'm a morning person, get it all done. By afternoon, okay, now I'm going to do customer support. I'm going to do this. It's just being more disciplined and selective in the work that you have. I
SPEAKER_00think there's different seasons too. You find the balances that work within the season that you're in.
SPEAKER_02100%. Yeah. Yeah, and you're exactly right because there's days I feel like designing, there's days I feel like writing server code and ride the wave. That's the best way.
SPEAKER_03All right, so I've got to pivot because I've had this question in my head that was not on the agenda. What do you think about Apple's new Vision Pro headset?
SPEAKER_02Oh boy, that was a pretty loaded release. The thing that shocked me about it most was I think that they were just trying to put it into our hands and help us answer the question, what do we do with this? Because there were a lot of use cases, but I didn't see a lot of practicality. For us to be walking around with those headsets on our head for eight hours a day, first, I'm just especially for a person who sits at a desk all day, I'm wondering how our body physics will react to that. That's not gonna be good for your neck. And it's a very cool concept, but they kind of took like, I can kind of explain it to Tesla, right? Like when they came out with the Model S, I believe it was, was the first one. And that was the most expensive thing. Then the
SPEAKER_03Roadster, then they officially
SPEAKER_02made their own. Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah. And so they start with the most expensive one and just kind of like work their way down from there. And I think that's them just trying to figure things out. Now, the other thing that was shocking, I think the biggest thing about that was they mentioned machine learning, but then they never had an official response to AI. And I think that's interesting because when you look at what it takes to power AI, you need two things. You need lots of hardware. You need lots of data. And Apple's really good at making chips. So I don't know. It's going to be really interesting, but they clearly had a lot of setbacks with it. It's argued with it being announced this year. Was it two, three years too late? You know, we had Meta come out with their Oculus stuff and the Metaverse, and that's kind of like turned into a little bit of a laughing thing. But then all of a sudden, like you started to get into Apple now being, they're nearing $3 trillion is now entering the space. What's the end game for it? And obviously those are going to be cards held closely to their chest.
SPEAKER_03So are you thinking of making anything for it? like an app, an experience?
SPEAKER_02I mean, my biggest excitement about it was the whole like monitor thing, have a lot more freedom to do something like that. Um, I'm, I'm a big person that I'm a tech person, but I love low tech solutions and I only use tech to solve a pretty well thought out problem. And so I could see collaboration being a big thing of assisting somebody. You can work within not just full virtual reality, but augmented reality is way cool. But to have Was it an 8K monitor? I forget what they even said. Is it a 5K monitor like right on your head? Yeah,
SPEAKER_03it's two 4K monitors that blend together. Yes. So I'll go on record of saying I'm incredibly bullish on this. I think it's going to change how people like us who sit at a desk are able to work. I think it's going to be massive. I might start needing to do some neck strengthening exercises. But I was just talking to my chiropractor. I just came from an appointment. And one of the things he was calling out is His wife travels a lot on an airplane. He's always trying to make sure she's ergonomically set up. She's always leaning forward into her screens. And I just described it briefly to him. He's like that. He's like, I could see the wheels turning, that he immediately was excited that this could change how his wife works with 10 hours in front of a computer. It could be a good thing to her because she's just going to sit in one location, but could she have massive monitors in front of her? So I'm very excited about this. I've been spending way too much time researching it.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's awesome. I mean, let's just put it this way. The tech's going to catch up. Yes. You're not going to have a battery pack in your pocket walking around in the next five revisions of the Vision Pro. It's no different than the iPhone 1. It was just, let's prove the concept. We can mass produce this. There is a market for this. Let's continue to innovate it. I think it's brilliant on holy cow, especially the interface that they came out with. It was no different than the iPhone. It was like we had the concept of these BlackBerrys and these portable internet connected devices. But when they brought the web browser, the iPod and the phone all together in one device, it was just like, holy cow, it was revolutionary. So I'm excited for it. It's going to be interesting on how we interact because the timing of AI is going to be interesting because that's going to change with how we interface with technology as well. So, but we will always need a consuming device.
SPEAKER_03I'm going to make a bet that I think they're doing a ton with AI. They're just not going to use the label. I've been testing out the new iPhone version iOS 17 software and they've done a lot with the dictation. They're calling it large language learning models, but they're not saying AI. I think they just don't want to be bandwagoning, but I think they're doing a ton behind the scenes that's very similar.
SPEAKER_02I truly respect the way that they're running AI or machine learning, they call it, locally on their chips. The intelligence behind taking a chip and having it do one job very well is absolutely brilliant. And I was just talking to some guy today, too. The biggest thing that concerns me about all this artificial intelligence stuff is just privacy concerns. You know it's bad when Google is coming out with their own, was it Baird or whatever, and they're telling people not to put sensitive stuff in there.
SPEAKER_03Well, and have you seen this happen in the last week? A, we are now having problems where AI is getting recursive. It's picking up on other things from that AI has done on the internet and it's using that to run back into the models. So it's actually, have you ever seen the movie duplicity?
SPEAKER_02No, I haven't.
SPEAKER_03It's hilarious. It's with, it's this guy who makes a copy of himself to do his day job so he can hang out with his wife. But then the copy of himself makes a copy multiplicity. Yeah.
UNKNOWNOkay.
SPEAKER_03The copies start making copies of themselves to do the work they don't want to do and finally comes back home and there's like four copies running around and the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy is basically this guy who can't even verbalize words and he just like slaps food on his face. It is hilarious. I think the AI is starting to get recursive and I'm curious what that'll mean.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, you can definitely take the whole topic of AI itself and just magnify one part of it and make a good point of it's really awesome or it's really bad. It's just going to be interesting. And just like, you know, we're in the wild west days. Like we're still, we don't even understand fully and how it's even coming up with its answers sometimes. And as we progress into like the large thing, I remember like starting with Facebook where it was like, oh, it's so cool to be on Facebook. And then next thing you know, I was like, my aunt is on Facebook. Like once it starts to get to that level, it's going to be weird. But I don't know. Like it, this is definitely when I use chat GPT for the first time it was, I remember Dan called me. He was like, dude, I know you're super busy, which I was. And he's like, but this is crazy. You got to check this out. And it was like the first time I heard, you know, the screeching noises of dial up. It was as revolutionary as that because it's AI isn't anything new, but it just became extremely accessible. And that was the breakthrough for humanity of like, holy cow, like I could just run this chat GPT app on my phone and have it come up with like a autobiography or a biography on like Abraham Lincoln, but as if Snoop Dogg wrote it. And it was just like, this is crazy, very useless output, but it's just crazy that the computer even knows how to do this.
SPEAKER_03I did a haiku or a poem of Dragon Ball Z where one of the characters is like fighting Superman. And I had it give me a poem for that. And I sent it to my brother like this is amazing. Okay, so we're almost at time here. Is there anything that you want to talk about that we didn't ask you or cover?
SPEAKER_02Oh, the only one that I wrote down was the challenges of of working remotely. But the big thing that I want to ask you guys is, what books do you guys recommend? Along? you know, this fractional group. I don't know if you talk about this every week.
SPEAKER_03We actually usually ask other people what books they recommend. I love the question back at us. I, I would recommend shape up the book from base camp. It's free. It's fantastic for how work should get done. And I'll put that in the show notes because it, it assumes async first. And if, if a team can truly like ignore shape up basically, Ignore 95% of it if you want, but if you can get into your processes that async happens first and then synchronous happens, then remote can be a possibility. Then fractional can be a possibility. But if decisions can only get made when you're in a meeting at the same time, your individual contributors, like your designers, your programmers, they will get burned out. They will not do great work. So that's a big one I'd recommend. The other... is Deep Work by Cal Newport. Anything he's written, but Deep Work is fantastic. Lance, do you have any... I read a lot, so I have so many book recommendations, but I'll stop with those two. Anything from
SPEAKER_00you, Lance? Yeah, a couple that come to mind for me. The one I'm into right now is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. That book blew my mind. That was so good. It's continuing to blow my mind. It's a long book. It's quite a lot to take in, but yeah, it's super fascinating to listen to that journey. The other is Range, but by David Epstein. That's a really important one as well. And I'll also throw in Traction, Gina Wickman's work on Traction. I've run into so many clients as a fractional who comes in from a strategic point of view that can just see your business needs an operating system and it's such a mess. So trying to recommend things from the traction framework has been helpful.
SPEAKER_03I'll also recommend Essentialism by Greg McKeown. You can go in a million directions a millimeter at a time, or you can pick one direction and nail it. So Essentialism, and he also has a follow-up where he burned out, and he called it effortless. That was the follow-up book. Both fantastic. Very
SPEAKER_00cool.
SPEAKER_03Cool. Lance, you get the last question.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. Well, where can we find more about you and your work and your business?
SPEAKER_02So the easiest way is to just go to jdrogers.com. So it's J-A-Y, letter D as in dog, and then Rogers, R-O-G-E-R-S.com. I have all my social links on there. My most active things are Twitter and GitHub. I accidentally started a Twitter war today over – I bought a – $4,000 MacBook Pro and a $500 MacBook, or I'm sorry, Mac mini. And I said, Hey, like, I don't notice a performance difference. So just ignore, ignore that post in the war that's now going on. You end
SPEAKER_03the episode with that statement and I have so many thoughts on that. All right. We'll link to the Twitter thread as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So no, thanks for having me guys. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much. All right. And one last thing, if anyone has any follow-up questions, email at onboard.com. Oh my goodness, I'm doing the wrong one. Email at... Info at fractional.fm. It's email at fractional.fm. Email at fractional.fm. We got this. I'm not even going to
SPEAKER_00cut that out. It's hilarious. Try one of those. I'm going to stop recording.
