CEO Cultivation: Think Big & Just Do It, More Time With Loved Ones & People Are UnReliable
Welcome back to another walking podcast. Today, there’s a couple different topics we’re going to talk about. Basically, all these topics are the things that I realized the day before and I write them down into notes and I talk about them the next day. So today the first one is to think bigger and just do it. When running a company, a lot of times you can get sucked into the small minutiae of stuff like proofreading contracts, negotiations, or what the next product is that you're working on. I'm an actual developer and actually do this stuff and work on it myself. I'll be doing anything from running wires in the building to do construction to coding whatever it is that we're developing. I'm a very hands on CEO of my companies which is good and bad.
Good because then it gives me a solid understanding of everything that goes on. There isn't anything in any of my companies that I do not understand or I haven't done myself. Whenever I ask someone else to do a task, it’s because I've already done it and figured out the best way to do it. Or at least I've already figured out a really good way to do it and hopefully my partners or employees can figure out a better way to do it. I'm very hands on, but what happens is you get stuck and you forget about the bigger picture items and the bigger risks and goals.
Something that we’re going to start doing as a result of a lot of talking with my partners and Jason is we're going to build up a whole new business plan for my cannabis consulting company. Instead of just doing consulting services, operational services, brand development like we’ve been doing, we’re going big. There’s too many people who have stupid ideas, and they fail miserably, but they get millions of dollars in funding just because people went in. I decided fuck this let’s just do it ourselves, let's go get our own licenses. We're going to start going out and acquiring licenses, get companies, and flip them. We're going to be integrating the Thrive technology grows that we're working with and a lot of our other expertise, bringing in brands like the Kevin Smith brand to do distillates and oils with the Jay and Silent Bob line.
There's a lot of big things that we have from our network and our connections, but we're not pulling it all together. So the decision I made yesterday was fuck that let's just do it, just pull the trigger. So we reached out to a couple of investors just to feel it out, we shared our ideas and their response was “Whatever it is, I'm in. I know your track record and I don't give a shit as long as it's you guys.” So we potentially have a decent amount of funding behind whatever we build. Next is building out the business plan. How do you build out a business plan? We're going to acquire multiple companies and licenses across multiple states, build brands, blah, blah, blah. Thankfully, have done that before.
With my cannabis company that I built up from scratch, it started from an idea to a $7 million valuation within a year and a half. It was really five different companies being built at the same time because we had a grow, three dispensaries, and manufacturing. They're all under the same umbrella of the same name, but they're all different. A retail store is vastly different than a commercial cannabis grow. And a manufacturing facility where you're making edibles is completely different than running a recreational cannabis dispensary. There's just a lot of things going on, you're trying to get them all at once, and it's stressful as fuck, which has been my hesitation in jumping back into that again. It really consumes you when you start tackling so many things like that at once.
It was really difficult because we didn't have the funding behind us. I didn't have the proper funding. We tried to do it on a skeleton budget and we did it. I built that company with two million dollars. $2 million to $7 million with a term sheet to buy out the company in a year and a half, running on a skeleton crew and a skeleton budget and doing 20% gains month over month since we started selling. We had the first licenses in the area that we opened, the first sale for the entire state, Jason and I did that one ourselves actually.
Basically I said fuck it, let's just do it again. Let's just go crazy, but this time let's get proper funding. Now that we have more experience under our belt, we have a bigger network of people and more access to money, which is a huge factor. We want to do this the right way. I don't want to go public because I don't know what I'm doing in that department, but I definitely want to go big. So that’s our next plan. The key takeaway here is that sometimes you just have to push away the small things, the little projects you're doing and just say fuck it and go for the big ones to see what happens. It's worked out for me in the past, I’ve failed in the past, so you never know. I like to count my successes and to the losses I say who gives a shit? I'm just going to go onto the next one anyway.
The next topic that I want to talk about is to spend more time with your loved ones and treat them like the most important job that you have. This is a note to myself more than anything, because I'm a very work-centric person. I've always been told that I need to spend more time with my family because I'm a workaholic. I am a workaholic because I'm trying to reach these goals, and just because I have kids does not mean I'm going to just stop trying. What I do need to do is change how I try, maybe change the degree of what I'm trying. Since I've gotten full custody of my kids about 1 ½ years ago now, I've been home. I haven’t traveled for work in a long time. I haven't hit gold or platinum status with Delta this year, which is insane. I've been diamond or platinum since around 2005. I've been highest status with Delta since then, and now I have less than 50,000 miles in one year, that's unheard of for me.
Now, I spend a lot more time home. I get to see my kids every day,I hang out with them every night, I get to see them in the morning. Even if it's only a little bit, it's more than I ever have before, and I'm slowly trying to get more and more in there. I'm trying to build build things up at the same time, so it's an interesting balance. What I have learned is that I need to prioritize my family, friends, my significant other, and even my personal time. To prioritize all of that, I have to literally schedule it. I have to set meetings with my kids, meetings with myself, meetings with my girlfriend and meetings with my mom on the phone, because if I don't, I'm not going to do it.
It's not that I don't want to or I have ill will towards anyone. Time just flies. Like today, I've been up busting my ass since 7 am, I just ate food for the first time at 4 pm because I totally forgot to eat. I’ve been so swamped with phone calls, text messages and emails from running things. I have to make a schedule for time with my kids as stupid as it sounds. It might sound bad to say that, but realistically it has given me more time, and I've had more fun, and I get to enjoy my family more. So it's working for me at least, so I'm going to keep doing it.
I was supposed to do a bunch of work late last night, but I said fuck it and took a couple hours off, called my girlfriend said meet me in the city, let's go see a movie. I just bought tickets and said we’re going. I pushed off a bunch of work that I should have been doing and now I’m trying to play catch up but spending that time with her, even just a couple of hours is awesome. She appreciates it too, so it's a win win. That's the takeaway - prioritize your family like they’re the most important job you have. There was something that I read somewhere that was great. Instead of telling people hold on a minute or you can't right now, or any of that bullshit, tell them “I don't have time for you right now”. Don’t say that to their face, only say it in your mind, but that changes the emotional factor of making that decision greatly. At least it did for me.
When my kids say look at this or come here or play this with us and I'm in the middle of working trying to get this shit done, I used to say not right now or give me a minute. Now in my mind I flip it to “I don't have time for you”, and looking at my daughter in her eyes and trying to tell her “I don't have time for you” just doesn't happen. So I get up and I go and do whatever it is they want me to do. That's a nice little mental heck that I have adapted and it has worked out really well for me.
It just makes a lot of sense for me because that's really what you're saying. You’re really saying this work is more important than you are right now, and sometimes it is. But a lot of the time it's not. A lot of the time the autopilot thought is that it's just family, they’re always going to be there, so I don't need to focus on them right now. With kids especially that is the wrong attitude to have, because they're not going to be kids forever. They're going to hate you eventually, move out, and you're never going to see them again, at least that’s what I'm told. I'm trying to capitalize on the little moments that I have now and that makes them happy. It's an extra couple of minutes I get to spend my kids. So that's another lesson of the day.
Let's go to the next topic and this one is my favorite. I think people are stupid and unreliable. Basically, it's true. People are fucking morons and unreliable as hell, If you hire a person because they're going to do a great job, eventually they're gonna fuck it up, walk out on you, bail on you, etc. It's not like they have malice, it's just that shit happens. A lot of times when we ask people to do things, whether it’s a certain job task or making my cheeseburger right when I order it at a restaurant, you're expecting them to be able to do exactly what is in your head with minimal description.
For example, I want you to post five posts on Facebook tomorrow. Okay, so the manager goes and does five posts on Facebook. I review our social media and I’m like fuck these posts are stupid, they're totally useless, they actually hurt the company! Now, is it their fault? They did exactly what I said. What really happened was I did not give them enough instruction or I didn't have enough oversight. Whenever you're talking to people, you have to expect that they're fucking idiots and you’ve got to break it down to the lowest common denominator. Otherwise, you're going to repeat yourself a bunch of times, or deal with a bunch of fuck ups and do it all over again a bunch of times and hat's irritating as shit. If you're someone like me, you don't have time for crap like that at all. Especially if you have a whole bunch of companies you're running at the same time. When you tell someone to do something, you're expecting them to do it right the first time. Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way.
I've learned through life, and I know it sounds bad, but if you just assume that everyone is a fucking idiot and they're not going to do the job right, you approach it very differently. When you start delegating tasks off to them, you’re going to be specific. “I want the content like this and I need it posted at this time, and I need to see this, this, and this. All of a sudden you get what you want, so spend that little bit of time in the beginning to be extra clear with people.
My problem is being clear without sounding condescending. I am bad at that. If you couldn't tell pretty blunt person. That's another thing I noticed as a deficiency of myself. I've tried to fix it. I just can't or I'm too much of an idiot to do it. What I always do is I hire a buffer person. In every one of my companies, I have a buffer person - with my IT company, I have Molly, with my cannabis consulting company I’ve got Alex, and with my tattoo shop, I’ve got Alexis. In every single company, I have my go to person when I want something done. I go to my buffer person and say “Hey, what the fuck's wrong with this person? Why the fuck are they doing this? Drop this shit off and make sure they do their fucking job right”. Then they go to the person and say “How's it going? You're doing a great job. I just want to see if I could help you, maybe improve what we're doing here, show you a couple little tricks that might help you”. They’re that buffer person to take what I'm raging about, tone it down and flip it into a nice, constructive way to get the task done. It's worked out beautifully.
Once I realized my deficiency and I gapped it with a person that's really good at that. Everything all of a sudden starts working a lot more smoothly. The buffer person then comes back to me and says “Hey, they said it's not going to work” or they know how to speak my language which is even better because they'll come back to me like, “Yeah, that shit is fucked. It ain't gonna work. This person's a fucking idiot. I don't know what the fuck to do.” So from there we can re-approach the situation.
People are morons and assume they're unreliable as all hell, this way you don't keep going back to re-do the same thing five fucking times. This perfect example drove me fucking nuts. I just hired a new assistant for one of my companies, and told her I needed these grinders to be picked up from a place in Manhattan. I was very specific about the grinders I needed. She called the place to ask if they had them in stock. They said yes, so she texted me that they were there and that I could go pick them up. I asked if she was sure, she said that she gave them all the specs and they confirmed. I took out hours of my life to go to this place to get these grinders because I really needed them, and when I get there, of course they're the wrong ones. Not even close to the ones that I want. I was fucking pissed because I wasted so much time on some shit when I was very specific about what I wanted and I was told exactly what I wanted was there. That's when I taught my new assistant to assume that people are fucking idiots. Double check, triple check, tell them to send a fucking photo because depending on the type of person you're dealing with and what industry, people react to you very differently, especially dealing with people from all over the world. Different cultures have completely different ways of handling things, and sometimes I may overreact, or they may not understand the difference in culture there.
One thing that I thought was hilarious was when I was in Egypt, they haggle for everything there. I mean, everything. You walk into a store and say I want a Coke, They'll tell you $2. You say $1 and then you kind of go back and forth from there. In the beginning, it irritated the fucking shit out of me. Just tell me how much the fuck it is I don't want goes back and forth. Then I started to enjoy it and approached it from a whole different angle. Once I took it as fun, and I just knew that that's the way it was in that area, I adapted to it really quickly and I did enjoy it. In the store, we’d start talking and both of us would be laughing as we're talking about the price rather than getting pissed off. A lot of times you just have to learn the culture and really adapt.
In Japan, how they do business meetings is very different than ours. You might think these dudes are just straight sleeping in the boardroom as you're presenting to him, but they're not. Normally the higher ups tend to look like they're sleeping because they're really thinking and absorbing everything you're telling them. So different cultures, different strokes for different folks I guess.
Let's go on to the next one here which is consultants are idiots. That's coming from a consultant who makes most of their money consulting. It drives me insane because most consultants don't have a clue what the fuck they're talking about, they’re just lying out their fucking ass. They're doing all kinds of shady shit to get the job, then they do a half ass job, and then everyone hates consultants because all they do is come in, fuck shit up, and charge me a lot of money.
Then I come in and they're already fucking hate me because they're used to terrible consultants. It's something that I have to fucking struggle with. One of my biggest gripes are consultants who come in and tell you all the shit that's wrong, tell you that you need to fix this and that. But when the company is like great, let’s make those changes, those consultants can’t make those changes happen themselves. Now the company has to find and hire more people to fix the problems that the consultant should have been able to fix. Why the fuck are you there, and also if you can't do the work, why the fuck are you consulting about it? If you can't do it, you do not know what the fuck you're doing, plain and simple. You're just guessing as to what other people can do based on your recommendations. So I just find consultants to be a huge pain in my fucking ass all the time because they make our jobs as people who know what we’re doing a lot fucking harder. The bill rates get all fucked up, it’s so irritating.
If you're a legit consultant, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you're out there on the road Monday through Friday, away from your family, going up to a different client sites and sitting in these stupid meetings where someone's yelling at you, sitting there in the fucking dank ass cubicle like I'm going to fucking murder people, and I don’t want to go back to that roach infested motel and eat this shitty fast food for dinner again, which I've been doing for the last four months in this godforsaken city, you're a bitter person. Most of the time if you're a hard core consultant, you are a serious road warrior, so when someone else comes in and fucks up your job, you get really fucking pissed. You're already pissed off. And now you're fucking triggered because you’re like fuck this guy, get him the fuck out of here, he's a goddamn idiot! Now they’re looking at you like whoa, where's all this hostility coming from?
It's because they do not know what I've been going through for the last 10 years to get to this point, then this dude just comes in and fucks it all up for the rest of us. So I hate consultants. Everytime someone asks what I do, I try to steer away from the word ‘consulting’ as much as possible. I don't want to have that negative connotation attached. I try ‘professional services’ or whatever phrase I can come up with just because I hate the word consultant. It just screams I'm an idiot, but I'm just here to bill you and get the fuck out and move on to the next one.
That is my rant about consultants, and I'm about to go talk to a bunch of consultants, including a buddy of mine. This guy is fucking smart, so much smarter than me. He was in a metal band touring around in a bus and one day he said it's just not working and he needs a paycheck. He didn’t like living in a van down by the river (because he was literally living in a van down by the river) He had a conversion van that he would sleep in in the city because he didn't have a place to live. It wasn't because he couldn't afford it, he was living so frugally just to try to make his band work that he sacrificed everything. I wanted to help him out so I offered to teach him what I do and help him get a gig. This dude learned what I do in about two weeks, he came into my apartment, I don’t think he left my living room for two weeks. He just absorbed everything and I helped him get hired, and he’s been there for eight years now.
He went from living in a van down by the river to pulling in over $200,000 year in less than twelve months just because he spent two weeks with me. He’s smart, he grinds, he’s able to just sacrifice everything. Even when this guy was pulling in twenty grand a month, he got himself a studio in Chinatown with a mattress on the floor and a table with folding chairs. This dude is the epitome of living frugally and saving his money and getting into all kinds of investments. He took Rich Dad Poor Dad to a whole new level. To him a bed is a liability, but look at him now. He's fucking killing it.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO