Episode 18: Runaway Founder Syndrome

Sarah: [00:00:00] Your sound’s gone. Your sound is gone. Why is your sound?

Zach: hear us. I think ’cause he is, it looks like he’s doing like his best NBC

Sarah: know, man. We can’t hear you. It is just gone.

Zach: This is,

Sarah: now. It says,

Zach: now.

Sarah: As soon as I hit record, all of a sudden your voice was gone.

Zach: it looked like you were doing a fantastic

Lee Zuvanich: I was doing a sick intro. No, I messed it up a couple times.

Okay.

Sarah: Should we

Lee Zuvanich: Sure.

Zach: Definitely keep this in for sure.

Sarah: Yeah, real problems.

Lee Zuvanich: All right. Ready?

Sarah: Okay. Let’s just jump right into

Lee Zuvanich: All right. Hey, welcome to Founder Problems. Today we’ll be talking about how to manage Runaway founder syndrome. I’m Lee Zuvanich and I do computer.

Sarah: I am Sarah Schumacher, and I do websites.[00:01:00]

Zach: Zach Oshinbanjo and I do housing

Lee Zuvanich: Nice. So just to dive in here, let’s start by unpacking what founder syndrome means. If someone wants to kick us off with that.

Sarah: Oh man. I think we should probably define this individually, but my definition would be when the founder has to be overly involved in every single decision. So they might hire a person to take something off their plate, but they can’t actually let them take it off their plate.

Lee Zuvanich: What, dunno what you’re even talking about. I’ve been accused of that.

Sarah: I think many people have some version of this. It’s a spectrum. Maybe we should also start with that.

Lee Zuvanich: It is a spectrum.

Sarah: It’s not a binary.

Lee Zuvanich: not be diagnosed, but you may have signs.

Zach, do you have a definition?

Sarah: Yeah, I wanna know what yours is since you’re not in tech. If there’s just different,

Zach: I would kind of say it as somebody who can’t let the [00:02:00] business breathe without them.

Lee Zuvanich: Oh wow. Oh, like an abusive partner. Where were you today?

Zach: Good gosh.

Lee Zuvanich: Everyone’s walking on eggshells. I mean, we’ve all like worked in a place like that, right? Where everyone’s walking on eggshells. That’s real. Yeah.

Zach: Yeah.

Sarah: It’s, it’s making decisions on eggshells. We all work remotely now, so it’s more about like, you can’t, you don’t have the freedom to do what you need to do without this specter hanging over your shoulder of, as soon as this person sees this, they’re going to undo everything the work quality suffers if you know that it will constantly be torn

Lee Zuvanich: Right, right. No empowered.

Sarah: Yeah. we want to talk about why we’re talking

Lee Zuvanich: Well, let me, let me take a crack at definition myself first. ‘Cause I think, I think I use it in different contexts sometimes. We were talking about that before. So for me, when I say, oh my God, they have founder syndrome, what I mean [00:03:00] is they are just.

Zach: are

Lee Zuvanich: Like Sarah was saying, picking it to death, kind of, but it can be so much more intense than just nitpicking other people’s work and micromanaging and not letting the business breathe.

It can also be just this over eagerness to try to be everything all the time to such a degree that you can’t

Zach: a degree.

Lee Zuvanich: let the processes happen either. Like if you’re building an app, which is, you know, where I live. An example of someone with founder syndrome might be we all. Sign off at 9:00 PM after a long, too long day of work and we think we’re all on the same page.

And then we get back online the next day at 9:00 AM and the founder says, I had some ideas in the middle of the night and I’ve reworked everything that we thought we were doing, and here are my ideas and let’s just dive in team. And expects everyone to be on board with that as if it isn’t extremely exhausting to deal with someone who constantly does that.

So I will say I. I hate working with founders like that and I have been a founder like that and [00:04:00] it’s the worst.

Sarah: Yep. Yeah, I would agree with

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah,

Sarah: So what’s, yeah, what’s our for talking about this today?

Lee Zuvanich: I think it came up

Sarah: what do

Lee Zuvanich: ’cause we’re,

Sarah: to walk

Lee Zuvanich: we keep dealing with it.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: It’s just part of. You know, the stress of of being a founder is you. I think a lot of us we’re serving other small business owners, or if you’re a, like a startup founder you know, business to business is the play they want you to do. You’re often not talking to your, the user. You know, it’s not like I built Instagram and I just want teenagers to use it.

It’s like, you know, a lot of us are building for other businesses because that’s the only way to have a stable. Business. You need other people that have revenue and consistent needs. And so that means we are interacting with people like ourselves all the time and just rubbing each other all the wrong way, constantly just constant friction.

Like, I don’t like the [00:05:00] way they have founder syndrome, but I have it too. And so for me, yeah, I, I would like to unpack what it looks like so that people listening can be like, oh yeah, I’ve dealt with that. How do I. Respond to it as a professional, how do I not just lose my mind and fire them? And then next, next time we come back to this topic separately, we will talk about what to do.

What to do when, into you. So today, yeah. Let’s see if we can help people figure out what do you do? How do you deal with it, Zach? ’cause I know you’re good at this.

Zach: We are jumping straight into the cure.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Zach: I don’t know. I almost feel like we could, we could, we can dovetail like kind of put that towards the end. I think we can unpack it a little bit ’cause the cure is very complicated.

Sarah: Hmm mm-hmm.

Zach: I don’t know, maybe we, we start with kind of scenarios of how we’ve experienced it or how about something more general when it’s a good thing now that we’ve [00:06:00] kind of each defined it in our own kind of lens.

Sarah: I think Steve Jobs is a good example of, of that, that most people are familiar with. The fact that he was. Like had a really clear vision, was really, really nitpicky about details and design. Like he, you know, famously took a typography class that really how he thought about things. Like, that’s, that’s an example of it

Zach: it

Sarah: going well because he was such a visionary. No one else could really see or understand what he was going for. because he was so strict about this is the way this has to be done, like he, he turned that into a reality. It also means he would’ve been absolutely terrible person to work for.

Zach: Yeah. But

Sarah: wouldn’t end up having the iPhone and Apple as it is now.

Like, none of that, none of that would’ve happened without him being so overly involved in it. So it’s not like there’s not positives to it. It’s, it’s balancing those with. You know, in the beginning, if you have a small team, you can direct a lot [00:07:00] more of that and be like, this, this is the vision. I need you to catch the vision.

And then from there it’s like, you know, Johnny, I famously was like the guy that took over the design of everything. So it’s like he was able to delegate that to someone that caught the vision. So it’s, it’s does it scale or it, it, it works to a certain point, but then when is it time to let go of those things a little bit perhaps? ’cause I think quality control, that’s the thing that I think of is a positive.

Zach: I would definitely agree. I think we’re, we have the fabled stories of when it doesn’t work, but

Sarah: Hmm.

Zach: on the, the counter to that is, you know, you have someone such as Steve Jobs as someone who can be the visionary and the operator at, in a sense, at the same time. And there, that’s a very delicate line to tread.

And there’s probably only a, a couple, a handful of people

Sarah: Hmm.

Zach: pinpoint and say, okay, yeah, they’re, they’re able to do that effectively. But otherwise that’s a person who might be, you know, running the company into the ground.

Lee Zuvanich: Steve Jobs got fired.[00:08:00]

Zach: I.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m talking about when he came

Lee Zuvanich: Right. We love, we love his comeback story, but he got fired because he was an asshole. Like for, among other reasons. He, he was hard to work with. And I think a lot of guys and, and women out here are wannabe Steve Jobs’s, right. It takes a special kind of visionary to be able to cast such a massive and important vision that they will put up with your shit and almost like get to the point where they can’t succeed without you because you built the core of the business on good design.

Like all the designers were apparently just waiting for him to come back. Right. Like, and we’re so excited that he came back even though he pushed them so hard. Just that’s the lore. So yeah, it’s a double sided.

I will say

Sarah: and it’s also,

Zach: would say.

Sarah: I was gonna say, you can’t also, don’t always get things done either. There’s, there’s a, there’s a type of founder like that that can [00:09:00] actually push that out to like execution. And there’s one that never gets to execution ’cause they won’t let up

Lee Zuvanich: exactly,

Sarah: those details.

Lee Zuvanich: So I would say, and this might be a weird example, but when I’m developing an app and I’m in design mode. I feel a little bit like Temple Granding. In the way that I approach it. I don’t know if everyone’s familiar with who that is, so I’ll give people like a, a quick overview. She’s an autistic woman who famously in the 1950s was able to go to college and become a professional like success, even though.

When she was little, she would’ve been institutionalized for the level of autism that she had and the issues it was causing was her ability to communicate and, and go through daily life. If she had been with a different family, but her mom. Like built systems for her and helped her to navigate the world until she was able to successfully, you know, do all these amazing things.

She wrote, she written a ton of books and she [00:10:00] influenced the cattle industry and animal processing plants. She was hired as a consultant eventually because she studied animal husbandry and then she was able to go in and she said she would talk about how autism is like having a prey mindset and she.

She felt like she could empathize with the cattle as she walked through every single step of the process. They took the cattle through, she would notice every single thing that would bother the cattle. And it was because she was noticing little, like a little flapping, like piece of plastic flapping in the wind would startle a bunch of cattle.

But a human would never normally notice that. A neurotypical human, somebody who’s neurodivergent might notice like. A little tinnitus sound right? Or chewing or breathing or, so when you apply that to the design world existing, why are you existing so close to me? So when you apply that, when a neurodivergent person comes into the design world or into the business world, and they start going, oh my God, it’s all wrong.

How [00:11:00] could you think that was right? And they start carving away at a person’s work. If they do it right, if they do it the way she did it, it can be this amazing benefit to their industry. Like Temple Grande. Like she completely revolutionized the way that they did cattle processing because before there would be all these stampedes and they would consider them to be losses, there’d be a lot of deaths and, and like injuries, and she fixed it to where they would peacefully go through process more happily and more calmly, and there was less injury and less death.

And, but we bring that into everything as neurodivergent people who are constantly noticing all the little minutia that other people don’t notice. So it’s a, that’s a good example. But it can also be very difficult, like we were saying.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Zach: Yeah, it, it’s, it’s being able to find that, that right type of balance. ’cause I think for the most part, that person, very rare. I mean, the three archetypes of an organization, the hustler, the tech, the, the strategist, the [00:12:00] tech, and the, the business minded person for that person to not only cons, consume, you know, assume two roles, but three in rare cases I think is something that you’re not gonna see a lot of.

And I think when it does work, it can work exceptionally. I’m, I’m drawing a blank on some additional kind of noted founders and people from titans of industry and

Sarah: I, I’ve, I’ve got one if we need one.

Zach: Yeah. I mean,

Sarah: Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: He he famously picks the toilet paper brand that they use in the bathrooms at headquarters.

Lee Zuvanich: What? Why?

Sarah: And

Zach: I could see that.

Sarah: because he’s a classic, he has to be involved in everything. He calls himself a benevolent dictator.

Lee Zuvanich: sounds terrible. God.

Zach: you get the right ply, you’re not wasting as much time on the rest in the restroom. So just

Lee Zuvanich: Stop. Stop.

Zach: Get in there, get out,

Lee Zuvanich: Oh my God.

Sarah: like a project manager is for? [00:13:00] Like, you

Lee Zuvanich: Delegate that.

Sarah: you to make

Lee Zuvanich: Geez.

Sarah: or, or finance or something. Yeah,

Zach: clipboard.

Sarah: he, so they just, the newest version of WordPress they’re talking about like, we need to work with AI and stuff. And so it was like, he’s like, we need to build AI into this.

And then all of a sudden, like they’re, they’re integrating AI stuff into like the newest drop, like just very quickly, right? So it’s, that’s the kind of thing where you can imagine, and again, WordPress is open source software. It’s volunteer built people, like he’s building this on the backs of volunteers essentially.

There’s, there’s a lot of not positive things I could say about this overall, but, so I don’t think he’s a good example

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah,

Sarah: But he’s definitely an example, I guess if you’re in this world.

Lee Zuvanich: that leads us into when does it become a problem? How is it a problem? Why is he a bad example?

Sarah: The ability to make unilateral decisions without feedback that are not in the best interest of the company or the employees. [00:14:00] Like he’s made some very, very poor decisions the last couple years and made a lot of enemies and upset the entire community, nobody can do anything about it. Like he, he single-handedly controls everything and there’s no, there’s no co-founder that you can go talk to, be like, Hey man, can you reason with me? Like, so I would say, when does it become a problem when you don’t have, ’cause you might have like the classic visionary integrator balance, right? Like, you’ve got the, the person that’s the co-founder that’s great at executing, and the co-founder that’s great at Dr.

The dreaming piece of it. And if you can bring those two people together and they can compliment each other, it can work. So I would say if you have a founder that is purely a visionary or purely an executor, like there’s gonna be some gaps there. So when does it become a problem when you don’t have the ability to, you’re lacking in things and you don’t have anyone to fill those gaps for you?

I think,

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: it could frankly just be advice. I mean, not being surrounded by sink fans that are [00:15:00] like,

Lee Zuvanich: Right.

Sarah: what are you doing? You know?

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: so I don’t, that’s common unfortunately with these.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: Maybe not even common, almost idolized sometimes I think in the media, like with just around startups and stuff, it’s like, oh, this visionary single handedly built this whole company, and you’re like,

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah, like

Sarah: he bought it, but

Lee Zuvanich: Steve,

Sarah: Or whatever.

Lee Zuvanich: so Steve Jobs had Wozniak, right? Like, like you’re saying, there’s

Sarah: And there’s

Lee Zuvanich: someone to temper.

Sarah: a hardworking nerd

Lee Zuvanich: Yes, yes. Always. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: You know, if you guys have ever seen that,

Sarah: usually the

Lee Zuvanich: famous, youTube clip of him getting called out by an engineer at some like conference and they were like, oh yeah, you’re building Apple.

What, when’s the last time you pushed code? Is basically what they asked. And he didn’t say, oh, Woz does that and like, share the credit. He talked about like something like the Burden of Genius or something. He kind of like brought it back to, you know, his role and, and how, and like the [00:16:00] user’s involvement in the design.

And he didn’t say like, well actually it’s a shared. Space and let me give some credit to my co-founder. He didn’t do any of that. So I think there’s always that personality that’s like the lead singer or the band type person. And Yeah, and, and unfortunately everyone orbits them, and that is just how it works.

For better or for worse,

Sarah: Yes. Because the people that are busy doing the work are off busy doing the work. They’re not worried about, they’re not focused on that, but you still need to be able to sell or raise money or

Lee Zuvanich: right.

Sarah: just, it always, it always filters to that person. So,

Zach: Yeah, it always ends up having its place and its role. I would you know, this is what edits are for, if this is also an individual who is had an interesting pathway. The Salesforce guy,

Sarah: oh yeah, mark Benioff, I have no idea what else to Pronou his name, name.

Zach: the early part of what they were working on kind of lent well to being able to do that.

Being [00:17:00] able to, what was his whole angle? Like having one direct, two or three direct, I think, ’cause they compete with SAP and some other large infrastructure type applications like that. Being able to compete with that directly and being able to align the company towards that goal. Like a wartime commander, like everybody’s. Take SAP down, they have 90% market share and being able to band together and take some share, but then that also can restrict the organization. If it does, it can’t exist beyond you because you go to your annual shareholders meeting and say something like how many international employees do we have here?

And people raise their hand and then you respond on stage to the CEO and say, good, we have ice here in the back for you guys. so yeah, true story said that last week, but,

Lee Zuvanich: I didn’t know that. That’s crazy.

Zach: but

Sarah: I just remember him being like, oh yeah, we love our people. Also, we’re gonna replace ’em all with ai,

Zach: yeah, that, so [00:18:00] having so much, I guess free reign just almost makes you neglect sensibility. I don’t know how to even describe it, but I would say that’s a case when it runs poorly as you’re, maybe you should have somebody for press, you know, you know, don’t, don’t talk all the time.

Sarah: it, the, the, yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: That was, that was his version of pr probably. That was a play. That was an intentional political statement. Right. And there’s a reason he did it.

Sarah: Yep.

Lee Zuvanich: So I don’t agree with

Sarah: Yep.

Lee Zuvanich: the decision to do that or the reason he did it. But a lot of people are trying to curry favor with the administration and that is what that looks like.

And that is an example of these founders doing whatever the hell they want and like the rest of the company be damned. And maybe it works out and you get a documentary made about you and maybe it doesn’t, and people just tell stories about how horrible it was to work for you.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s, I think it, it seems like there’s some level, and I don’t know where the line is, but there’s some level of like [00:19:00] success or money or something that goes to the person’s head and then they just become, I dunno what they become, it is not normal and it’s, it’s interesting to see this pattern happen just con constantly.

Zach: It’s probably 2.5 million. Once you

Sarah: the number.

Zach: million liquid, I think it just

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: is, okay,

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: you’re down.

Zach: You just wake up. Just start, start saying outlandish stuff every day.

Lee Zuvanich: Blaming your sleeping pills.

Sarah: is probably a press thing. You know, it’s

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: thing because there’s the famous thing about like the millionaire that no one knows

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And maintains their lifestyle. It’s when it’s public,

Lee Zuvanich: Yes.

Sarah: when people know that you have a lot of money and then all of a sudden you’re surrounded by people who are all fake, know,

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: and you no longer have any real people that are like, Hey, you know what?

I’m gonna tell you what you don’t wanna

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah,

Sarah: Like just all evaporate, I guess. So

Lee Zuvanich: So

Sarah: anyway, [00:20:00] yeah. So

Lee Zuvanich: yeah, let’s move on.

Sarah: how Yeah, how do

Lee Zuvanich: How does this show up in, in different industries? So I’ll represent app development and you know what that feels like, but I have a lot to say about that. So you guys should go first. How does it show up in the industries that you’re working in, or have you noticed it’s different among different founders who represent different industries?

Sarah: I’m in the creative space, so I would say that it’s, it’s. We will review this make some comments, and then suddenly have opinions that appear, you know, at the end of a project or nitpicky things we wanna change or don’t understand the best practices that have been applied as to why these certain decisions were made.

Like there’s a lot of feeling like need to make just unnecessary edits to something that is personal preference,

Lee Zuvanich: How do [00:21:00] you know they’re unnecessary? Sarah,

Zach: do you know they’re

Lee Zuvanich: maybe they’re so necessary. Maybe that founder is a brilliant visionary,

Zach: Brilliant

Lee Zuvanich: genius.

Sarah: yeah, I if it, you might not be a brilliant visionary if the same edits are being made on the same section of a page, like back and forth for like six times. And the final one is failing contrast requirements for web accessibility. So stuff like that where it’s like, well, I like this color better. It’s like, you know, is this, is it, what’s the ROI on changing the color of the icons in this section of your

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: There is none.

Lee Zuvanich: Right.

Sarah: There is like, there are so many more important places for you to be investing your time and energy in. And it’s like a lack of, of foresight, in my opinion, to, to be so involved in these. Like, don’t you have something better to be doing?

Lee Zuvanich: Apparently not. Yeah.

Sarah: yeah. So I would say like, the creative, yeah, creative stuff.

It’s like just getting really, really involved. And that doesn’t mean it’s not important to like, [00:22:00] have input on things. I mean, like, you know, brands matter and like, you, you should, you should like what you have, like if you’re doing like a logo design or something you know, if you’re doing a website, yeah.

Like hopefully the founder likes what they have. You should have some input, but at the same time, it’s not actually for you, it’s for your customers.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: And there’s a lot of people getting hung up on, well, I like the shade

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah, but I don’t like it.

Sarah: for

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. Or like, or I want, you know, you’re a restaurant, you don’t use blue in restaurants for a

Lee Zuvanich: Right. Yeah. And they’re like, but I wanna be different. You’re making me like everyone else. I have a vision. Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. You’re like, there’s, there are perfectly scientific reasons for why these things are

Lee Zuvanich: Right,

Sarah: So,

Lee Zuvanich: Trust the experts.

Sarah: I would, I would say that that’s a big piece of it is feeling in control, I think perhaps is part of what that is.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah. What about you, Zach? How does this show up in different in, in your industry?[00:23:00]

Zach: I brief caveat, I, I think the restaurant industry is probably the one where this actually ma makes the most sense beyond just general line cooking, but like elevated French cuisine or some sort of culinary art type thing. That person probably serves well in that industry. And

Sarah: Mm.

Zach: probably something I forgot.

I

Lee Zuvanich: Oh yeah.

Zach: of startups and tech. ’cause you want to put out the same quality dish, whether it’s person here, this other type of person, you want the same level of plating, you want the quail egg to rest ever so gently on like the cracked sternum and all this other stuff. You want every dish to be exactly the same.

So within that industry it probably makes perfect sense ’cause that also becomes your brand signature. And I think

Sarah: Yep.

Zach: just leaks over into creative as well.

Sarah: I a hundred percent agree with that. And there is a chef I know and love locally that I would not wanna work for that person. [00:24:00] So there’s a reputation for, I that’s a, that’s a really good example actually that I think people would understand.

Zach: Industry-wise within the nonprofit sector, I’ll speak from that lens. I think what you often find like with any startup, but maybe 6% more, that someone treats their nonprofit as their darling they just want to control every facet from top to bottom. And that becomes a hindrance because it. Is impossible for you to also be the front person shaking hands, kissing babies, being everywhere, writing every grant doing all your compliance, doing all your reporting, doing all your filing doing your, your nine 90 every year doing your books. You, at some point cannot be the sole person doing all that. So I think being able to separate yourself is what allows a nonprofit to truly [00:25:00] grow and breathe. I almost feel like it’s fundamentally understood more, but when it isn’t understood within the nonprofit sector, you have a, a nonprofit that just fails to, to grow in capacity and what it can actually do. So

Sarah: That makes a lot of sense. ’cause it’s so much more a nonprofit’s gonna be more personal usually for people. So, I mean, ’cause I, I would say most founders think their business is their baby. But in the nonprofit space, that’s like times 10.

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Zach: It’s a baby that does good.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: Yes.

Lee Zuvanich: And, and that attracts a certain kind of personality that if they have found your syndrome, I feel like it’s so much worse. ’cause I did social work a million years ago, and the people that I worked for had this so badly where they thought their story was. The most important story, whether it was, well, I was homeless 20 years ago, so I know what to build and what these people are going through.

And also I can treat them however I wanna treat them. I know what they need. [00:26:00] Or like,

Sarah: Hmm.

Lee Zuvanich: aside from that, I don’t have that backstory, but like, because of my personal beliefs about what these people need to, to shape up and be better, like citizens of society, here’s the program we’re gonna build for them.

And I had to leave. My dream of being a social worker when I was 19, after doing a couple internships and realizing working for those people would burn me out. It wasn’t the work or the working in homeless shelters or on the street with people you know, who were addicts. That was all easy compared to working with people who were making it all about them and make, I mean, they just, people would leave crying meetings with the, the founders because they were just obsessive with a vision that wasn’t serving anyone but them.

So it can get bad.

Zach: that’s like getting too much into your own way. Like at a certain point you need to be able to deliver as that famous study of a group of scientists, or, I dunno, somewhere they thought that women [00:27:00] women who had just recently given birth would be best served by easily col was like more rigid or something like that. And then it was like, no, that’s super hard to take it onto a bus. So they actually wanted more collapsible, easy, easy

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Zach: I can’t, I’ll, I’ll

Lee Zuvanich: Notes,

Zach: the show notes, but that’s like an excellent case of that people come in with their own idea

Lee Zuvanich: right?

Zach: I can serve these people well, I’ve had a baby or something like that.

Like, no, there’s circumstances, there’s nuance, there’s different scenarios in which that actually matters.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: And it’s really easy if you just, you know, ask people

Zach: Now why would you do that?

Lee Zuvanich: But I speak for them, I can just,

Sarah: what a novel idea.

Lee Zuvanich: so yeah, the way that it shows up in app development, custom software development for in my world is when, like I was describing you before, people show up saying, oh, I redesigned the app,

Zach: oh, I,

Lee Zuvanich: a dream, had a vision, had. No big deal, right? Hey, dev team will it, what will it take another week?

Like what are we, what are we thinking? So there’s that personality and [00:28:00] then there’s well I was talking to you guys pre-show on another day about this, and I think for me it came down to people who think they’re creative, but they’re not a creative professional. So I’m an example of that. When Sarah, you were helping me with my website, I would be like, but I came up with a new color palette again.

I’m creative and you were like, no, you are. But don’t do it like this. This is insane. Like you can’t have 20 colors. Be your brand color.

Sarah: that’s

Lee Zuvanich: That’s it.

Sarah: palette. It’s a rainbow.

Lee Zuvanich: That’s a spectrum

Sarah: It’s

Lee Zuvanich: and you’re on the spectrum. Get outta my way. So, and I did not listen to you and you were so patient, and I just, yeah, and it, so just to describe what it is like to be that person, which we’ll get into more in the other episode, but it was like eating at me.

You know, I would look at it and go, well, I, I loved it last week, but I hate it. Now. Are we really gonna now spend probably another month or two [00:29:00] designing something that I now hate? Really when we could just have a just one more conversation. Just one more redesign conversation. It won’t kill us. Maybe Sarah will kill me.

I don’t know. But I don’t wanna like, I don’t wanna hate the thing that we’re gonna ship.

Zach: wanna,

Lee Zuvanich: And I think the problem was I was getting obsessed, like we were talking about with my experience, when really I needed to be obsessed only with my user’s experience, because for all I know, I’m gonna ship the website.

Then people will see it and go, oh yeah, I noticed you used like a lot of coral and lime green. And that, honestly, it made me feel like I was looking at like a daycare website for blind children. And their caregiver is like, what are you doing? And I would be like, oh, that’s good feedback. Maybe we should do the more limited color palette Sarah suggested.

So I needed to just get outta my own way, like you guys were saying. But another version of that that I come across a lot is founders who they also think that they are technical. So it’s a, it’s a theme. [00:30:00] When they think they’re technical, then maybe they are semi-technical, but they’re not a full-time professional developer.

Or they think they’re creative, but they’re not a full-time professional, creative person. And I don’t know if I can apply this in other realms because this is my wheelhouse that I’m speaking about, but when you think you’re technical and you come in and you’re like. Even if you’ve built an app before even if you’ve written some code before, that is not enough to take a startup to market successfully.

I’ve seen a lot of people fail because they thought that they knew enough, and if I could tell them just one thing to do differently that could give their business, it would be to. Quickly ship, and I mean, before you build an app, you need to do your solution in a spreadsheet. I’ve talked about this ad nauseum in other episodes, but you need to be delivering your solution before you build anything repeatable.

Just be consulting, be selling one-off experiences, whatever it is, use a clipboard and a piece of paper. And get buyers interested or get buyers buying. [00:31:00] And then I think the rule of, like the principle in the UX world is it takes eight people to give feedback. It’s not 20, it’s not a hundred like some people might think because that can actually muddy the water.

The ideal number of people to get feedback from is eight. So go get eight people in your target market to give feedback on what you’ve built on your. Clipboard process or your spreadsheet or, or maybe it’s, you know, your concept, you haven’t even built anything yet, and then they will hone it for you.

Your job isn’t to be like, I’m Steve Jobs. What else can I think of? Your job is to get out of your own way and say, I have this limited expertise. I can do this thing for these people. How would you like me to do that thing for you? How would it feel best? How would you like it to be delivered? How would you like to find me?

How would you like for me to talk to you when I do the service? And then you figure out how to serve those people based on how they want to consume your service. If people would just do that, then they would be, so, they would have a place to put their obsession [00:32:00] and they wouldn’t be up at night looking at color palettes.

They would be talking to their users and their users would be giving them plenty to work on. So that’s my, my best advice that I’ll probably have this episode, but that’s, that’s where I see it every day.

Zach: This episode, I, I

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Zach: that’s in some cases, but call it the, the founder’s fallacy. I think the founder. Conjures an idea for a solution and then find somebody to apply it to. I don’t, I seldom feel like people do it the other way around.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Zach: up, Eureka, I have it figured out. You could use this.

Right? And then when they don’t use it, I, you don’t know what

Lee Zuvanich: Right, right, right.

Zach: kind of the

Lee Zuvanich: I need to tweak sales. Yes.

Zach: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: Yep.

Zach: You don’t know. That’s why you don’t

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah, let me, let me just convince you that you need it.

Sarah: That’s, to me, like that’s saying though, that like you, or maybe there’s a certain type of founder, I guess, that just wants to build something and they don’t have, like, the [00:33:00] best kind of founders come out of an industry and they see a problem and they try to solve the problem and they start, that’s the starting point. But there are some that seem like they, they’re trying to hit upon the next billion dollar idea. And that’s, I think that’s where you run into that, where it’s like, oh, I had a, had a

Lee Zuvanich: Actually,

Sarah: that

Lee Zuvanich: I disagree.

Sarah: or whatever.

Lee Zuvanich: I’m not, I’m not saying you’re wrong. That’s like, that’s definitely a one better approach than just, I’m a builder. I built a solution. It is better to be like, I’m coming from my industry with the, with something I think will help my industry. Here it is. I have helped so many doctors who should not be startup founders though, like.

They have no business being a CEO, but they have a God complex and why can’t they, why can’t they just build an app too? They’re a surgeon. So like, oh my God. Those are some of the worst people I’ve ever worked with in some cases.

Sarah: I It has to be, yeah. It has to be the right person. Just ’cause you have an idea and you know, the industry does not mean that you’re cut out for running. I mean, I, I, I try to talk people

Lee Zuvanich: right.

Sarah: starting passion as I am about it, it’s like, I’ll talk you out of it first and if you’re really convinced you [00:34:00] wanna do this,

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah,

Sarah: But it doesn’t mean that everybody’s a good fit for it. I just think that that’s a better

Lee Zuvanich: well,

Sarah: is, is

Lee Zuvanich: I disagree with, ’cause I’m saying I’m agreeing with you about like that is one good angle, but I wouldn’t want anyone who doesn’t have deep industry expertise to think that discredits them. As a founder. I don’t have the formula. I’ll try to think about it while we continue to discuss this, but just from experience, I can say the best.

Businesses that I have ever launched and ran successfully came out of a single parent desperation to find a solution. Like my first first ever business was a nonprofit that I wanted to just use to travel with my friends, and we did staff augmentation as volunteers at nonprofits. It met a need. I had, I had a need to travel with my friends, and I had some startup.

I, not startup, I had some non-profit expertise. So I hit up all the nonprofits I knew. They said, yeah, we’d love to have your volunteer team come. And we traveled around the country and we did a lot of cool stuff. And that like it just met, met a simple need. I found [00:35:00] some people who, who also had a shared interest in meeting that need or I could meet their needs and we had a mutual benefit and we did it.

And I fundra, I’m good at fundraising, so I fundraised from churches that I knew and we did it. And then a few years later. I became a single parent unexpectedly, and I had a month to make rent and I had no college degree. I had that little nonprofit, I had shut down experience and nothing else really except waiting tables.

And I had two kids to take care of.

Zach: I

Lee Zuvanich: And I couldn’t afford daycare. I didn’t know what to do. So I started a home daycare. And so, you know, I have a lot of stories like this, but it always came out of me saying to my friends and family, so the people in my world were my addressable market. Those are the only people I could address.

This was back when I didn’t have the money to run ads if I had known how to, which I didn’t. So I asked around, and I think I probably posted some stuff on Facebook and that is it. And within a month I had enough kids coming to my home, daycare that I got licensed and accredited that I made rent and I expanded and I got a house.

[00:36:00] And I did it for a few years and it was an amazing source of income for me. And in contrast to

Zach: Talk

Lee Zuvanich: a funded startup that had more money. Then it probably needed to build a solution that I’m still barely taking to market now after three years. I prefer the, the small hussy like vibe that I used to have before where I just said, I’ve got five things I can do.

I can teach yoga, I can bake, I can watch kids, I can probably clean your house. And I can build websites. And the first thing that people said that they desperately needed was childcare. And so that is what I did. And I think that that can produce a better entrepreneur than pretty much any other approach.

But that’s, that’s my perspective, my experience.

Sarah: more lucrative too, though. No, and I, I totally agree with that. ’cause I mean, that’s like, it’s, it’s just like a, what’s the thing that’s, oh, curb painting. I’ve seen some stories lately about like teenagers curb painting and it’s like,

Lee Zuvanich: I know

Sarah: can be

Lee Zuvanich: my kids and they were like, eh, I [00:37:00] don’t know about that.

Sarah: I mean, you gotta ha like, it’s like, would you rather mow lawns? Would you rather, but there’s like so many, like those, those things, those

Lee Zuvanich: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: like totally can be like, they’re way

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: To start and do and make more money than something like, I’m going to build an app

Lee Zuvanich: Right.

Sarah: money and have all this, like, whatever, you know, the stuff that, it’s not sexy.

I guess it’s the, those are the sometimes the better choices. So, yeah. No, I totally agree with that.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah, and it’s good to cut your teeth on these little side hustles too, like don’t go shoot your shot after you get funded for the very first time and you have never managed a single person. That’s terrifying to me.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: So any other,

Sarah: Do we have any story, I guess like, I’m curious if we have any stories about this for when we, you mentioned like having, well, you just gave an example, the color palette thing, I

Lee Zuvanich: That was me.

The time that someone fell, one of us fell [00:38:00] prey to runaway founder syndrome. I would say Zach might not have any stories after working with him. Zach, I asked you before, are you gonna be able to tell us how to be like you? To not fall prey, the founder syndrome, because you’re such a great client to work with.

You’re just like, I trust your judgment. Let’s, I know where my zone of genius is. I’ll go work on that. That’s, that’s the kind of person I wanna work with every day in my life

Zach: the biggest,

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Zach: I think that’s the main thing. I, I try to, I focus on, you know, what my actual skillset is. ’cause I feel like everything else is a waste of time. Waste of

Lee Zuvanich: wise.

Zach: where you’re centered, you’re of control.

Lee Zuvanich: And you do seem calmer than Sarah and I most of the time

Zach: it’s a

Sarah: Yeah.

Zach: of work. That’s a decade of work.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m like too just a DHD, energy, idea, energy all the time. Like that’s a [00:39:00] whole bias to action. It’s like a pro and a con for me. I’m just like, oh, I’m gonna do this thing and then I just

Lee Zuvanich: right.

Sarah: the thing. Like, it can be distracting sometimes, but it also means I get a lot done when I’m not overly distracted.

I, I don’t know, I can’t think of any clear examples for me. Like I am not in a position to, like, I’m trying to build things up to where I am handing off more stuff. So like, my end goal is to not be as involved in the things that I don’t want to. Like, there’s certain things that I’m like, yeah. I’m trying to remove myself from delivery as much as possible.

So I’m, you know, sales and strategy on the front end, and then I’m coming in at the end and I’m nitpicky about like, the details pre-launch for stuff. So, so like a website, you know, needs to be adjusted for mobile. There’s like certain things that like, you know, everything we build is responsive, but it’s going to, there’ll still be like adjustments you wanna make. And so I go through that stuff with a fine tooth comb that’s just, I’m really good at doing [00:40:00] that. And so I don’t, I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that like I want to do, but like there’s not, I don’t feel like there’s anything that I’m like, I just do too much myself because I kind of have to like, I’m like, who am I gonna give this to?

Or if I’m gonna give this project to someone, then I have to now write up to do. And that takes me longer than it does to actually do the dang thing. So I don’t, I don’t, I’m pretty like, I’m not a mult not multitasker. Yeah. I’m really bad at multitasking. What’s the word I’m looking for?

Micromanager. I’m not a micromanager. I’m like, okay, how

Lee Zuvanich: This person need.

Sarah: person need to do? This thing? Here you go. And what I’ve found is because I’m so used to filling in gaps, I don’t give people enough information. So I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t feel like I have any good examples of. I guess I would have to ask people on my team, like, give me an example of when I’ve had founder syndrome, I’m usually like, I think we should do this this way.

What do you think? And then it’s like,

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah,

Sarah: nay. And I was like, cool. Do what you just said. Like, I, I don’t

Lee Zuvanich: I mean, there’s.

Sarah: I mean, there’s certain stuff that I’ll make calls on if I think [00:41:00] it matters, but most, most of the time there’s five ways to do the same thing. And so it’s a case by case basis and it’s like, let’s, let’s weigh the angles here.

I dunno. I mean, I didn’t even, like, not famously, I guess I don’t, did we ever record a brand episode? I didn’t design my own logo when I rebranded. I mean, I sort of did. I sketched it and I got a starting point and I, I paid, I paid a brand designer to take it, the rest like the next chunk of the way.

And then I took it back and I wrapped up the last 10%. So,

yeah, I don’t know. I guess I should have asked my team before we did this, if I had any examples.

Zach: Actually, you know what? I can, I can dig into the, the archives. I have one example, one example. I was working, working as very loose term. I was with a startup in 2019 going through a Berkeley accelerator that was trying to create some [00:42:00] type of

Lee Zuvanich: 730

Zach: or something that would

Sarah: Hmm

Zach: people

Lee Zuvanich: 3

Zach: back gut bacterial issues.

And was brought in as a customer,

Lee Zuvanich: 4

Zach: customer interviewer or something like that. But the founder at the time, I think he was a. This, this might predate but he had a very Adam Newman,

Sarah: mm-hmm. Yep.

Zach: very persona where he just wanted the energy of what he was saying to carry everything without instruction. And so he would, you know, kind of send us out to

Lee Zuvanich: the SIO.

Zach: different campuses and have us interview

Gut issues.

Lee Zuvanich: and

Zach: no instruction. And it was, I think he, he wanted to show the work of busy, like we’ve interviewed X people without the qualitative data being of any interest or valuable insight to anyone. I did that for two months, needless to say. Yeah, I had to move on.[00:43:00]

Sarah: Wow.

Lee Zuvanich: I will say, I was told by an agency owner that runs an operations agency. I hired them to come in and do operations for me at one point. It was three people and they struggled to keep up with the work that my former ops manager did by herself part time.

She was just a genius and so fast and so amazing and I don’t know if I’ll ever have another person on my team like her again unless I get funded because, people like that are hard to find. The agency owner spoke with me recently and made a joke about how if I hire them again in the future, hopefully I won’t, like, let them go do their work for a while and then jump in and start to micromanage, like I did before, and I was like, Moi, like, and I don’t feel like I’m a micromanager, but I know what he’s talking about.

What actually happens is I do what, I think Zach, you were talking about a little bit. I know I do this. I warn [00:44:00] people about this. I will hire them for their expertise. I don’t hire anybody junior. So you’re coming in with some seniority

Zach: So you’re coming in.

Lee Zuvanich: how to do what you’re doing. You’re a contractor, you consult, and you know the basics of what we’re doing. And so then you get what you need, maybe 90 percent of it. Maybe there’s a document missing, or maybe there’s an overview you still need to get from someone. And then you get thrown into the work, and we have a sink with everyone, alright? Everyone knows what to go build, go build it, go work. And that new person might have to come back a few times their first week, maybe five or ten times, and be like, I need this document. Where do I find this? I haven’t met this person yet. Should I just DM them? Like, yes, be proactive. And I expect people to be proactive and to figure their shit out. The first agency I ever worked at, they said they had a FFIO. Policy it was effing figure it out. And I found that pretty annoying as a junior

Zach: Put that on a t-shirt.

Lee Zuvanich: I

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: being trained on the job with literally no professional white color [00:45:00] expertise at this point They brought me in because I could do Web dev and I’m good with clients and I can do sales and they knew all that and they said good luck and they threw me in the deep end and every time I had a question they’d say FFIO. So I try to not do that to that

Zach: I’d rather not do that,

Lee Zuvanich: like, cushier onboarding if they don’t know the industry, but. Overall, I will throw you in, and you’re gonna sink or swim on my team, and my team is running fast, like, it turns out, I have high standards, and I have to be careful that I hire accordingly. didn’t know that for a few years, and I fired quite a few people. But now that I know it, I warn people

Zach: but now that I know.

Lee Zuvanich: have to be very proactive. This is a fast -moving startup team. Basically, I have to hire people who are like mini -entrepreneurs, or they’re intrapreneurs. And, they have to give me feedback, you know? If they’re struggling, they have to let me know. And I have to have people tell me a few times, listen, this is too much for me to handle. We need to re -scope my role. And we would do it. [00:46:00] But, like, my team is too small for us to feel corporate and easy and slow. It’s just never gonna happen. So, I might be the founder we’re talking about. I don’t know.

Zach: Yeah, and it, it might be a matter, this is probably a good question for you, but as an outer body experience, do you recognize when there’s, when you do, you know you’re too involved or is this like glass breaking, you just know right now

Lee Zuvanich: no.

Zach: or new problem?

Lee Zuvanich: all this about myself. The issue my friend was talking about with the agency was, if you are doing it wrong, I will give you enough rope to hang yourself with. And then if you do, you get tripped up enough, I will jump in and I will become micromanaging you right before I fire you. And it’s because that’s your last chance. And when it came to his team, I don’t know if they did anything wrong so much as I didn’t realize that my former

Zach: I didn’t realize that.

Lee Zuvanich: doing the work of probably six people [00:47:00] and we only have three. Like, she was just such a rock star. And, I I weep for the fact that we don’t work together anymore. knowing that, knowing now with, with more experience that I have had some unicorns come through my team and not everyone will live up to that standard. And I have to be a little bit easier on people. What happens, but my nature

Zach: What happened?

Lee Zuvanich: knowing that I will throw you in. you’ll swim. And if you start to sink, I will start to micromanage trying to be like, well, what could we do differently here? me how you think, how you misunderstood this. How can we better support you? it can probably feel a little intense because it is intense because you might be getting fired and they do get fired, but sometimes I give them enough like rungs on the ladder that they make it right. I’ve done that with a few people where they made it and they turned out to be some of the best people on the team.

They just needed a few. You know, extra steps. I already know all this, and now I use it to inform how I hire. And [00:48:00] I don’t know if I will ever be different. I just know I need a high -level strategic operations leader, director. And then below them we need an operations manager that they disseminate the work to. And then below that we need administrative assistants. I am the kind of person, if I just hire an administrative assistant off of Upwork, I will make that person’s life a living hell. And I just know that about myself, so I hire accordingly. For more information, visit www .FEMA .gov Yeah,

Sarah: we’re like veering into the conversation like how to delegate well or like levels of delegation, which actually is probably a good topic for an episode in the future.

Lee Zuvanich: yeah, and like, personality fit and all that, like, it’s all important. I’m not going to change

Sarah: yeah. Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: I’m not going to suddenly not be ADHD and have a huge vision. just need people who know how to disseminate a vision around me. And that’s

Sarah: Yeah. And I mean, I, I think you have to, yeah, you have to work within your own constraints. And I, like, I, so I deliberately are like everybody on our team, I [00:49:00] think also runs their own business. I deliberately hire people that are essentially solopreneurs on their own. I don’t really work with freelancers.

I work with people who actively are doing their own work, and they also do work for us because I’m looking for people that are self-starters. I can be like, I need you to do this project. Here’s the information you need. If you are the same thing, if you’re missing something, come, come back to me.

Lee Zuvanich: stop

Sarah: let’s talk about it, whatever.

But like, I’m not gonna babysit you. And

Lee Zuvanich: All right, so

Sarah: I, so that’s why I’m like, I don’t, that’s why I think, I can’t think of an example of the founder syndrome thing. ’cause it’s like I, my issue is that I have too much information in my own head. So delegating is hard. And it’s like, you know what? Where do I need to offload some of this stuff so I can hand it off?

But like I, I’m not trying to own all the pieces. I don’t want to own all the pieces, like, so Yeah. Do we have any gosh, I, yeah, I don’t wanna use the word cure. Do we have any tips for founders or some advice we can give if people are realizing that maybe they are, they’re [00:50:00] doing a little too much of this?

Lee Zuvanich: I think looking at myself as an example, knowing that I have some of this going on that, I already shared what my cure is. It’s to make sure that I’m hiring appropriately and screening when I hire. And I do have to temper it. I have to realize, like, you know, I can’t go off the deep end and make a ton of changes. have to be methodical with the way we change things in the organization. Policies, procedures, apps we use. I don’t show up every week and go, Hey guys, Notion just dropped a new feature, we’re moving off of Monday. And then if we don’t like Notion, in two weeks

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: ClickUp. I mean, I would never want to work with that person.

And if you’re that founder, you… Do you need help? Because, like, that you can’t torture people with your own desire to experiment and, like, stimulate your own brain, that is hell for a team. A professional team that wants to do real serious work and ship something they’re proud of. I’ve, I’ve, I think, been trained.

[00:51:00] At so many agencies that if you go too far with this, you destroy a million dollar project. So it’s easier for me to recognize it, so maybe like, first step is to learn how to recognize it. Like go deeper on this issue, find out if this is really something you do, and how you can rein it in, and redirect that constant energy you feel to do something. there’s really cool shit you can do as a founder that no one else wants to do. get out of the developer’s fucking job. And the designers way, and go sell. That’s usually the solution for

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lee Zuvanich: me. Go sell. Get out of everyone else’s way and stop talking about what they’re an expert in.

And be like, here’s how many deals I landed. your job.

Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I test stuff. Like, just ’cause I’m constantly, I, I just said this week I have somebody doing a systems audit and I’m like, oh no, no. Who was I talking to? Oh, one of my developers. I was like, yeah, I’ll be honest, I’m really tempted to [00:52:00] build my own project management system because I’m like working through all this stuff right now and like doing an audit of this.

And I’m just like, oh, if I could just build something from scratch and I’m like, yeah, nope, nope. It’s a thing in the back of my mind that’s like, that would be cool. I’ll let that, you know, percolate back there for however long and maybe someday down the road, like I’ll, I’ll privately build and play with something like I have like a sales app I wanna build for like my sales process just for me to use internally.

And so I’ll do that kind of stuff. On my own. I’m not immediately going, Hey, I wanna move everybody to X now. Like, I’m literally doing, having someone do a systems audit right now to be like, okay, here’s, here’s all the components. Here’s how things work. I want you to tell me where you see gaps. And I’m like, what could be better?

And what stands out as being weird or a bad way to do things? And then you tell me what you’re seeing as someone on the outside. So I don’t, yeah, I don’t drop stuff on people. Like, wait, wait to the don’t. The note we have is don’t share new ideas with the team right [00:53:00] away. Like we wake up in the middle of the night, write it down, don’t drop it on people.

Lee Zuvanich: And it helped me to have someone on the team that I could try stuff out with, my operations manager, who was patient, and would be like, I hear

Sarah: Hmm

Lee Zuvanich: let’s write that one down. Let’s put it in the backlog. are three things that

Sarah: mm-hmm.

Lee Zuvanich: work on last week that we didn’t touch yet. What’s most importantly, and I’d be like, it’s this one that I don’t want to do. Let’s do that. Because, thank you for the accountability. And that way, I felt

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lee Zuvanich: and I tried it out on someone on the team, and occasionally she would say, you know what, that’s a great idea, I think it would really help us, let’s prioritize that. Good job. That

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: happens, though. Like, I have a lot of ideas. They’re not all good ones, you know?

Sarah: Have a designated talk through person. What am I looking for? Sounding board. There we go. Have a de [00:54:00] dedicated sounding board team member for new ideas.

Lee Zuvanich: will filter it and protect the team from you. That’s my job, professionally. That’s why

Sarah: Yep.

Lee Zuvanich: about this. I protect dev teams from founders. my, I would say that’s one of the most important parts of my job as a product owner. And designer and architect, like, I don’t let all the bad shit get through.

All the rework and all the, I change my mind again.

Sarah: Yep. I do the same thing and that’s like, that’s why I’m trying to like teach and offload to more project management stuff. ’cause I just can’t. But when we’re busy I can’t do all the, it’s, it’s partly when we are busy and I’m also like constantly jumping between two different hats of, of building and managing and I would rather not do that.

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: So Zach, do you have any thoughts on advice?

Zach: I would say

My idea is

Lee Zuvanich: [00:55:00] I

Zach: I’ve been trying to distill this during this entire conversation. I think the easiest thing I could say is imagine what you want the organization or the business to be,

Lee Zuvanich: I

Zach: if you can see yourself going beyond that roadblock and it took, you know, and, and true transparency. And I think there’s been some

Lee Zuvanich: I’ve

Zach: light things said here on this call, but I think I suffered from it greatly for the last three years or the four years that I tried to do my startup, where it took me the first three years. I was in my own way. I was like, nah, I don’t, I don’t need to hire. And why would you hire? You can do your own thing. You don’t need consultation. You can be the C-T-O-C-O-O and the CEO the fund. You can be everybody. You don’t need anybody. You’re the vision, Zach. You got it. And then I was, it got to like

The last part of, you know, trying to get things rolling.

Like, dang, this is hard. I don’t know how to do that.

In like the last six months that I was trying to get something off the ground with it, I was like, [00:56:00] oh, I should bring somebody inside

Let them do that part. Let me focus on

Lee Zuvanich: take

Zach: to go get

Lee Zuvanich: And some

Zach: an engineer for this.

I need to go get a this for that. Like, I think so many times I had to, I had to, it took me being at the end of, okay, getting ready to file my dissolution and getting everything out that I was like. Do I want to do this? Or is this a fledgling lifestyle business? what am I, what am I trying to do?

Because if I want it to be more than continuing to I’m a startup founder with no results for the next decade, I need to get out of the way. So that’s, that was the strongest thing. I wish I knew that back in 2021, but I learned it too late.

Lee Zuvanich: Okay. Okay.

Sarah: No, I, I I [00:57:00] could say the exact same thing, like it’s, I had an intern fairly early on. I don’t remember how many years into my business at that point, but it was, it was so much work. It was so much work for me, still having to, like, I, I didn’t just. It kinda left a bad taste in my mouth and I was like, Nope.

I, I am going to not deal with having to manage other people’s work. It is so much. ’cause I also work really fast. And I have like a bunch of different skill sets that make it easy for me to see big picture and just all the things. And so it, it’s, in a way it’s, it’s a,

Lee Zuvanich: for

Sarah: And so I was like, Nope, just gonna be what I’m doing. And I did the same thing. I was like, Nope, I’m not gonna work with people. And then at some point I realized like, no, like the vision I have for this, I do actually have to bring in contractors. And so I’ve been through all sorts of variations of that and it feels like it’s taken forever.

And I feel like I was very behind where I could have been if I had not been so resistant to that for the first several years. So I literally could say the exact same thing you did about that. And then even now, I feel like I’ve been playing this, trying to let go of [00:58:00] project management game for years.

Like literally like five years. Like I feel like I’ve been spinning in this hamster wheel of, I still do too much of that myself because I can’t figure out how to. Hand wind to hand things off, or like, I still, there’s still so much information in my head, so I’m trying, like I’m, I feel like I’m finally making some progress on that this year.

But yeah, it takes, it takes a really long time. I think it takes longer if you have high standards, like if I was okay. And the rule, I think we probably should say somewhere in this episode, the rule is if someone can do the work 80% as well as you can, you delegate it. Like it’s not gonna be your quality.

So I guess that’s maybe a different way to define the founder syndrome is that the work always has to be a hundred percent for you. And if that’s the case, you’re never gonna grow or do well if, ’cause you just, you have to let go of that 20% and you have to figure out like where your, you know, where the wiggle room is for you on that, so.

Lee Zuvanich: rule is that the clients have to, their expectations need to be met and then exceeded. If you can [00:59:00] meet and exceed client expectations, I’m happy. And you can see the

Sarah: Yep.

Lee Zuvanich: of that in some of our back -end processes that our files might be mismanaged or there’s other things that haven’t gotten done because I wasn’t prioritizing it because everything is about the client’s happiness. And then the rest comes secondary. And if I have someone on the team who, you know, I don’t know, doesn’t label things properly, that might bother me personally. I am not going to let it come even into my mind when it comes to business. I’m a very different person with my business than I am with my clients.

With my, like, home and personal life at home, I am very organized, and it’s fun for me to nitpick about, like, I don’t know, labels and things. It’s not always clean and perfect, but I, I like to be creative and obsessive and create systems and make my kids do things. Jump through hoops, like, here’s what a clean room looks like.

This is a skill. But when it’s my team, if it’s like, let’s say an engineer with [01:00:00] a messy desk and terrible at file management and terrible at onboarding new hires, I understand their zone of genius, and I actually support them in their zone of genius. And I just find someone else to figure out how to help the new hires like, I will leave them to what they’re best at, and like, carve out space for them to be better, because we are going to deliver some great code from that person at his messy desk. So, I try to let go of as much as I can. That way.

Sarah: I think a practical example I could give of that would be like, if I am. ‘Cause I’m still overseeing like, the overall creative direction of projects. I’m trying to remove myself from the actual, like, build of it. But if I were to look at a page layout and be like, that’s not how I personally would have laid this section out, but does it solve the problem?

Right? Does it follow marketing best practices? Does it include all the content it needs to, is it, you know, does it meet all the requirements and is a client happy with that? And if that’s the case, then a founder syndrome founder would be like, well, I want you to move these boxes this way in a, in a way that doesn’t meaningfully [01:01:00] impact anything.

That’s when you’re doing too much. Whereas, you know, it’s like, did did we solve the problem? And is the client happy then? Yes. Like it doesn’t have to be the way that I personally do. You know, layout things or, or whatever. And I’m fine with that. Like, that’s why I’m like, I can’t really think an example.

’cause like, as long as it looks good, and I mean, I, I have to do with some junior people, I do have to do some cleanup,

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah.

Sarah: on things. So like, I have, I remember one specific project where I just went in and I was like, I’m gonna have to rebuild all of these page title bars. ’cause they’re not good enough.

They’re not good enough. I’m not gonna let the client see this. And so I have to clean it up. But then what that tells me is that I didn’t do enough on the front end to give this person, to give this developer information that they needed to meet the, the design thing, right? Because like, again, I’m a designer and a developer, I don’t need that information, but that’s not normal.

So then I’m, you know, then you step back and you go, how do I solve my processes so that I, I can’t let go of this thing?

Lee Zuvanich: Yeah,

Sarah: yeah,

Lee Zuvanich: if I expected my team to behave the way I behave, like, it’s their business too, and they should take a call from a client 24 -7, 365 [01:02:00] days a year I would have to pay a hell of a lot more to be

Sarah: I.

Lee Zuvanich: demand and client you know, like, I expect a lot from myself, and I get all the equity of my business in return. Yeah. And

Sarah: Yep.

Lee Zuvanich: The people I hire, I give a lot of grace for every single arena that they didn’t get hired for. And they, there are usually huge gaps. Because they’re not here to do everything. They’re not here to wear all the hats. And the, the kind of people, like we were talking about before, hiring entrepreneurs, I realized while you were saying that, I don’t like doing that.

I said I hire intrapreneurial people when I need to, but thinking it more, I do best with engineers who are really bored at work and they want more of a challenge. They, I don’t want

Sarah: Hmm.

Lee Zuvanich: like me who’s like, but what if we revamped the business and changed our marketing position? And have you thought about talking to clients this way? Like, let me do that, you go write code, or if your job is sales, [01:03:00] like, then we can talk about that,

Sarah: Hmm.

Lee Zuvanich: like, go sell, you know, don’t talk to me about website design. I want everyone to just be in their zone of genius, I don’t want everyone to be trying to wear a bunch of hats. it’s, it’s hard, you have to know what, who you work well with.

Sarah: Yeah. I also, just before we wrap this up, I also wanna throw in if this whole thing is like, but I don’t wanna do that. I like having my hands on everything. There’s nothing wrong with, I mean, depending on the industry you’re in with being a solopreneur, like, and I have known people that have tried to do the agency thing or tried to build a business and decided that it was too hard to manage people and to have a team and have gone back to being a single person that does own and control everything.

So there’s also no shame in that. I don’t think if, especially like if you’re like a consultant or something, if you find you don’t work well in teams or you don’t wanna manage people, or this just sounds horrible to you, or you don’t wanna let go of all these details, you can just be the, the guy that does the thing that they hire you for and you just, you just have limited.

You know, you need to [01:04:00] charge more and your calendar is booked out farther or whatever. Right. But like, I don’t, I think that is a perfectly legitimate thing for people to do if they, they decide that that’s, they can’t compromise on just doing all the things, or it’s easier for them to do it all on their own.

Lee Zuvanich: if I scaled too fast, I’d have to compromise on quality. That’s just null, you know, you start to go down

Sarah: Yeah.

Lee Zuvanich: a bunch of unicorns to having a bunch of industry average people that deliver industry average work. And I was burning myself out, running around giving more and more and more to make up for a few, like, hires that were falling behind the rest of my unicorn team. And it was causing stress on everyone, like, the people who were excelling. We’re carrying too much. The people who were not doing enough, they were shocked that for the first time in their career it wasn’t enough because it had been fine everywhere else. And I realized, like, I have, I have not engineered things properly. I have [01:05:00] insanely high expectations on a team that is scaling too fast for me to find the right people to put in the right seats. I need to actually scale down. I need to stop serving so many small clients who can’t afford what I do. And get back to my scrappy little team of experts. And that’s what I did, and I am so much happier now. And so is the team.

Sarah: Yeah, that’s why I’ve been so slow with how I’ve been building sinks. I guess why I’m still doing too much myself. But there’s a lot at the end of the tunnel. ’cause I have, I’m working on a lot of this stuff. But yeah, it’s ’cause I have a limit in terms of the quality’s not gonna drop with what we do.

So it’s just gonna take some time. But anyway, we should probably wrap this up. Do we have any final things we wanna end with? Zach, you have any final thoughts?

Zach: I think I’ll practice some brevity and I’ll be very short with the very simple mantra. Get out of the way.

Sarah: I agree.

Zach: you’re a chef. Unless you’re a chef,

Sarah: Mm. And mine is build processes that make it so that you can get out of the way while still getting the work done.

Lee Zuvanich: Mine is, [01:06:00] know thyself. Hahahaha!

Sarah: Also, all three put all those three together and you got it. So awesome.

Lee Zuvanich: Sweet good

Sarah: Thanks guys