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A podcast that explores what it means to work with purpose by interviewing people who are working for more than just a paycheck.
Are you in corporate America grinding away the weeks as you watch the years fly by? Do you have that voice in your head that’s asking for something more? But you shouldn’t complain, right? You’ve got a good job, good pay, good benefits. There’s people out there that would kill for a job like that. But that little voice just won’t go away.
I’m your host Gino. And as an ex 9-5er I know that feeling all too well. I worked in corporate for 6 years before I finally decided to walk away, choosing to live my life a little differently. And since then, I’ve met some pretty amazing people who do work that positively impacts the people around them, their communities, and the world. This podcast exists to share their stories, and to help inspire you to do the same. Leave that job that you hate and to start working towards your purpose.
Welcome to Working Towards Our Purpose, a podcast that
offers a different perspective on what a job can be. For everyone
out there that's heard that voice in the back of their head asking for something
more, it's time to listen to it. I'm your host, Gino,
and join me as I interview people who have decided to work in their
own purpose. Together, we will learn, become inspired,
and hopefully find our own path towards working in our purpose.
Joining me today on Working Towards Our Purpose is Dave Phelan, who is one of
the founders of Loople Mobile, which is an app that connects customers
to restaurants and bars. He is also the co founder of
Founders Approach, where he helps small businesses build and develop
apps and websites. Dave is also a podcaster, and he hosts the
show Why I Quit, where he interviews people who have quit their nine to
fives. Me and Dave met through a friend, Cody, so shout out to
Cody if he's listening. And Dave, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for
having me. I definitely appreciate it and look forward to chatting about a
bunch of yeah. Yeah. So if you first want to start, tell
us a little bit about yourself, like maybe where you grew up and where you
went to school and college. Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up outside the
Philadelphia area, went to college at Susquehanna
University, was studying business. Didn't really have
a particular path. I knew I exactly wanted to go down.
I knew I wanted to be involved in business. And after college,
I got my first job in the corporate world, working for an
engineering firm. I worked on the management side, kind of wore
a bunch of different hats. Learned a lot there. But during that
time, myself and one of my best friends from college were always bouncing
around ideas. We always wanted to start something and didn't really
know what that was going to be. And eventually we had an idea that
stuck, and both of us quit our full time jobs
to take the leap. And that was the initial app that we
built out called Loople. And essentially the concept
know, my co founder at the time, Phil, he was working as a sales rep
for Boston Beer. So Sam Adams, Angry Orchard, he was going into
these bars and restaurants on a daily basis, selling in these specials
to sell his product. And a lot of these bars and restaurants are offering
a daily special, essentially as advertisement to draw in
people. But many times that information that special
is not actually getting to the consumers before they walk in the door. A lot
of times you're downselling them once they get in. And so some bars and restaurants
would post on social media. Other people would have it on their website. There was
not really, like, one place where you could find all that information. So we wanted
to build out an application to do that and essentially
built out the first version. Iterated a bunch ended
up growing to over 50,000 users and it was a really
cool experience, a good learning experience. It didn't fully work out the way we wanted
it to from like a monetization perspective, but it also helped us
pivot and kind of lead us into different businesses of where we ended up
today. Interesting. So yeah, how did you first
get into the app building world? Did you
have like a tech background? Did you learn as you went or did your
partner have some sort of experience or how did that process
work? Yeah, great question. So neither of us
had any tech experience whatsoever. Neither of us took
any tech classes. We were more on the
finance and sales business side of it. But we did
a deep dive into teaching ourselves as much as we could about
it and kind of like really understanding the experience. We started off
with wanting to be able to find someone else to build it so we
could focus on growing the business. I think we knew how much time it
was going to take just from an operational and
business development perspective to kind of run and grow and scale a startup
and we wanted to find someone who's going to be the right fit for us.
So we went through the classic looking at every software
development agency near you getting quotes and with
bootstrapping this, we were getting quotes for six figures to build out an MVP. And
we were like, well that's never going to happen. And then tried to find a
CTO, someone who's willing to work for equity. But a lot of times it's really
hard to find someone who is on the same wavelength as you
of wanting to buy in as much to the ideas that you want
to and being willing to work for equity, essentially, like not
pay. Because a lot of times, if there's a developer talented enough, they can
be off making great money elsewhere. And so it's really hard to
find that person. And then we had heard a lot of horror stories about experiences
overseas with people that just got burned and
didn't spend a lot of money but didn't get what they wanted and
people that they didn't necessarily trust. And so we spent a
ton of time and due diligence until we found a team overseas that we were
comfortable with and it was a learning experience for sure. There's a ten
hour time difference, there's a language barrier. We had never project
managed anything before and so I think a lot of YouTube
videos, a lot of books, a lot of just like learning from
failures and we ended up building our own project management process
that allowed us to efficiently manage the team. And we got to a
point where we got our first version out. We were
doing iterations every two weeks with new features and updates based on
talking to our customers and we were continually learning. And then we kind of took
that process of what we learned and then we used that to
replicate that, to build apps and websites for other startups
in eventually what became our next company founders
approach. Interesting. Yeah. I'm very interested
in your story and how you kind of just figured out how to do
it right. And I guess one thing that kind of comes to mind. I remember
reading The Four Hour Work Week, and there's like one chapter or something in there
that says they can even give you a website. I think of go
overseas and get work done there because it's cheaper.
And where did you get the idea to go overseas to try to
get some of the app to be developed? Did it come from that book
specifically? I honestly think that is a great
book, but I think if I had to guess where it came
from, it was Google. I mean, I think we were Googling just
best ways to find developers, and I think it was purely price
point. We were bootstrapping this on our own,
especially for the first version. And we needed to
find something that was affordable, that allowed us to
quit our jobs, but still have runway to be able to see
if we could make this thing work. And so really it boiled down to price
point. The only price point that was going to work was overseas. And then it
just got to a point where, what's the best way to find overseas developers?
And we ended up using a platform called Upwork. It was called something else at
the time they got bought out. They're now called Upwork, but it allows
you I mean, we probably did 30, 40 different
interviews until we finally found the one that was like the right one for us.
And so I think the beauty of the
Internet nowadays is that you can find all the information that you want, but
I think you need to spend a ton of time kind of like curating and
vetting and figuring it out. Because I think
for every developer you find that works,
it's not like it's the same process for each one. We've
also had developers and agencies we've worked with that haven't worked out. And
so I think being willing to be open to opportunities
and try different things, but being ready to know with gut intuition that this might
not be the right option and then when you do find the right option, kind
of double down on that and kind of take it from there.
Yeah, I think that's good advice for sure. So I also want to ask
you, what was the transition like to go from a corporate job that
maybe you had a degree in or you went to school and to quitting and
then kind of doing your own thing? Were there any challenges or struggles that
you immediately faced or was it something that you were so fired up
about figuring out that you just kind of went all in on it?
Yeah, it was really tough. I would say
initially quitting my job was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.
And I think more from a perspective of I felt like I was
letting my managers and coworkers down. I mean,
I think I had built such good relationships there that
I just was super nervous about the process of
leaving. And so I think even just getting to the point of quitting, I
think there were two separate times I went into my boss's office to quit that
I actually didn't end up doing it and I go back in another time because
I was just so nervous about it. I
think that to me was definitely the
hardest part. And I think there was so
much unknown as a startup mobile app. We
had no salary, we had no nothing. It's really
a lottery ticket to a degree of like this thing's either going to be worth
zero or it's going to be worth a lot of money and there's really not
much in between it. So you're really taking a risk and taking a gamble. And
so I think there was a lot of excitement in terms of
what could it be? We could build the type of company we wanted to build.
We were able to learn a
ton. You go from working in a corporate
company where you have a very specific defined role and everyone has
their different roles, to a startup where you're doing everything
from legal to accounting to sales to
project management. So you're wearing all these different hats, so you're learning a lot.
So I think that part of it's super exciting and the
excitement of the wins of the startup. You have your first download,
your first positive review to your first sale, and you have these things that
are such like mile markers and they're such highs. And so I think in
entrepreneurship, what I always tell people is it's like the highest of highs and
lowest of lows. You have these moments that are so incredibly fulfilling,
but very quickly it could be the same day or the next day. You have
these lows that are extremely low and so you have
I remember times where I literally had less
than $10 left in my bank account.
I was on food stamps. I was just fighting to survive, just trying
to pay my bills and do all these things just to keep the startup going.
And I think you have these moments where you're like, I wouldn't
be where I'm at today without that, but you kind of have to sacrifice to
get through it. And so I think overall,
I don't think I was super confident that I'm like,
this is going to be worth millions of dollars,
but I also don't think I recognized how hard the path was going
to be. But I think having a co founder
who's extremely supportive having a spouse who is extremely supportive
throughout, it can help weather those extreme highs and lows
to get to a point where you figure out what works and figure
out how you can make a living doing it,
and then you kind of just keep grinding down that path, essentially.
I was going to ask you about that too. The fact of having a co
founder and somebody in business with a partner and how does
that kind of help drive you? Because you kind of have accountability with each
other. Right. Do you think that that has been one of the things that has
helped you keep going? When the times got tough, was the two of you working
together on this one project? Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
I would say if I was at this solo, there's no way I
would still be going at it. I think Phil and
I talk about this all the time. You hold the other person
grounded, accountable. There's moments where
each person is the other person's support. There are some days where
I'm like, this is not worth it, this is brutal.
And he's able to kind of be that soundboard, that voice
of reasoning, and vice versa. And I think
having a person where you can kind of diversify your skill set
and have your lanes, where there are certain things that he takes
on, there are certain things that I take on, and being able to rely on
each other for that and then just like the support system in itself, because it's
super isolating. I mean, I think you can go from
a company where you have hundreds or thousands of coworkers
to being an entrepreneur where you have none overnight.
And a lot of times nowadays you're working remote and so you can be working
from home, you can be by yourself. And so having another person to rely on
is super important. And that's not to say you can't do it alone. I think
there's a lot of people that do it very successfully. But I think if you
are a solo entrepreneur, it's even more important to
rely on your partner, your friends,
your family, because even if you don't have that co founder,
you need to kind of find that support somewhere. And so being
able to look for that and find people like that in your life, I think
is super impactful to be actually able to
continue the path of entrepreneurship.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point, and it's definitely something
I've kind of experienced myself too. I know we had talked about
a little bit in the past, but when I first quit, it was during the
pandemic. I was living alone, so much isolation, and it
kind of got to a point where I was like, all right, something's got to
change because this isn't going to be able to keep going the way it is.
And so yeah, I think it's very important to have whether it's co founder or
people in your networking circle or like
you said, family or friends and things like that. I did want to ask you
about your relationship with Phil and how you found out that you guys would
be good business partners. You said you were friends first. Do you think that that's
a good thing? Because a lot of times you hear people saying don't go into
business with your friends because then you won't be friends anymore. What's your stance
on mean? You know, you
have no idea how you're going to work with someone
until you actually do. But I think we had a lot
of conversations early on about a lot of hard
things like what is expectations around
work, around money, even like equity conversations.
And I think the biggest thing
without a doubt is communication in terms of open
communication. Because I think we've been
extremely lucky to have
been in business for eight years together and we've had a very successful
relationship and we've been able to navigate business and friendship. That doesn't mean that
it's all easy times though. I think something that we've learned
is figuring out how to be open and honest about
having difficult conversations, how to have that conversation,
how to respect the other person's feeling and then also how to separate
friendships with business. I think that's one of the hardest parts. And I think there
are times where we physically say
we're not talking about work outside of work as a friend,
how are you? Or you have these moments where it's like you need
to figure out ways to separate work and business. But also sometimes you just
realize that those things are intertwined and they are
tied together. And so I think being
thoughtful and empathetic of the other person and just having open
conversations can help build a
successful relationship like that. But also I
think you need to know how your personalities and
skill set mesh with someone you're looking to work with as well.
Because I think there are times where there could be
someone that you could have great open communication with
and you have a really great relationship. But
if your personality types or your skill
sets would kind of overlap in terms of the type
of business that you're going to run, sometimes that could be a recipe for
disaster. And so I think before ever jumping in with a
specific person is just like aligning on expectations. I think that's
super huge talking about how you're going to communicate.
And I think there is never really a perfect answer but I
think kind of going with your gut of like if you've talked about it enough
and you think you're both aligned, don't be afraid to make the
jump just because you're friends. But also
sometimes if you have a gut feeling that there are
some things that aren't aligned and you have different working styles
that you don't think you can get over. I think sometimes you just have
to be aware of that too. That all sounds like really good advice
and something that I think about more and more as I find my way
through entrepreneurship and think about doing new projects
with people because I've been pretty much a solo entrepreneur
up until this point and kind of feel a little bit of the limitations of
it. So as someone who's kind of maybe newer into that world, I
think that's I appreciate your words for sure. I do want to kind
of jump into your next venture and maybe talk about
the second sort of transition of you going from loophole to founders
approach. And you do that with Phil as well, your business partner.
You guys stayed partners through that.
So basically we reached a point about two
years in that with Lupal, we just weren't making
enough money to sustain the business. And I think
that the business model was just not there. Like we
hadn't paid ourselves and bills were running out.
And we actually had a potential investor who was interested in
investing in us and he ended up pulling out and decided not to
invest, which we were super bummed about because we had goals of going
nationwide and we wanted to hire people and we had all these things we wanted
to work through. But I think looking back, it turned out to
be a blessing in disguise because I think we were always going to
struggle with the business model. I think that's a lot of times what people in
the consumer app space fight where it's like when you are in
a revenue model that's based on digital advertisements,
you either need a crazy user base or a specific
niche type of advertising customer that you can sell to
and it's very difficult. And we fought that
battle for two years and then eventually we just got
to a point where we couldn't do that anymore. But that investor who
pulled out asked us separately that if we'd be interested in
building an app for him. And it was something that we actually
honestly weren't thrilled about, but we were like, hey, maybe we can
pay rent this month if we do this thing. And so
we did that and then we had another person come to us and we did
another project and then it just started snowballing. And I think we found this
market where there were a lot of startups and small businesses out there that couldn't
afford us development but didn't know where to go overseas. And so we focused
on coming at it with an entrepreneurial mindset
of partnering with these types of clients and almost being like a stand
in CTO of like we will manage every aspect of the
build from turnkey, from design and idea
through getting it live. And we can provide hell of
a lot more affordable prices in the US. And we're going to focus on customer
service and giving you a great experience along the way. And
we've now been doing that full time since 2016
and we've probably built over 200 different
products between apps and websites for different companies. And, yeah,
it's been a really good experience. I think we've been exposed to some amazing companies
who are doing some amazing things and it's something different every
day. And we've built our own overseas team that's been
great as well, of like, we have reliable talent that we can trust and count
on and then we have our team here of project managers, so it's
Phil, myself, and then we also have another partner, Cole. And so it's really
the three of us that kind of work with these clients know, to really
understand what their development needs are and bring them to life. And
so it's been a lot of fun kind of building
that and something we never expected, but it's something we really
enjoy. That's interesting. I imagine
letting that go and moving on to something new must have been something you
had to get over mentally. And how was that process for you?
I guess, like letting go of the old idea. Yeah, I mean,
honestly, that was super difficult. That was another one
of definitely the lower points, professionally,
personally, admitting that this thing that
you've poured blood, sweat and tears into was not going to work. And then
also we had raised a small friends and family round and we had to talk
to our friends and families and investors and talk to them. We were
shutting down and it was just like just some of the worst conversations
and I think that at
that time, I think
we had Grinded for like two years straight.
We were tired, we were poor, and I think we got to a point
where we just needed to
get financially secure. And so I think
sometimes people start businesses because there's an idea that they're passionate
about and this is what they're going to do. But we were at a time
where we had very little options and we didn't want to
go back to a nine to five. And so we were like,
let's see if we can make this work. And so I think we came at
it from a more desperate, for lack of a better
word, perspective, but we knew we had skills and we knew we could
build it because we'd done it before. So I think we were pretty
confident in what we could offer and then just to see if it
would work. And I think I would say as we
were able to start gaining more clients and started getting
positive feedback and started getting new clients, we were able to see like, we were
on the right track here. And I think it made it easier
to focus on the fact that even though the
original idea didn't work, we could kind of take what we learned
and we can still run a business without having to go back to
a nine to five. And I think that at the end of the day was
super intriguing to us. And so I think that was kind of like the turning
point of like, okay, now that we have some validation here, how do
we scale this thing to be able to do this sustainably long
term? Right? So you could see
the past heartaches contribute to something
new in the future and therefore it wasn't like a waste of time, it was
like, well you learned a lot and now you're using what you learned to this
new thing. That's really cool. So in going along with
that, how did you find new clients once you figured out you could do it
for the first one? What was your marketing approach? Or was it
word of mouth or how did you go about acquiring your new clients?
Yeah, I think something that we're pretty proud of
to this day is that we haven't spent any money
on marketing. I think we
started in the beginning so focused on just kind of
our network of people, and from those initial
clients, we were getting referrals to do more work,
and then we just built these super strong relationships. And so I think we
were able to find clients of just it was everything
from referrals from past clients to
us reaching out to our network, just telling them what we're
doing now, and people being like, oh, I know this person who's looking for
that, and it just kind of snowballed on itself. And so
I think at the end of the day, that's not a fully sustainable
model that can only take you so far. But it's kept us
busy and I think that's something that we talk to people about a
lot. Is there's a real power in your network? And don't
be afraid to talk about what you do because
you never know who needs the services that you provide.
And I think I don't like social
media. I haven't had any social media in the past five
years. I deleted everything out, I hadn't had anything. The only thing I have
left is a LinkedIn, which arguably is social media.
But I don't like posting on LinkedIn. I don't like
kind of like self promoting, but I think
it's been super powerful in terms of even
just starting a podcast talking about what we do with our company.
We've gotten tons of clients just from
friends, family and second 3rd connections being like, oh
that's awesome, I didn't know you did that. You should talk to this person, they're
looking for this. And so I think there's a good way to do
it and a bad way to do it. But I think I always tell people
a lot of times people are a little hesitant to post about what they
do, but I think it's a really good thing to
not only tell people what you do, but remind them. And I think if you
do it in a genuine and authentic way, I think people are willing to go
out of their way to help you. Don't be afraid to. You have an
agency of services, business, even a startup idea. It doesn't even need
to be clients. You can ask friends and family for five star reviews
on your product and that small thing can help
boost you up the list in Google. And now all of a sudden, you're getting
double the clicks that you were. And so I think a lot of people are
willing to help, support, and there's a lot of different ways to do it. And
so I think you can get creative on different ways to ask for help and
not to be afraid to do. I I
agree with that. And I have this one friend who
he does a lot of different things and he has a lot of friends who
do cool creative sorts of things. His name is Josh and he's
really good about lifting up others. And I think that there's also a really good,
I don't know, call it karma or whatever, but when you're always supporting other
people and then you now have something to have others
support, everybody kind of shows up and supports
you in that way because you have been there in the past. So I think
that that's something to think about as you're starting your own
things. It's like, well, you've been there for other people, so now it's kind of
time to ask for the help, right? I know that's something that I've always
struggled with is asking for help, but I think that that's something
that you can do more often.
So let's talk about your podcast. I want to get into your podcast
and how you started it and why you started it. I know you're
almost like 50 episodes in now, which is significant for a
podcaster. So talk to us about how you started that and what was the idea
in starting it? It was an idea I
had in my head for a while, like probably going back
to 2018, I really got
into listening to podcasts and I think that
was a huge learning experience for me. And especially on the
entrepreneur side, there's so many great podcast
resources out there, especially for people looking for some inspiration. And
sometimes, as we talked about earlier, it can be isolating. There's some ways
you can really resonate with people's stories. And so I got super
hooked on some of the original guy raz. How I built
this, where they focus on original founder stories, but they focus on a
perspective of talking about the early days and the hard things.
They went through, the failures they went through, and what that led to, where it's
like, I don't particularly like or find
valuable when they're telling stories or doing interviews
that they're just talking about. All the good things. I think telling the story about
the journey of how they get there makes it more realistic and you can
resonate with like, oh, you can pick up on things that's helpful
of how they got to this point. And I think something
that I found was that the majority of
rhetoric on social media about
quitting was very much so, like, quit your job and
start this Amazon FBA, and here's how you can make a million dollars in six
months. And it was just this rhetoric
that was very get rich quick. It seemed like very
cringey. And there wasn't a whole lot out there
with people telling real stories about
quitting their job of what was the first year like, what
was it like without a paycheck? What was it like without health insurance?
When did you first feel financially stable with running your
business? What was it like just talking to your boss to quit? And so
I hadn't found any content based around that. And so
that was kind of like the initial idea and then
basically had always wanted to do that, but
just didn't have the time, didn't focus in on it. COVID
Hit and Phil Cole and I were chatting
and we were talking about, hey, what are some different side ideas we can try?
And that one came up and neither of us had any
experience editing, posting, hosting, doing
anything with the podcast. I've never done any interviews and so I think we were
excited about a new learning experience. So kind of dove in to understand
even what microphone to use, how do you set up interviews, how do you record,
how do you edit, how do you post? And I think it was like a
really good learning experience. And then also just got to talk to
some amazing people, just met some incredible people who had some
incredible stories and just wanted to tell them. And so, yeah, I think
we're 47 episodes in now and it's been a
really good experience. I think it's helped me grow
my network. I think we've gotten projects
out of it. We've made amazing connections from people who are just like, good people
to talk to. And I've learned a ton that I think we can
use for things down the road. So, yeah, it's been a fun experience.
Yeah, definitely. I think that's one of the maybe hidden
values of a podcast that sometimes people don't see right off the
bat. The first thing to think about is downloads and like, oh,
I could sell ads now because I have so many downloads. But I think the
connections part of it is like the biggest piece because you don't have to have
a lot of listeners in order to make connections with your guest or even
just a few listeners here and there who reach out to you and tell you
that it was impactful. I think especially when you're
podcasting and talking about your business. It's such a natural
way, like you're saying it's not cringey. It's the opposite of that.
It's like a natural way to tell people what you do and to just
talk about the things that you can do. So that way you kind of naturally
get a flow of people to come towards you who know who you are because
they've been listening to you. And that's something that I think is
like a secondary benefit that you don't really think of when you first start a
podcast. So I'm glad you were able to articulate it in that way.
So can you define success for
me? Because I know that a lot of people have a different version of success.
And as you shared some of your story with us, there was
a time when you were looking to get your idea going, and then you hit
a wall and you need money, right? Money is always a part of
it. Can you define today, I guess, what success means for
you? Yeah, I think that is such a
good I think, you know, to preface it, I think it's going to
be very different for each person. And I think that that
benchmark constantly changes. And I think
something that Phil Cole and I talk about all the time is that we live
in a society where that benchmark is
continually it's always pushing forward, and sometimes
it can be super tough because it's hard to celebrate wins
when you're always thinking what's next? And so even if you're
like, oh, you set a goal for you want to have X number of sales
in a specific year. You raise your expenses to hit that. And so
you're like, you need to hit the next thing the next year. And sometimes it's
like you don't stop and look back and think about like,
wow, we've done some amazing things. But I think
at the end of the day, the way I try to think about it is
I try to think about the priorities I have
for my life in general and then how work integrates with that. And I
think you have money of how much money do you need to make
to live the life that you want to live. You have
time in terms of how do you want to spend your time, how much
time do you want to spend at work versus
off from work versus traveling? And you have
lifestyle. What type of lifestyle do you want to live in terms
of? There are some jobs that are super stressful. There are ones that
aren't stressful. And so I think they float right, and I think they
change where there could be some
years or months or weeks where money is the most important
thing, and there could be other times where time off and travel is
the most important thing. And so I think when I look at
founders approach and businesses that I have something that
is most important is flexibility
and control of schedule to be able to control those priorities.
And so what I find as a definition of success
is, do I have control over my life?
And founders approach allows us to do that. Now in terms of like,
we have money that we're bringing in and we have the
ability to work from wherever we want, and we control our schedule when we're going
to work. Now, on the flip side of that, we don't have a
consistent salary. We have a lot of stresses. You have all
the stresses of running your own business. And so I think anytime you look at
anything in terms of success, the grass is always greener on the other side. Right,
but it's like kind of understanding what your priorities are to
be able to figure out how to best align what
you're doing on a daily basis to those priorities.
Yeah, no, I appreciate that answer, and I think being realistic
about what your expectations are, too. I think you mentioned
earlier, I think there still is a lot of get rich quick schemes
online. I think I just saw one about Airbnb the other day about how you
don't even need to own the property to make a ton of money.
Yeah, I think the realistic part of it is
definitely something to think about and know that things are going to take
time to grow and that sort of thing. What's one thing that you'd say
that you're struggling with as a business owner and maybe an area
that you could maybe get some help in with your
business? Where it's at now? Yeah, that's a great question.
I think part of that kind of ties into
my previous answer before is we're spending a lot of
time trying to figure out
what do we want founders approach to be in
one year, three years, five years, ten years. Right. And I
think sometimes it's difficult to
when you're thinking about something in both like a short term and a long term
perspective of what do you want something to be? Because I think things
change in terms of your needs, your lifestyle,
all of these things. And so I think what we're constantly
trying to figure out with founders approach is like, how do we build a
business that we want to work at today, but also set
ourselves up long term that this is.
So, you know, something we talked about a lot is
that there's really three full time project
managers here in the US. It's me, Phil, and Cole. We're
a super small team. We purposely decided not to scale and not to
hire because we decided that we're going to be a lifestyle
business in terms of, like, pick and choose the projects that we want to work
on. And we're very intentional about that. We want to focus on that. But I
think that also does create some stresses in terms
of everything falls on us in terms of
client management to running everything and we need to do that
from there. And so I think sometimes what gets hard is
there are stresses in terms of the
types of projects that we work on, of like, is this a good fit,
are we working on the right types of projects, are we
delivering the quality that we expect and all of these things? And so I
think being able to manage a business that we
are delivering quality for our clients, but that at the same time
we are building it sustainable to want to
be able to run it long term, if that makes sense. Yeah,
definitely longevity and making sure you're also thinking
about the future. So yeah, no, I think that was a great answer.
So last question here, as we're kind of running to the end of our
time, what's one thing that you're excited about for the future or something
that you're ready to get into? It seems like through
talking the last 45 minutes that you always have this hunger, I guess, for
learning. And that seems to be something that has driven
you, but what's something that you're excited about for the future? Yeah,
that's a great question. And I just recently met up
with Phil and Cole in person. We were all in separate places and we work
remote, but we try to get together every three months or so to make sure
we get some in person interactions. And part of that is kind
of discussing like, hey, what's next, what do we want to
work on, what do we want this company to look like? And I think
we're excited to keep delivering mobile and
web projects for our clients that we're doing right now. I think that's kind of
like our bread and butter. And I think we really enjoy working with startups and
small businesses and kind of like helping bring ideas to life. And then
I think in addition to that, being able to try
different ideas and see if there's something that we get super
passionate about that we can also grow in tandem with that. And
so part of that is we're going to continue with the Why Equip
podcast. Pre COVID. We had started a company called
Goworking that was remote trips for entrepreneurs
where we had done three trips pre COVID. Where we had a group of twelve
entrepreneurs. We would travel to a different city, we'd work together in those
places and then kind of explore around in the afternoons and night. And it was
like a great way to meet new people and network with like minded
individuals. Eventually we want to bring that back and I think we're
always tinkering and experimenting with what types of ideas are
we passionate about, how does it fit into founders approach and how does it fit
into the business. And I think we're excited just to keep
experimenting and I think I'm just excited to see
kind of where it. Goes, that sounds really interesting. I really like that
idea. Traveling with entrepreneurs and going somewhere
new to learn and to play at night and
get to meet some new people. I think that's a cool idea. So you'll have
to keep me posted on that if you ever bring that back. Thank you
for joining us today and thank you for being so transparent
about the struggles that also are part of your
journey. I think sometimes it's easy to only talk about the good things,
so I appreciate you talking to us about the struggles as well
and looking forward to what you have in store for the
future. And thank you so much. Thank you. I really
appreciate you having me on and I appreciate your show and what you're doing and
I'm excited to check out more of your episodes too. I love the concept of
what you're doing and yeah, thanks for thinking of me. Yeah, of course. Thank you
so much. Thanks for tuning in and listening to
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