SPEAKER_02: 0:00

All right, welcome to Fractional episode 41. I'm here with my co-host, Joshua. I'm Lance. And today we have an exciting guest joining us to talk about fractional stuff, building a career. And we're excited to have Eric Friedman, founder of Go Fractional, joining us. Thanks so much, Eric. Thanks for having me. Excited to have you here, excited to talk more. But yeah, tell us a little bit about why Fractional is so interesting to you. How did you discover this? It's obviously a seriously trending topic over the last year or so. Yeah, I would love to hear your story getting into this.

SPEAKER_01: 0:38

So as you mentioned, I'm co-founder of a business called Go Fractional. So you probably immediately see the bias with the name and the trend. And it really serves two ongoing trends that exist. One is with companies and clients, and they're choosing to go fractional to basically solve their problems. And we can get into more of that later. And the other is people. So members or talent. And they're choosing to go fractional to live their life as a professional, either by building something on the side or because of other obligations. And we can unpack that side too. What's led me here is actually doing fractional work myself. So I started out as a fractional COO over the last few years and was hit up by a lot of people and founders. Hey, can you come do fractional COO work for me? And the answer was, no, I'm booked, but you should talk to this person. And that grew into a bench of people. And then I met back up with my co-founder, who had a bunch of more technical people. And when you get hit up, when you get a tap on the shoulder, when you hear what someone is doing, to be able to answer that call with, hey, you should talk to so-and-so, they're going to help you right away. It's kind of a great way to think about helping people. And that turned into the business we run today, which is a marketplace for talent. called Go Fractional.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57

Awesome. So this is a topic that we have discussed with different guests and between ourselves over and over again. What is a fractional? How would you define a fractional? There are people who get very passionate about what they believe it means to be fractional. Other people are pretty loose with their definition of it. How do you see it? What does it mean to be a fractional? Is there a differentiation between a fractional, a freelancer, a contractor? Super curious how you shape

SPEAKER_01: 2:24

this up in your mind. It's a good question. And I think about fractional versus a consultant. And so for me, a consultant from a large acronym based company with, you know, hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of employees, they come and they deliver a slide deck and it's up to somebody else to instrument the findings or to take that strategy and turn it into actual tactical work. For me, anyone on the go fractional bench can write the strategy and and then execute and tactically do the work. And I think that's what most people are looking for instead of the air cover associated with like a consultant that delivers a slide deck. They say, we talked to so-and-so and they gave us this advice, so it's their fault. And this is a little bit different where you have a seasoned, very senior person working alongside probably an earlier stage in their career team.

SPEAKER_00: 3:18

That's a great distinction there. When I've been able to come in and help people I've noticed that, yeah, they're happy with ideas, but they also need those ideas done. They need something to happen with those ideas, which is why they're coming to a fractional person. That's what they're kind of expecting. And I think that's a great distinction where Lance and I were both part of an agency where we would do consulting, but we also, the reason so many of our projects went so well is we also had some engineers and designers who would then get the thing done. And that combination of the two was really helpful in that context.

SPEAKER_01: 3:53

Yeah, I think about this all the time of like sitting in the passenger seat, being a guide and drawing a map and then sitting in the driver's seat, you know, going on the on the adventure. The best advice I've ever heard and dispelled to founders is fire yourself out of every job, like do it yourself, probably do a crappy job and then find somebody who can help you with the unknown unknowns and actually do it. Do you

SPEAKER_00: 4:16

try to make that complete? For instance, I've heard some great advice that initially do your budgeting, initially do your accounting, just to understand what's going on at a very basic level. Then you hire someone, right? Initially do your coding. For a founder... Do you recommend that they just keep doing that for everything they can or keep some of the ones that are dear to their heart? Or no, you need to get rid of those because someone else can do it better. Where do you try to balance them out? Because I imagine there is a balance on that.

SPEAKER_01: 4:46

I think about maybe the dimensions of competency, execution, and maybe joy. So if they are really good at it and it's the execution their company needs and they enjoy it, great. Keep it within your sphere of influence. If you hate doing it, and you suck at it, and it's an energy drain, you should probably delegate it. And that's probably one of the hardest thing that most founders have trouble with, but that's how I think about it.

SPEAKER_00: 5:14

All right, I'll ask a little bit further on that because I think that's a great distinction. What if someone loves doing it and they're good at it, but you're worried it's not where the company really should be going? What do you then say to a founder? Well, this is the

SPEAKER_01: 5:27

education piece. I'd say a lot of people don't recognize that this is an option. So they have a person that they've hired. Maybe they're more junior. Maybe it fits their budget. Maybe they're earlier in their career. They've got a lot to prove, chip on their shoulder, like a diamond in the rough. What they don't realize is they can accompany that person with somebody who's done it four times. And when you look at what someone could do who's getting paid X and doing 40 hours a week of work, if you ask someone in the context of, hey, I'm Would this person benefit from asking someone who's done it a handful of times successfully a bunch of questions on a weekly basis or getting some mentorship from them or just getting steered in the right direction? They would say, yeah, absolutely. I'd love that. But good luck finding that mentor who's maybe semi-retired who wants to go back and spend that time with a random person. That is what go fractional and exponential talent means. So a handful of hours where you're up-leveling those people who you hope turn out to be diamonds.

SPEAKER_02: 6:30

And with this in practice, an organization can put, like I do people, right? I do HR stuff. So essentially, we could put an HR generalist plus the advisory work of a fractional leader in that area of expertise in place with an organization at 60% of the cost of them hiring their CHRO.

SPEAKER_01: 6:53

Exactly. And let's stick with the people example. How many times have you seen a company make a decision that has a negative impact to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars later?

SPEAKER_00: 7:02

Yeah, we're both smiling because we agree with

SPEAKER_01: 7:04

that. That happens. So now when you think about the cost of hiring someone on a monthly retainer basis for, I don't know, say$10,000 a month,$15,000 a month, let's just put any number on it. When you think about path A or path B, or when you think about handling a HR problem, When you think about the ramifications of doing it wrong, and then you look back and say, hey, remember that$250,000 problem? Would you have paid 10K a month to solve it? It's like, yeah, I probably should have worked with Lance. I'm curious.

SPEAKER_00: 7:37

You heard it from him. With those, through go fractional. Yeah, true. Get all the terms in. With the monthly engagement you talked about, do you typically offer monthly? Do you do quarterly? Do you do annually? How do you kind of gauge that out? Because one of the benefits is, From the hiring side, I get someone month to month, 10 grand a month, et cetera. But if it's only month to month, that fractional person is always looking for their next engagement. How do you kind of balance that out? So I

SPEAKER_01: 8:07

think about three dimensions of hiring someone. There's really three reasons people come to us. The first is that we provide great clients who want someone for at least three months on a monthly retainer basis. And the way I think about that is value-based pricing. So I'm going to pick on Lance. They're paying for 10 years of knowledge. If you want hourly, there's probably long tail services that can help you do that. There's a lack of engagement. There's a lack of attention. And there's a lack of institutional knowledge that is gained with somebody plugging into an organization, joining their standups, joining their meetings, like reading all the docs, up leveling and mentoring those people. Then when it comes time to make a decision or strategize, he can lean in and say, hey, here's what I think you should do. And so One is time, so three months of service. The other is monthly retainer. Most people aren't sure how to price, and this is true for first-time consultants or people going fractional. And the same is true for people who've done it for a while, or maybe with an agency, they don't realize that the margins associated with their work are so high, or they're working with a platform that takes a lot out of their pocket. And then the third is a negotiating partner. So by handling the legal contracts, by handling billing and invoices, you know, you essentially get like a back office. Most of the people that I know want to get back to doing hands-on keyboard work or people HR or, you know, marketing. They don't really want to have the hard conversation, negotiate with somebody who they're going to be working with for the next three months, and then deal with all the paperwork. And so those three pillars are how we attract folks that are excited about doing this work, most public and some private, where they just want a very specific industry approach very specific team size. And those teams would never know to contact that person. Like they're just too big, too big of a name or like maybe they don't have the industry expertise, but they've gone through an IPO with some company in pick your favorite space. And maybe there's a company in the climate space and they want to work in the climate space. And this company would never knock on the door of this person.

SPEAKER_00: 10:10

So what you're doing is for people who don't have the energy or the desire to to run all the admin themselves. You're taking a portion of the revenue in order to allow them just to do the thing they really enjoy. And that makes it, yeah, because I've been there. I've gotten to the point where I'm comfortable running the contracts. I've got a lawyer. I've done the sales process. I'm very comfortable with it. But that took me probably a good six months and a lot of sweat and sadness and stress to get comfortable with that And that's not something that I think most people are going to be willing to go through.

SPEAKER_01: 10:46

Think about what you just said and imagine removing them. Sadness, sweat, and just toiling through this. Plus six months, plus legal fees. When you get hit with your first red line from general counsel inside of a company, you don't know what to do. You could probably figure it out. Everybody's smart.

SPEAKER_00: 11:04

But why go through that? The other factor I'll add is iMessage audio voice memos to Lance. Both of us have had an ongoing text thread for a year and a half now where this thing just happened to me at a company. I need to talk to someone about it. And so we've kind of been there for each other, which is great. But I imagine most independent fractionals do not have that kind of support. And it's very stressful. So let's talk

SPEAKER_01: 11:28

about that. Consulting is lonely. You don't have a lunchroom. You don't have virtual meetups by HR to do, you know, those virtual happy hours. let's be honest, nobody really wants to go to a virtual happy hour, but they do want some camaraderie. They do want- We've talked about that before here. Some shoulders to lean on. What I would say is that people that join Go Fractional are not guaranteed a client. They're guaranteed a great community. So we've got a no jerks policy. We screen everyone. People are sometimes shocked by that. You can't just click a form and sign up. And what it leads to is people that we can match with clients and it leads to people who meet each other and lean on each other. Maybe they collaborate, work on something. We have a lot of founders and they're bootstrapping their company. And when you think about that in the context of how lonely it is to build and how lonely it is to consult, this is a great answer to that question. How do I find my people? When someone goes off and hangs their shingle being a consultant for the first time, they probably have a network of people that are, you know, lawyers and real estate people and marketers and product managers and engineers, they're all getting a W-2. You can't have the conversation about taxes. You can't have the conversation about contracts. You can't have the conversation about getting turned down on a Friday and landing a client on a Monday. So where do you go?

SPEAKER_00: 12:49

To that point, the reason I got into fractional is I was working with a previous company And the CFO was a fractional. And we've actually had him as a guest on this podcast. And so I texted him like, hey, I kind of think I might try what you're doing, but I have no idea what to do. What do I even charge? How does that work? So he gave me some advice. He kind of gave me the quick boilerplate. Here's how you should do it. And then let me know if you have any questions. And that was enough for me to get started. But as you've just described, that's not something most people will have access to a fractional CFO willing to just like give you a little bit of feedback on what to do. So

SPEAKER_01: 13:25

that's how we started this business. And I can tell you, I definitively don't scale. So people would hit me up. How do I do what you're doing? And I'd give them a teardown. I'd give them the playbook. I'd give them all the answers. And people would hit me up often for like virtual coffee. How do I do this? And I started doing it. And then I realized I should just build a bench of people. And so what?

SPEAKER_00: 13:44

Yeah, go ahead. Actually, I want to ask you, I've been kind of, as Lance and I have gone over fractional terms, a lot of times it is for a fractional head of or chief or director of. In my career, I somewhat by choice have pushed back on all of that. And I really just love being individual contributor. That's just the thing that I'm most interested in at this stage of my life. So I've kind of built up doing fractional as an IC. And right now I have a day job and check out previous episodes if anyone's curious for why. But The thing I'm kind of curious about is how do you address or do you not address people who just want to be ICs as fractionals? How does that kind of fit into the equation?

SPEAKER_01: 14:28

Well, I'll look at the other way. Many clients come in looking for a fractional C-suite person, fractional CTO, huge line of business for us, fractional CMO. I need a seasoned marketer, fractional product designer. I need someone who can take us from one to two. And the reality is once you start talking to them and you unpack what they actually need, they'll come back and say, I don't need a fractional CMO. I need a marketing strategist to help me implement these things. And when you look at what a CMO does at a series C, series D company, they're maestroing a team of marketers. So they don't need that. They need a tactician. So I think about it a lot from the client side. On the talent side with what you're talking about is... The type of work that people want to do. So this is what we look for in screens. Do you want to come in at that high level and be a strategic partner? Here's a great example to bring this to life. There are fractional CTOs that will come in and migrate off an agency, up-level the engineering team, and give guidance and a roadmap to the CEO. There are fractional CTOs that will be hands-on keyboard committing code. They're both called the same thing. That's a great umbrella for the board, for a friend, for the rest of the team. but they tactically execute different things. There's somebody I know that has been early at a bunch of startups and is most interested in building the culture of engineering teams. So hiring and building out that team, then moving on. There's someone else I can think of that excels in the hundred person plus mode to up-level all the engineers and to listen to those stories and hear those skillsets and then pair them with client needs. I think that's also, and

SPEAKER_02: 16:10

you're touching on it, It greatly relates to the size and stage of organization, right? Because like seed, series A, your employee headcount is so low. Someone can be a CTO here, but it's vastly different from what a CTO at a 500, 5,000, 50,000 person organization is doing. So same title, essentially completely different skill set and experience set,

SPEAKER_01: 16:34

both valuable. I agree. It's almost as nebulous as BD. That means a hundred different things. a hundred different companies. What does BD mean? Yeah, business development is a moniker that gets put on sales, partnerships, corporate M&A, marketing, right, growth, you name it, and somebody's tucked it under a BD title.

SPEAKER_00: 16:56

So if you have someone that's listening right now and is curious about fractional and as they've been hearing these descriptions, they're like, hey, I feel that that's something I can do. I'm not, I'm a W-2 right now. How do you typically handle someone like that? How do you walk them through becoming part of Go Fractional?

SPEAKER_01: 17:15

We have people at all ends of the spectrum. Everything starts at GoFractional.com. So everybody goes through GoFractional.com slash membership. And we could put that in the show notes, but whether you're early in your career as a contractor or you've been doing it for 10 years, everyone goes through the same process because we spend time with everyone. We care about the people we bring into our community and we make sure that we have clients that that want these types of people. If someone has a really esoteric skill, they're more than welcome, but they might not see the work that they want because, you know, it's a little bit more long tail. The purpose behind that and the sessions we have with our community are about growing your knowledge, providing templates and takeaways. And then, like you mentioned earlier, meeting other people. You know, when you talk to five people at the beginning of their Go Fractional journey, it's really helpful. And they might be five years in and had their own Squarespace site. or they might be five minutes in and they just quit their job or lost their job.

SPEAKER_02: 18:13

It sounds like there's a handful of different services or product things that you would do for somebody who's on our side of the fractional table, right? So I'm hearing that you're building community for people, which I'm in a number of Slack communities around fractional and I value each one for different reasons, but I value having other human beings who are going through this too and learning from each other, supporting each other. So that's clear.

SPEAKER_01: 18:36

There's legal, financial, and sales. And those are three dimensions that you need for a transaction. And then there's community. And that's what you need for, call it EQ or emotional support. Sure. Yeah. Right. It's

SPEAKER_02: 18:48

the, how do I, how do I do this part? We haven't talked much about, you've alluded to it a little bit, but lead generation sales opportunities for people in seats like mine and Joshua's. How does that work for through Grow Fractional?

SPEAKER_01: 19:02

Yeah. So, I mean, classic marketplace supply and demand, right? This is true for Uber. that it is for any other marketplace you see. For us, we think about those two sides being talent, which are members, people, and clients, which are those people who wanna hire someone. I would say in any case, there's always gonna be more talent and there's gonna be less clients, right? And that's true whether I'm happy when five people meet a prospective client, they choose one, you got four people who didn't get the gig, right? So what I think about those four people all the time, I think about the fifth one too, How do you serve those four people? What calibration and understanding of why it didn't move forward? And how do you help them? Right? And so in terms of lead gen and marketing, which is your real question, we spend an inordinate amount of time and resources on outreach, lead generation, and matching. And as you think about, and maybe this is a good segue to the underlying technology and like where things are going, we're spending a huge amount of resources now on the client side. the BD side, the sales side. I'd say in the recent past, we've spent a lot of time on the talent side of things, making sure we have a scalable way to handle operations and admin and grow our community. And with a small team ourselves, we're spending time now on the outbound client side.

SPEAKER_02: 20:25

I don't know if I speak for you, Joshua, but I hear this from a lot of other factionals I talk to. Sales is the hardest thing for a solo entrepreneur. who's going out into this big marketplace. You're competing with firms and agencies. And it is really, really tough to generate those conversations that are going to end up converting. So, I mean, already, like the value of what you're doing is tangible.

SPEAKER_01: 20:49

Well, we don't want to promise anyone something that's not deliverable. And I look at that and other things, and maybe it's for the rearview mirror. But in looking forward, I don't want to promise anyone they're going to start work tomorrow. What I will promise them is they get to a great community of people We're going to put amazing prospective clients in front of them. And for the top tier of talent, they might be able to pick and choose who they work with, again, based on stage, category, or what the body of

SPEAKER_00: 21:15

work is. Fractional has been this term that's been around for a while, but it's kind of hitting somewhat of the mainstream right now. Where do you see things going over the next couple of years with more talent, more companies looking for this? What makes you... think that this isn't just a fad, that it will have state and power.

SPEAKER_01: 21:34

So if you ask a founder or if you ask a management team, what are you focused on right now? What are your biggest challenges? And I get to ask that as an investor and a partner. Many times they'll tell you hiring. Many times they'll tell you people, right? If you ask what is the biggest expense in your company, it used to be like if you look at an OPEX plan, maybe it was office space and people. Now it's people. And so if you put that through the lens of like, what problems are you trying to solve? Well, I need to hire an engineer to do X. Well, I need a marketing strategy to do Y. Well, we have an upcoming launch and we need a copywriter. Great. How do you solve that problem? And when you look at that through the lens of time and money and effort, this is a great solution. So we have an education challenge right now. Not everyone knows that Go Fractional is an option, but if you break it down to those fundamental, like first principles problems that I just mentioned, you can come in and embrace the language that someone's using and say, great, I can get you someone to start solving this problem in three weeks versus three months.

SPEAKER_00: 22:33

How do you answer the question of, and this has come up with me many times, you're trying to explain to a company what this fractional person will offer. The very next question they ask is how much time will they be spending on my project? How do you address that? Sure. So we

SPEAKER_01: 22:49

outline it very clearly. We don't bill by the hour. This is not a punch in and punch out place, but we will deliver immediately. the the minimum amount of hours so if somebody's saying hey i'm a fractional engineer i'm going to be hands on keyboard and join the team they're going to spend 20 hours a week with your company

SPEAKER_00: 23:05

so then what that presumes is if you have something like an engineer they're not going to work with more than two companies right they're going to be fractional with they're not going to be working with six at once right because that's what companies are sometimes wondering is this person spending two hours a week for me what's happening

SPEAKER_01: 23:20

Yeah, I don't think that's ever the case, nor are they set up for success. Even if somebody wanted to work with one of our people at that capacity, we would probably recommend against it. These are folks who are former founders or building something on the side. And I think what people realize very quickly, and this happens often where they try something out, maybe they're new to this, we land and expand. So I don't think I'm a fan of like the 10X engineer hyperbole, but I am of the three to 4X hyperbole. And when you get someone who's contributing and shipping and has done it before in your industry, there's a huge difference. And so that 20 hours could be actually less one week. It could be more one week. This is why we don't calibrate to like a time tracking tool. And when they see the impact of that person, they're like, wow, I need to think about my current team and I need to think about how to get this firepower for the rest of my departments.

SPEAKER_00: 24:14

You touched on sometimes you have founders who will take a fractional role as talent while they're building their own thing. That actually is a really great use case, right? Where I need some, I need to generate some income right now, but I want to keep working on my idea. Do you ever have talent that want to be full-time fractional where they're like, I actually, I would take on two or three engagements and that's just me. Is that something you see often? All the time.

SPEAKER_01: 24:38

And there's some people have been doing it for three years and now they want to see a community of folks and more leads. Yeah, we have had everything in between. I'm building on the side, nights and weekends, and I want to bootstrap. I want to go back to full-time, but I have a family obligation for the next six months. I want to fill in for someone. I want to give back to an earlier company. I want to mentor someone. I mean, you name it, and we've got, you know, an example.

SPEAKER_02: 25:01

I want to get to a couple of the points that you pulled in here for us. Talk about how you're building this community. Is it Is there some sort of screening? How do people get in? What's the criteria around this? Yeah, what's your philosophy on community screening?

SPEAKER_01: 25:17

We have a very strict no jerks policy. We look for nice people that are going to help each other out. It's a give first mentality. We also come from a place of abundance. If you're a part of another community, great. If you've got your own website, wonderful. How can we be additive to that process? We have a very clear referral process. So if you refer someone that turns into a client, you get 5% of that top line revenue ongoing. People love that. You might pull someone in, grow a team. You might refer a friend. You might refer an old client. And I think that's important to bring to life. If you land an engineering client, let's say a fractional engineer goes in and is charging 20K on a monthly basis, and you've referred that client, that's$1,000 a month for the life of that client. It's pretty good. So you think about those three dimensions. We spend time with every single person And the reason for doing that is building essentially a repository, a library of who they are, what they can do, and the nuance behind it. I like to say that anybody can write three bullets on a profile. But it becomes really interesting when you hear someone talk about their expertise. And then it's about leveraging that and surfacing that. How do we go into that interview archive and say, wow, Josh has got the right background for this because of the work

SPEAKER_00: 26:34

he did three years ago? When you're screening... Let's say you have someone who has fantastic talent. They are good at what they do. You're interested in them. What are reasons that you might tell them, hey, we actually don't think this is for you, even though you have a ton of value? The demand

SPEAKER_01: 26:51

for their expertise isn't there. So maybe somebody works on a part-time basis on oil rigs out in the ocean. Never had to demand knock on the door for that. They're probably great. Super esoteric long tail example. I don't know where that just came to me from, but it's true. So it's nothing against the person. It's nothing against their skills. It's nothing against their seniority. It's can we land them somebody great? And if they're a jerk, doesn't matter how great their experience is, right? Yeah, nobody wants to be around that. Yeah, that's another part of personality. It's very hard to quantify it. And that's why spending time, you know, face-to-face, video-to-video makes a big difference. How you treat people, how you help people. Consulting is lonely. Consulting is hard. I

SPEAKER_02: 27:34

don't want to guess at where you're going with this. But you have a comment here about hindsight. The path makes sense, right? When you look back, the saying is hindsight's 2020. Yeah, tell us a little more about looking back for you now.

SPEAKER_01: 27:47

Most people's careers don't make sense as you go through each chapter. But when you reach the middle or end, you can connect the dots and it becomes really clear. I think of them as loops. And so I'll articulate it for you guys. For those at home listening, it's like up and to the right rarely looks like a perfect line. It really looks like loops. Like you go up and back like a roller coaster, up and back like a roller coaster. And when you look at a series of jobs somebody's had, they might be really well set up to do fractional work because of a short stint at one job, helping out on another, working out on a project with someone else, and then the six years experience they had at one company. They don't recognize it until they land in a new gig and are like, wow, My corpus of world experience makes me uniquely capable of executing here. And in the moment, they're like, you know what? I worked at this one company and was part of this 20,000 person layoff. They're pretty bummed. That's a loop back. But then they worked at another company for a year and learned what it was like to be with a remote international team. And then they went six years at some other company. Those things like in the moment don't make as much sense as 10 years later when you're looking back and you're like, wow, I can go help this climate company that's looking to hit a new market internationally.

SPEAKER_02: 29:07

Yeah, I wonder too if the same also applies that when you look at that on paper, maybe it doesn't make as much sense. You've had little opportunities here and there, each one building a skill that you know then you can take the leverage for success in the future, right? So it's more about maybe grit and finding a pattern that's useful in there Versus like, here's my obvious resume. You should clearly hire me,

SPEAKER_01: 29:34

right? Or just go deeper on your questioning. Like what are three whys or five whys? You know, one of the things we do really well is Go Fractional picks up where LinkedIn leaves off. LinkedIn's like where you worked and when. And Go Fractional is what did you do there? What are your work highlights? What do you deliver? Oh, I worked with Josh. I worked with Lance. We as SWAT team, we put out this new feature. It was responsible for an increase in, you know, sales by 20%. Oh, really? What'd you do? Oh, here's what we did. Here's the building block. Here's the blueprint. I would totally come do it again. Wow. That sounds great. I like to say there's people who have been at companies when they scaled and there's people that have scaled companies. You want to hire the people that have scaled companies, not just like I was there from a hundred employees to 10,000. Great. What'd you do?

SPEAKER_00: 30:22

I follow NBA quite a bit right now. And there's, I'm going to butcher the name, but I think Robert Scori has six rings and as an NBA champion. No one's heard of him, but he was on three different teams where other people led the teams to victory. But he's got six rings, which is fantastic. Probably amazing NBA player, but no one's heard of him because he wasn't the person that took them there. And I think that's a great point where Lance and I have talked to people in the past where we can tell they were the one that made it happen or they were there for the ride, which is okay, but I would prefer the former.

SPEAKER_01: 30:54

Yeah, that's what kind of attitudes do you want on your team? Attitudes are contagious. And I always think about that, like attitudes are contagious. And if you come in with an execution positive attitude, the rest of the team is going to start to mirror that. It's a great, you know, kind of halo effect.

SPEAKER_02: 31:11

Is that something that you're like if you're as a founder now, right? And you're thinking about your your team for the future is attitude top of list when it comes to like, who do I want to scale go fractional with?

SPEAKER_01: 31:22

Yeah, I think it's gumption attitude. Ability to take on random tasks like nobody's above or below anything. People with a chip on their shoulder, they have a lot to prove. I mean, these things sound like cliches, but in hiring teams and hiring consultants, that's what I look for.

SPEAKER_00: 31:39

You touched on something that actually I'm bringing up in probably next week's topic on Fractional with Lance. I saw someone posting that... They're getting rid of all their social media and LinkedIn. And instead, they're doubling down on their blog to really try it because it's almost gets to the same problem you're describing, but in a different way. They want people to know who they are. And in this case, this person's on Mastodon and they rewrote everything about them on their website because they want people to get at what they really have that makes them unique and interesting. And LinkedIn and all other social media kind of just strips that out by default. So I don't think you're encouraging people to stop LinkedIn, but you're saying there's something more that we want someone to know who you really are. And I think that's such a great way to think about it, that that's part of why I like to podcast. That's why I like to write on my blog. That's why I like to have calls with people where we just get to talk about our core humanity alongside what we have to offer.

SPEAKER_01: 32:35

I don't know if there's a question there, but I totally agree. If you ask people, do you match the LinkedIn posts, like the Twitter X posts or the Instagram posts, are you that exact persona? I can't tell you a single person that says yes. So what you're talking about to me is owning your audience, having your own voice, and in my opinion, that's the most important thing. I've been blogging since 2004, so I'm old. Having that soapbox and having that distribution list and seeing flash in the pan things come and go, I don't think it's helpful. We can relate this all back to people, and I think that's what work highlights on Go Fractional magnify. I think, well, there's a different track I'd love to take, which is like getting clients to talk to people. You

SPEAKER_02: 33:24

mentioned brokering these

SPEAKER_01: 33:25

conversations. I want to hear more about

SPEAKER_02: 33:27

that.

SPEAKER_01: 33:27

So

SPEAKER_02: 33:27

when

SPEAKER_01: 33:28

someone raises their hand with a challenge or a problem, it's usually pretty acute. They need help right now. And The thing I think about the most is time to talent. When someone has an idea of what they need, the faster they speak to someone and start getting an idea of what that person can do, the higher the chance of them bringing someone on to solve that problem. Talking in the abstract, selling, and like trying to explain how big of an impact someone can have versus spending time on the actual question that founder or team lead has has taught me that time to talent is critical because they don't even know what they don't know. We've seen job specs come in where somebody spent a huge amount of time and energy articulating a job wreck. Lance, you probably have seen these. And then they start talking to people and they're like, this isn't what we need at all. We need this person. She's amazing.

SPEAKER_02: 34:23

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I published, I published job. That's like, we had to just pull down and overhaul because it wasn't serving. Yeah. 100%. Thought that came from that was you can, the time to getting help, right? If you'll tolerate discomfort for a while, you start to accept it. Oh, I'm okay with this. So Joshua and I both run, I'm dealing with a hip injury. So I went on this snowshoeing adventure and I started to develop a little discomfort in my hip, but I was like, I'm going to make it to the top. I'm going to be okay with this. And I ended up It ended up taking like three plus hours to get to the top. And by the time I got there, I was in like serious discomfort. And six weeks later, my hip is still injured from tolerating something that I should have immediately said, I should stop. I should stop. We should go back. Right. But I didn't want to I don't want to stop. I want to keep going. And so this whole time to getting help thing, like if you don't go ahead and get that help. you could really run off the tracks in good ways. And you talked about it earlier. Remember that$250,000 problem? What if you could rewind, and instead of spending that$250,000, grab a retainer talent through a platform like GoFractional? There, that's my pitch. I'm selling it for you.

SPEAKER_01: 35:40

I appreciate it. You're hired. What you're talking about is painkillers versus vitamins. People don't like taking vitamins. But when they get hurt, they want painkillers. I mean... Lance, let me ask you a question. What would you do differently if you were running that same hill today with that same injury?

SPEAKER_02: 35:56

Oh, okay. So knowing that injury would be a result, right? Like I started to feel the same way. Knowing what I know now, I'm stopping. I'm stopping when I feel discomfort. Great. What would you tell someone

SPEAKER_01: 36:06

who's running that race who presents with the same exact situation that you did?

SPEAKER_02: 36:11

Yeah. I mean, I'd be saying, hey, I know you really want to get to the top because we all want to conquer that that summit. But for the next six plus, who knows how much longer, weeks, you're not going to run again if you

SPEAKER_01: 36:23

do this. That's the strongest pitch that I know of for exponential impact from someone that's seen it before.

SPEAKER_02: 36:31

Yeah, if there was a dude on the side of the trail that day telling me that thing, I might have turned around. Might have been worth it.

SPEAKER_01: 36:37

I can save you this pain in the next few months if you take this other path. I mean, this is why like coaching for sports and advice for business is so intertwined, that exact talk track with a determined founder is very real, right? I'm going to summit no matter what. Well, your business failed. Great. Which would you prefer?

SPEAKER_02: 37:01

You probably can still summit, but it's just going to take you longer than you want it to be.

SPEAKER_01: 37:06

Yeah. Less pain, more gain.

SPEAKER_02: 37:08

This has been awesome. So we know GoFractional.com is where everything gets started. Where else can people find you, learn about what you're doing, follow you? Where are you hanging out?

SPEAKER_01: 37:17

Well, I have my own personal blog at EricGFriedman.com, which has been around for 20 years. I'm Eric Friedman on most social channels. That's me as a person. I think GoFractional.com is where it's at, both for clients and both for talent. I think GoFractional is a choice. You can GoFractional as a consultant or you can GoFractional to solve your needs.

SPEAKER_00: 37:37

Cool. That's where we'll send folks. Perfect. Thank you, Eric. It was so great to have you on and to chat about this. And yeah, if anyone's listening, like reach out to Eric, let him know if you have any questions about this and you're kind of curious about getting into it. Our email is email at fractional.fm. If you have feedback for us for the show and thanks for listening. Thank you guys.