The Secret Sauce to Success - w Biz/Dev | Holiday Episode

In this special holiday podcast episode, David and Gary reflect on the secret sauce to success, the meat and potatoes of strategy (hungry yet?) and the allure of Michael Scott, IYKYK.

Links:

Traction Book Link

___________________________________

Submit Your Questions to:

hello@thebigpixel.net

OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube

Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

Contact Us

hello@thebigpixel.net

919-275-0646

www.thebigpixel.net

FB | IG | LI | TW | TT : @bigpixelNC

Big Pixel

1772 Heritage Center Dr

Suite 201

Wake Forest, NC 27587

Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

David: 0:00

Find out what you did well last year, and what you can do better next year is the secret sauce. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I am David Baxter, your host, and I'm joined per usual by Gary Voight. What is up, man?

Gary: 0:19

How you doing? It's freezing down here in Florida. I was reading all day. And I know you hate me. So I took an

David: 0:26

idea for you. I appreciate that. That takes a lot of control because those things are dragged right

Gary: 0:30

back on as soon as this is done. Because

David: 0:32

you're cold. It's what 60 degrees outside.

Gary: 0:36

64 view big blistering 64.

David: 0:42

It is 48 here today we had but yesterday was 70 which is so weird. It's December. It is it is not even mid December. It is crazy warm right now.

Gary: 0:52

Last weekend it got to 85 Hear that is?

David: 0:57

Is that normal? Or is that warm for you? No,

Gary: 0:59

that is not normal. It is normal. This

David: 1:03

is normal for us about 40 to 50 is normal for us, it will get really cold for a couple of weeks in January, maybe February, maybe some snow, but that's about it will get like one or two days. But we haven't had snow here really in two years. It's kind of weird. So we don't have a guest this week, it is our end of the year wrap up which sounds like it's something that we do every year. This is the first time we've ever done it. So we'll we'll we'll start a tradition. It is the end of the year, or early in the 2020 fours depending. But it's a good time, I think to think about planning. I think that's something that every entrepreneur should be doing, whether you're brand new, or you've been doing this forever. And I will say that big pixel didn't really plan. I would say, for the first eight years of our existence, we never planned and i There is a quote, it's a Dave Ramsey quote, I can actually attribute this one. Dave Ramsey says the difference between a dream and a vision is a plan. And I think that is really important. Because if you just dream it, it's never gonna happen. But if you plan it, it can. Does that make sense? You look confused?

Gary: 2:20

Yeah, no, I've heard that quote. And it's not from him. But it's the difference between a dream and a goal is a plan a

David: 2:27

dream and a goal. Did I mess it up already? You see,

Gary: 2:30

you think he quoted someone else to your Michael scouting it all over the place.

David: 2:37

This is why I shouldn't lead a podcast, why you shouldn't create a goal. That's right dream and a goal 115 episodes in and I shouldn't be doing this. In regards to sound like vision goal, whatever you want to call it, it is something achievable versus something you're just thinking about is the plan. And eight years of our company, I just meandered and just kind of went along with it. And even with our clients, one of the things we talked about is there's maintenance. And there is you know, doing the day to day and then their strategic thinking. And we try to talk to each of our clients at least on a quarterly basis. And think about strategically stuff, because every month they have stuff they want us to do. And it's just your way to maintain maybe move the needle forward an inch or two. But it's nothing grand. It's nothing big. And so we try to wrap around and say let's talk about strategic, what do you want to do next year, next quarter, whatever, so that it's not just we're lost, and three years go by and nothing really has changed. Because no one wants that no one has to spend money on custom software that's not really changing. It's just maintaining the status quo. That's boring. Bar. So your company is the same thing.

Gary: 3:48

Yeah. And they all have goals, they all have features that they want are the things they wish their software could do. But I think a lot of times, they just get hung up on. Well, it doesn't do that now, and I don't know how much that would cost. So let's just not worry about it. But that's when the strategic

David: 4:05

and they don't have big dreams. Some clients do some clients do their own strategy. But the point of that is saying, hey, take a moment and the end of the year. We actually do it. In September every year. For the last three years we've been doing it where we have a leadership retreat. And we have our leadership team come up to Raleigh, typically, sometimes we might, we thought about leaving, but we keep having them here. But we talked about what we want to do in the next year. So if you haven't done that strategic planning with your business, now's the time because you don't want to end up in June of 2024 and not and not have planned ahead at all right? You're just meandering and going forward. That's not going to get you what you where you want to be whatever that means. So what does that mean? What is what is strategic planning look like? So My business group follows a, a path, curriculum. Whatever that word is that I'm looking for, that we did this year. I don't think we did it the year before. But correct me if I'm wrong here.

Gary: 5:13

We did. I know what you're talking about. Yeah, we did. They're just guidelines there ways to look at the future, and assess the Present Past and gonna guide yourself forward.

David: 5:24

So just real quick, the way that this works is you first you look inward, which means you look at your mission statement, you look at your core values, do those still align with what you want to do what you want to be, are they in step, and this really, we did this as a group. But if you haven't already nailed those down as the leader, you need to do that alone. And then do it again, with your leadership group. Because mission and core should be yours. It shouldn't be a committee, it shouldn't be anything, it should be something you can stand behind. And that is something that is guiding the beating heart of your company. That is what's going to create alignment, that's going to create everything, we just promoted Carl, who has been a project manager forever. He is now my director of operations. And where we've decided, if we have me and him have a disagreement, we're going to use the core values to be the deciding factor. That alignment, right, so he thinks we should go with path A and path B or whatever. Usually, this will be really minutiae minutia really small things. Where would the core value say? Where would they lead us, you know, is are we being good stewards? Are we being honest and transparent, et cetera, et cetera? That would guide us. So that's what looking inward is? That's pretty quick. I mean, we did that pretty fast when we did ours. Yeah.

Gary: 6:53

Morals. Also, the leadership team is very aware of the core values of the company and in the mission. So

David: 7:00

I would challenge everyone to ask, depending on how large your companies but just ask five random people at all levels, what your core values are, and prepare to be depressed? Because they don't know they are? If they are, if they do know them, then kudos, because that would be amazing. We did that this year, I asked everybody in our Slack channel. I think one guy Matt, in particular, who has been on the podcast, I believe he's the only one who knew all five of them.

Gary: 7:34

I think he was the only one that took the half a second to go to our website. And look. There's literally the internet, like we have a whole deck on our branding page for it. Like the interests even

David: 7:48

sadder because half of them didn't even know where it was much less what they were like. It's literally Yeah, like you say, it's right there. But at

Gary: 7:56

least you didn't get away. We have a website.

David: 7:59

What is our website again? See, that doesn't work because our email addresses our website, but the other one is looking back, which is looking at the previous year. So that would be in this case, you'd be looking at this year 2023 As it's wrapping up. How did that go? You probably if you've been doing this for a few years, you had goals for 2023? Did you hit them? That's really the the big question. Did you hit your goals? And our case, we didn't 2023 We wanted to be at a certain revenue level. We didn't hit it. And so it as it starts a whole conversation, why? Why did we not get it? Or why did you hit if you guys knocked it out of the park? That is and how do we? What do we need to improve to move forward? That's what they're looking back section is that was painful to me. That's that section in particular? Because you kind of look it out? And you're like, Yeah, we didn't hit it.

Gary: 8:53

Yeah, but I found it to be kind of interesting, because it's not that we didn't hit our goals, because, you know, we did a bad job, or we lost this or lost that or anything like that. You know what I mean? It kind of just helped us evaluate what can be improved. But I mean, to be honest, we were so close that it's still an improvement from the year prior. And it's still progress. So

David: 9:17

well, in our case, our revenue glass

Gary: 9:21

half full kind of

David: 9:24

what is it this year, I will say 2023. So it's confusing because we were looking at 22 when we did this in September 2022 was not a good year for us. It wasn't a bad year. Okay. I thought you know, this year was great. No, this year was wonderful. We didn't hit our goals, but we had pretty good goals. So I wasn't I was referring to this. Yeah, yeah. 22 In our case, we 2021 and 2022 had the exact same revenue, we ended up with the exact same place. We had one new client, which was not good. It's not bad. horrible. None. No clients left. So cool. But we made in 2022. In our case, we made way less profit, almost no profit, because we over hired in 2022. You're not, there's a lot of reasons for that. And they were all legitimate, we decided we hired a guy. And this is something that's totally, we could have a whole podcast about this. We made a decision, we hired a guy. For a project that never took off. We literally said, you're gonna be on this project. And we had been given a verbal for that project, and it didn't happen. So we as a leadership team, and the company at large had to decide you can we're not big, do we keep him when that project did not happen? And we were pleased with his work. And we liked him. He was a good culture fit. And we're like, Yeah, we're gonna keep him. And that had big repercussions. Right? We didn't make any profit in 2022. But we we went in knowing that like, it wasn't, we weren't upset about it. It was a conscious decision. And we did it.

Gary: 11:03

And we did it for the goal of it paying off for us in the end. And it actually did. Yeah,

David: 11:09

I mean, I'm thinking 2023, we were able to, we almost got our lofty goal. We had six new clients. Which that sounds funny if you sell jeans, or soap or physical goods, six new clients sounds like you're about to go to business. And our world. We we keep clients for years and yours.

Gary: 11:31

Yeah. Or if you're just making websites or something like smaller. Yeah. Six new clients, one new client. That's that sounds like we're barely holding on. barely

David: 11:41

holding together. Yeah, six new clients for us is huge, because each client generally stays for many years. And our bar world. So to us, I mean, I was in 2022, I think we had 12 clients total. Views give you an idea with 12 clients. And so adding six is a big jump. Anyway, so that's looking back. Any, any anything else you'd like to add on that? Looking back section looking back

Gary: 12:09

part? No. We did inward and back. So now what's next? Next

David: 12:14

is looking around. What you see is this like SWOT analysis, looking around opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses. We and I stole this from a C 12 member. Instead of Swat, which is strength, weakness, opportunity threat, he recommends that you do opportunities and threats first, and then strengths or weaknesses. And the reason he does this is a guy who has been running a very successful business for 30 years. And he says, when you do strengths and weaknesses first, he says it flavors, your opportunities and threats. Everything now looks through the lens of what you're good and bad at your threats become your weaknesses, your strengths become your opportunities. He's like, flip it around to do opportunities and threats first, and it will open the door way wider. And so we did that this year. And I agreed with him. It was I thought a much better discussion than it had been in the past. Would you agree?

Gary: 13:10

It doesn't sound like it would make a difference at all until you actually start naming things and trying to actually come up with what are your opportunities and threats. And then when there's a group of people putting up, you know, their ideas and opinions and you're like, oh, yeah, that does make sense that we did that. First, this time instead of tainting them with the weaknesses. That one's always tough.

David: 13:33

It is tough, but it's worth doing. I think a lot of people because SWOT has been around forever. And people kind of gloss over it, because oh, I've done this before. I it's a really good tool if you actually invest in it, and take a little bit of time to see what's around you. And in our case, I mean, there's so many things that are weird in our world. I mean, you've got a year ago, you had crypto and stuff

Gary: 13:58

in our industry things changed so quick. Yeah. So So you have to do it every year. Otherwise,

David: 14:04

I mean, now we have aI which is, you know, the great unknown. It's like crypto if crypto had any substance.

Gary: 14:15

It's NF T's that were useful. It seems like the future of AI now is becoming more shadowy and unknown. Like at first it was as soon as there was an API released, everybody offered an AI component to their product. And then everybody needed it. I mean, I components of their products. And then things happened with AI that kind of halted, you know, where's it gonna go from here? And now it just seems like it's gotten a little bit shadowy,

David: 14:41

where it's a little more uncertain. I think. AI is following not to derail totally, but I think AI is following a very similar flow as self driving cars. When self driving cars first if you go eight, nine years ago, when they first started way Moe was starting to really Come out. Everyone thought this was going to be easy. I mean, Elon Musk said his cars already did it. That was a dirty lie. But he was perpetuating that myth that this is easy. We've got this solved. Well,

Gary: 15:12

I mean, Lane detectors worked rear view cameras worked, have sensors, work parking, so they figured it was just, you know, a little bit more algorithms and software and we're good. We're

David: 15:23

good to go. And what they found was, you know, ultimately, over the years, I mean, it's been many years now, since those hay days, that last 10 to 15% of truly driving, like through a neighborhood of bad weather that stuff, almost impossible. Just just downright, almost impossible. With our current technology needs. We can drive 80% of the roads, any highways are really good, those super cruisers or autopilots, or whatever want to call them, they're very good at driving in a straight line. And even exiting, turning basic stuff. But you start going into a neighborhood or crowded city, things get real ugly, get bad weather things get they just so now you they're almost all backing off of that, right? This year. automated cars dropped dramatically. I think AI is following some of the thing. Chechi Beatty is coming out. Everyone wanted to catch up to what you have borrowed. You have this out the other. And now it's like, Okay, now what does it really do? And I think that's where it gets really murky. I'm not saying it's not useful. I still, I'm a big believer in our world will be very different in five years. I just don't know what it looks like. It's still don't a year into this fun game. I still don't know. Except for every product now has AI gizmos and doodads, which for the most part, I still don't trust and I'm a technology freak, right? I love tech. But I don't want anything summarizing my emails. I don't want anyone summarizing my meetings, which they all do that now. But if they if they miss a bullet point in that meeting, my client doesn't care that the AI thing missed it. We missed, right. So I just don't I can't trust it yet. Anyway, so that's looking around,

Gary: 17:00

that was something that we looked around as one of our, I guess you can say threats to something in our industry, when clients think that they could just use AI to create and build something for them. But it's not why and

David: 17:15

we're taking steps 2020 for a big thing for us just is to go further in AI to start figuring out what we could do for our clients, for our the businesses that we work with, to use AI in a real manner, not fake AI, not trivial, stupid AI that you see all the time now, but real useful stuff that would allow people to use their products in new ways. I mean, that's cool. I think that's something we are going to invest in next year.

Christie: 17:49

Big pixel, build world class, custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects, our design, infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. from startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business.

David: 18:15

The last one last one, that I in this process. So looking ahead, right? This one makes sense. You're jumping forward. Now what do we want to do next year? What do we want to plan next year? What do we want to improve next year? This is obviously the meat and potatoes when you're planning.

Gary: 18:36

I think there's also one more mind. You have to let go of the realistic answer of well, if we didn't finish everything this year, we have to obviously continue to finish those before we get to any new stuff. Like take that out of your head for a moment and just pretend you're starting the year fresh from scratch, everything was done. Where do you want to go forward from that moment?

David: 19:01

Find out what you did well last year. And what you can do better next year, is the secret sauce. I think like one of the things that's easy to say like we have a five year plan, which I recommend everyone having actually, if you follow traction or any of those books, they'll tell you do a 10 year plan and then back up to five then three than 12 months. And all of those are linked together. Because you can't get to 10 years without knowing what you're doing in the next 12 months. That's ultimately what but that 10 year plan, of course, is pie in the sky or you know, I mean, my company is 10 years old or almost 11 Now, so, like double the age of your company. I mean, I have no idea what that looks like. But it's it's a nice thought exercise to jump that far ahead. Where would you like? Like a question? I think every entrepreneur should ask themselves, how big do you want to be? And don't choose out and say, oh, I want to be a billion dollar company. Do you Do you really want to be a billion dollar company? That's a lot, dude. That's hundreds if not 1000s of employees. That's a very specific culture. That's lots of people spread out doing lots of things. It sounds good on paper billion dollar company. Cool. Do you really want to run that company? I certainly don't, I have zero interest in running the company anywhere close to that large. So you need to ask, I think everyone needs acids of what is big, what is what you want to be. In my case, being specific, I have always said that I want a company that has 10 developers, and support staff. And using those numbers, now, we are about halfway there. And we've been growing pretty quickly. So at that rate, we should be at that size in three to five years, which is weird. And I've always reserve the right to change my mind once we got to that. So yeah.

Gary: 20:59

It depends on how good that support staff is, if you got everybody else doing like a really, really good job maintaining and keeping up with everything. And it's easier for you as the owner, or the founder to like run the company. But with all the help, like really good quality help. And then you probably think, Okay, well, we might want to get a little bit bigger, how much more can we handle? What even if, even if you

David: 21:23

do, like, it's easy to say you're managed well, right? So you've got great leadership teams and managers and whatever. And it's not painful, as you know, you've been able to let go, and you've been able to now you are the true CEO, the the visionary, whatever you want to call that. But you still have a different company, right? If I have. So if we doubled in size, we'd be about 30 people,

Gary: 21:47

right? Yeah, it's gonna be a third dramatically different from my guess. Because a lot the culture perspective or your culture, right? Actions and relationships.

David: 21:58

We're already getting to the point where I don't know everybody. There are some people that I don't interact with, hardly at all, in our company. I do not like that. That that rubs me wrong. Because that's not been the case for 10 years. If we were 30 people, yeah, that's weird. I'm not saying I'm not against it by any stretch. But that will take adjustment for me, because I'm a people person. I want to know everybody who's working with me, not just did I interview them, or you get to the point where you're not even interviewing everybody. Right? I mean, that's weird. You're hiring people that you've never met. There's one person in the company, she's she's a contractor, technically, but she is been with us for almost a year or so. I've never met her. That's really weird to me. I didn't hire her. I didn't do anything about it. She was hired by Christie. And I've just never met her didn't need to no need. So she was not a full time hire. So if I'm a full time, if your full time hire, I mean everybody. But that's just weird. That was the first time that's ever happened. But anyway, it's more than when you're looking ahead, don't if you've never done the 10 year plan, and gone backwards, it's worth doing. You don't have to update the 10 year plan every year, you probably should update the three year plan every year. And you 100% have to update the 12 month plan. Every year. What does knowing what you know, this year at the end of this year? What does next year look like? It shouldn't be? Oh, I didn't make my goal. So I have failed. Oh, that's not it at all. What did you learn? What do you move forward with? would you add anything else?

Gary: 23:36

I know like the five year and 10 year goals can seem lofty. And sometimes I think you got to take yourself out of the realistic approach, like you said pie in the sky type stuff, which makes sense. I think you have to actually, a lot of times people will say like, well, this would be great if I could, but then this factor, this factor and this factor aren't going to, you know, allow that to happen for that length of time until this, you know what I mean, people start doing the logic math in their head of probability of what could and couldn't happen based on the span of time, but it's just a fun exercise to think. You know, how cool would it be if the company did grow to this size or did be able to work with this client or was able to produce this many things or, you know, even won this award for something we achieved. Just stuff like that doesn't have to be nitty gritty, realistic, detailed when you're out five and 10 years. That's what the three and the one year and a 12 month you know, when you start backtracking it then you start realizing Okay, what do we actually have to do for that? Then you can start throwing into Logic and the realism.

David: 24:48

The one caveat I'd put to that is if you're brand new startup mode, you're in survival mode. You're just you know, you're either pre revenue or you're just barely making ends meet. Be careful. Make As I've used the term many times the before, you're awesome. And once you're awesome, right? Those are two phases. And every startup life before you're awesome means you are, no one knows who you are. No one cares, you're in that that struggle, that survival mode, slog is another place to where to call that. And then once you're awesome means now you you've got some money under, in your, in your bank, you've got some clients, you've got some gravity, those two companies are often very, very different than what you've built. Even if you're talking tech, the stuff you build before, you're awesome compared to what you can build. And I'll use a cheesy example. If you want to integrate with, say, a big player, right? Whatever you want to do Amazon kind of stuff where you're talking to big vendors, they're not going to talk to you when you're tiny, right. So you can't build that even though that's in your dream, I'm gonna integrate with Adobe, and I'm going to do this cool thing. They're not going to talk to you while you're pre revenue. But once you are awesome, and once you've caught their attention, because you have real money and real clients and this the other doors open, things change. And so when you're planning ahead, there's a very big thing that the before and after So, okay, three years, I'm going to make up in my mind that we're going to be awesome in three years. Okay, then by bam, now we're going to plan as though I'm awesome. Maybe that happens. Maybe it doesn't. But it's all part of the planning that first stuff the first three years be just be realistic. Just try to be realistic. Yeah,

Gary: 26:32

that's exactly what I meant. Don't Don't stop yourself from the after we're awesome. Planning, just because you're not awesome yet.

David: 26:45

That's fair, that's fair. But also don't get ahead of yourself. I think it's kind of where I was putting the brakes on, whatever.

Gary: 26:53

Take a glass half full from the side.

David: 26:58

But I if you aren't planning? Why aren't you planning because if you're not, you don't know where you're going. If you don't plan, you just driving without a map, man, you got to do it. So it is a good time to do it. And in the if this is the first time you've done it next year, do it earlier. I think it's a good third quarter fourth quarter kind of thing, as opposed to it's January, or God forbid, February, March, where you're planning 2024, you're already behind, right? So if this is the first time you're thinking about it, and it's in December or early January, that's fine. Get it done. But the next year start earlier, it'll just save you a lot of time and grief and give you a real plan to move forward.

Gary: 27:44

can prove what you don't measure.

David: 27:49

I wish I could attribute that that's a great quote, I

Gary: 27:51

was about to attribute it to you. And then you were going to attribute it to someone else. And then I could Michael Scott and Michael Scott, as I

David: 27:57

say it all the time. But I certainly did not make it. But it's 100% true if you're not measuring it. And that can be anything from your culture, to your deliverables, to your products to your clients, to your client satisfaction, all of those things, everything can be measured, how good your people are, can be measured, how good your clients are, could be measured. We were talking about this, me and Carl was talking about this the other day, there's a famous graph. And it's like of the classic quadrants, right, got the T graph. And it's basically the x and y axis x is how much money a client makes you. And y is how big of a pain in the butt they

Gary: 28:37

are. Yeah, aggravation versus this is,

David: 28:41

this is a great thing. If you haven't done this, at least on a high level, it's highly recommended. What you want is the top right corner quadrant, which is of course the magic spot, that means you make a lot of money and they're easy to work with. Right? The bottom left quadrant would be the worst, which means you make less money or no money. And they're a huge pain in the butt. As if you have clients in that bottom left quadrant, you should fire them. Which probably gives most owners absolute hives if you are a new company. If

Gary: 29:10

they're your only clients, and they're in that bottom quadrant. Can't quite fire. But yeah, start start thinking a little bit differently about how you might be presenting what you can and can't do and who you're presenting to.

David: 29:25

Yeah, how do you not get any more of those get better? Yeah. It's so interesting to me when when I started out, we so I was digging around last week, I worked a lot of hours in the last couple of weeks. And so I find myself at night when no one's asked me anything everyone's want, I need a break. And I start doing random stuff. So I found

Gary: 29:44

go into your Jobs folder that's sorted by date. That's what I do too. Yeah. Go to the Jas folder sort by day, go to the bottom, open up stuff and just laugh. The

David: 29:54

oldest some of the oldest sites Gary and I ever worked on together we're talking 2000 The eighth 2009. And I was showing them to the team just how cheesy some of the copy was and stuff. My original company was called visionary online, which is so grandiose and self righteous, but but it was fun going through that and seeing, but those original websites, I was charging three and $500 for. And to think you know how different things are now, and how what we build is so different. It's really interesting. I don't know how I got onto this random track, we

Gary: 30:37

were talking about firing clients, and then eventually getting clients that you deserve in need. But you have to go through this stuff where at first you can't fire clients if you just need clients. I remember when I started doing like freelance design work on the side and doing logos I was like, I would do someone I think I would go way overboard and deliver like 10 to 15 examples and all these revisions and then brand colors and alignments. And you know how it would look mock ups and stuff for like 150 bucks. Guys way too much work crazy little money

David: 31:14

amount of work. Yeah. crazy amount of work you would do? Yeah, I was some of my old sites, I can't run anymore because they had flashed on them. That it's, you know, verboten in browsers today. But it is just, it's really interesting. If you've been around for a little while to go look at some of your early stuff. If your whatever your early designs were or, you know, mock ups or prototypes. It's worth sometimes to look back and see how far you've come. It's not a it's not I mean, it is navel gazing, of course, but it's it's worth looking back and seeing look, you can do this, reminding yourself, because every year brings new difficulties, new challenges. And if you started looking back at your past, you can see you've done this before you've done the hard thing. You've made hard decisions and you succeeded. Or you learned

Gary: 32:02

there's no fan, you're always going to see the improvement. There's always going to be some improvement that you can glean from it just because I Yeah, okay. So I mean, I'm not getting worse, that's for sure.

David: 32:17

So it's Yeah, I think it's a good time at the end of the year to do all that. Okay, that's enough navel gazing. Is there anything else you want to end? The

Gary: 32:27

navel gazing meaning? That's like a weird, Texas University phrase. I've heard I don't know where plenty of times but I'm too embarrassed to ask what it means because

David: 32:36

navel gazing means you're staring at your own belly button. Understand contemplating your own existence? Well,

Gary: 32:43

that's obviously the direct thing. But how does that relate it to looking at your old work?

David: 32:50

Because you're looking at yourself, you're staring at your own stuff. There, you're seeing your own importance good or bad, right? It's,

Gary: 33:02

you're not? Don't worry. It took me a long time to figure out what drinking the Kool Aid meant, because I never really bothered to ask either.

David: 33:08

I'm not allowed to say that anymore. i It's, it's I was told that that is insensitive and wrong. So I'm not allowed to say that anymore, which is really hard.

Gary: 33:17

I get a funny story. So I worked for this corporate media company for 13 years, right. And my direct boss would use that phrase a lot. And everybody like in meetings would say it, you know, and then everybody not along. I be like, Yeah, okay. And then finally, like, no one else really in there about 10 years. Oh, I know where it comes from?

David: 33:37

Sure. Because most people don't. Yeah, but finally,

Gary: 33:41

I was like, You know what, I don't understand the Kool Aid thing. And everyone just looked at me shocked. Like, you've been agreeing with us for like, 10 years, and you never like, What do you mean, you don't know what it means? Like, I don't know what it means. I just, everybody else isn't nodding their head. And I figured it's just like an inside joke that I'm eventually going to get, but never got. So I finally started thinking, Okay, I gotta ask because I'm being left out for some reason. But then when I found out what it was, and I was like, okay, that's just that's hard. That's, that's dark.

David: 34:13

I wish I wish there was a happier version, because the concept is real, right? I mean, that drinking the Kool Aid means you're all

Gary: 34:20

happy version is just smile and wave, just smile and wave, you're, you're

David: 34:24

all you're all on the same page, you're all moving in the same direction. The book that I'm reading right now, which is called rocket fuel. They call it getting all of the arrows in it pointing the same direction. If you are, if you're a company and you shoot a bunch of arrows, each of the ideas each employee has an arrow in your quiver, and you shoot them all out. If they're all pointed in different directions, you're not gonna get very much, you're not gonna hit very many targets. So the idea is a good integration of the death reference is someone

Gary: 34:54

who can do more time arrow reference that start to yes, we're

David: 34:57

shooting somebody. But yeah, Getting on the same page is basically what drinking the Kool Aid means. If you're too young, and you want to look at the real thing, look in the 70s. And it's very sad. Um, you know, when I look back at the year, it's been a really good year. We've had a very successful year, which is nice. We don't always have those. Sometimes. We've never had a bad year, I should say, we've, we've had some years, that growth wasn't what we wanted it to be. But we've never had a bad year. So that's a blessing. I am very pleased and excited about 2024. Okay,

Gary: 35:34

yeah, no, that's, that's probably what I would verbalize then that I feel like there's momentum going into the next year. So how I'm ending this year will be decided.

David: 35:46

I want to land this plane we've we've had, this has been a rough December for us only because we've had people out. And we've had lots of stuff we have to do. And a lot of that's just fallen on me. So I've been working like 80 hour, weeks at Air months. Other tough man,

Gary: 36:06

CEO time.

David: 36:09

A lot of golf man. Now I don't play golf. I did take a course in college of golf. You know, it's so interesting. When I'm in the business group, I ask it you know, who plays golf still? Like, is that still a thing? And the answer is yes, it absolutely is a thing that is still a place where you wine and dine. And there are still young people who are learning to golf, like we're talking 20 year olds, learning to golf so that they can wine and dine their people. And I've never learned to play golf. So that's never been my world. But schmoozing man golfing, is you're stuck with someone, and you get to talk to them for a long period of time. That's ultimately what it is anyway. So I'm ready, I'm ready to end the year, we've worked very, very hard. We've done a lot of really good work, we've built a lot of really cool things. And so I'm ready, we always close the last week of the year, to celebrate Christmas, and to spend time with our families. And so I'm looking forward to that very much and then hitting the ground running in January. Because I don't think normally in our world, we slow way down in November, December, January, February, it's just our cycle. I don't think we're gonna get that this year. I think in January, we're gonna hit the ground at a dead sprint, which is weird, but very cool.

Gary: 37:25

Yeah, I don't think the ball is going to stop rolling at all. But I think we've built up enough momentum from the successes that we had this year. But going forwards, looking pretty exciting, actually,

David: 37:39

to everyone listening, thank you so much for a great year. Thank you for joining us. We have been experimenting all year long. We have found some pretty good footing. We've had some amazing guests. And we've really, really enjoyed this and we're going to continue to keep doing this. But if there are paths, you want us to take questions you want us to answer, you know, let us know because that's we're all experimenting here. We're just saying what's fun to do. I mean, this isn't, you know, we don't have any ulterior motives here. So anything that we find, we want to do, and

Gary: 38:15

to mirror that thank you to every one of the guests that we've had. Hey, thank you to every one of the guests that we've had. And we're gonna have some more guests coming up. So that's not ending just because it's been me and David for the last couple of weeks. We have more guests lined up. So

David: 38:30

get some rest. Don't forget no matter if you're an entrepreneur and you are you doing a side gig or whatever, still got a restaurant. So good. So enjoy the holidays. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. 2024.

Christie: 38:44

Hi, I'm Christy pronto, Content Marketing Director here at Big pixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of The bizdev podcast. We'd love to hear from you shoot us an email Hello at dub big pixel.net the biz dev podcast is produced and presented by big pixel. See you next week. Until then follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook threads, YouTube and LinkedIn