Rituals in Business

any other shit. Thank you.

Well, we're recording as of now, so here we go. ⁓

can't see it currently but we're about to do some sketchy shit

⁓ my gosh.

Alright, let's move this. ⁓ We could put all this stuff away ⁓

Now.

That's buzz. ⁓ that's almost perfect.

Okay, good.

Yeah, that was pretty good.

I go too far this way you get the fucking

the sun.

⁓ I can ⁓ move this here ⁓ like so maybe even bring it up a touch still can't see it.

Move my keyboard out of the way. ⁓

Alright, ⁓ about ⁓ now.

you don't know is that I've ⁓ been sending screenshots to Riley along the way. ⁓

can't sit as close to my desktop.

I've got to stay far farther back than I usually am, but I guess that's OK.

I gotta pee.

little tea break.

Still a little orangey. ⁓

⁓

can definitely hear any, any typing or big ⁓ way.

Oh yeah, you can hear it. Typing, clicking, Seth was like trying to edit all that stuff out. I'm not trying to do all that. Who cares?

Creeks, cracks, probably. ⁓

A lot of work.

A lot of work for very minimal benefit.

Yeah.

Can you hear those things? Like putting down a cup?

yeah, ⁓ probably not not like super super crazy loud or anything but ⁓ I guess I could remove myself from picture in picture so I can see myself on the screen again. ⁓

shit.

So sending these screenshots to Riley, I have ⁓ my LG monitor over here on the left and then I have the TV monitor that I'm using as a main. I look fine on the TV monitor, but when I send her the screenshot, I look like way oranger.

Yeah.

Like my color?

It looks fine to me, currently.

I'll have to figure out something with this. That's the only ⁓ option I have.

Yeah. ⁓

You got more options with your background if you can control the outside light. ⁓

⁓ Yeah, but ⁓ in lieu of that it's ⁓ it kind of is what it is because

It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Everything's ⁓ All right. ⁓ We need to get moving if we're going to actually be able to record anything. I got to leave by 2 15, I think, to take the kids to a movie. ⁓ Utopia 2 is only in theaters today, which is so odd. I've never heard that before. One day. That's today.

It'll be fine.

Going to theaters for one day.

Why?

I don't know. ⁓ It seems like a really stupid strategy.

Yeah, like that isn't the normally the goal is to maximize the amount of money you make in box office and they're like Hmm one day is enough Is it going direct to streaming afterwards or something?

Mm-hmm. Let's ⁓ I'm sure there'll be a delay. They'll probably try to, you know, hawk it on as like a premium buy on Disney+. They'll do that for a while. ⁓

you ⁓ Yeah.

interesting.

So, ⁓ all right, what's our run of show? How do you wanna do this? ⁓

I mean, I think the general. ⁓ Sent like the general theme should base her man Fucked up all my keys ⁓ Honestly, I would probably like ⁓ usually just kind of like started the way we're starting now ⁓ and Kind of pick a good point and then at that like once we're Basically the episode could start literally as us just kind of bullshitting about something and then kind of pivot and be like, all right, well today's topic is ⁓ rituals in business. ⁓ And we want to talk a little bit about. stuff that rituals that take place in business and just whether those are good, bad, ugly, whatever. And then we can just fire away until we kind of reach a natural wrapping point.

I'm good with that. And then just kind of wrap it as like, thanks for joining till next time. Whatever, some kind of sign off or does that even matter?

Thank

Yeah, I don't think it matters that much, we probably will at the end. Kind of just be like, all right, I think that's enough for this one. So we've talked about XYZ stuff. Join us next time for whatever we decide to talk about next time.

Yeah.

⁓ There's also ⁓ like, okay, so for purposes of ⁓ what ⁓ the end product is gonna be, we'll have like a bumper, ⁓ we'll have some sort of intro, whether that intro is consistent with the bumper. Do we wanna have like a ⁓ 10 second, this is what's in the episode at the beginning or do we care?

I don't know if we care. Yep, we can at least get started and we can, uh, we can deal with that later if we decide to do that. And if we do, then, then we would do like we did last time where we would just record that at the end and be like, we don't really know what today's episode is about until after we record the episode.

least for now. Get more advanced as we go. ⁓

Yeah.

Correct, that's why I was asking. And maybe we do it, maybe we record it just while we're here and just make it quick so we have it and then decide not to use it.

So if we get.

Yeah, that's fun.

All right, so we are we staying in here I've retitled this episode zero bloopers of the podcast

down with them.

⁓ Fuck it. I say we stay here This works we got to figure it out. ⁓

Okay.

Alright, so... Episode 1, Rituals ⁓ and ⁓ Business. ⁓ ⁓ I ⁓ need to figure out how to find the fizzy. ⁓

There she is. ⁓

I don't think I put a lot of detail into the card in there. I think it was literally just the title.

You did not. ⁓ No, you put a couple bullet points in there.

Better? Alright, well, I'll get better than I thought.

All right, well, today's episode is about rituals and business ⁓ and what works, what doesn't work. Over 16 years, we've tried a whole bunch of stuff and I think we have opinions. ⁓

We're certainly not short on opinions around here.

⁓ No, no, we're definitely not. All right, so where do you want to start? Maybe start with something that works? ⁓ What's ritual in business that we found that has worked over 16 years?

I mean the easiest ritual that comes to mind and what even spawned the topic is our off-sites. We've since like what the first year, maybe second year in business, we started the practice of ⁓ you, John and I going away for a few days to a week. ⁓ And we do that at least two times a year. We aimed for four, usually it was like three. ⁓ ⁓ but with the goal being work on the business, not in the business, because we, ⁓ as entrepreneurs, you spend most of your time day in and day out working in the business and getting sucked into the daily, ⁓ whatever needs to be done today, and you don't take time to back up and think, are we in the business that we wanna be in? Are we strategically aligned to where we wanna go? ⁓ All those sorts of things. So we started the practice. back then of just like us ⁓ disconnecting ourselves from the business entirely, not working on anything day to day, no checking emails, no answering, no taking phone calls, no meetings, no nothing. And we started that as, you know, going literally to a cabin in the middle of the woods. ⁓ And that has since evolved a little bit, but you know, I think that's a ritual that we have that I don't think most other businesses have that has been incredibly successful for us and helped. I mean, ⁓ shit, think about all the decisions that we've made and how we've shaped the business. We've literally changed the entire trajectory of the business over the course of four days sitting together and starting the day with, okay, we're in this business, we're aligned this way, we're going this direction, and over the course of four days working day to night. ⁓ completely change the trajectory of where we're heading as a business, which I think is interesting and not something that most people can say.

Yeah, I think it's interesting to think about how, you know, first off, let's define what a ritual in business is. A ritual in business is like something that has been defined as that you should do this with some regularity. It could be an all hands meeting. It could be an offsite. It could be a Christmas party. That's a hot button. We'll get to that later. ⁓ It could be weekly standups. It could be all sorts of things that are like that, that are routine in nature. And we found over time, I think a pretty good cadence of things that have worked and have not worked. And we've read a bazillion books and recommendations and feels like we tried them all. ⁓ some, some more successfully than others, maybe more, ⁓ more, ⁓ given at the good college, the old college try better than others. And some were like, this is stupid. We're not going to do this anymore. ⁓

Yeah, I think ⁓ some of them can be defined and some of them aren't defined either, right? Like there are a lot of things that I think are rituals in business that are, they're certainly not defined. Like people have, people did not make a conscious effort ⁓ to do that, but they just happen, right? ⁓ And those are probably the ones that we'll get into that I think are not valuable, right? It's the shit that everybody does just because ⁓ they've always done it and nobody ever backed up and thought like, are we actually getting real value out of this? And should we continue to do this? Or is there another way that we could potentially go about this?

So maybe we address it like this. Maybe we pick on, let's start with three things that work and then we'll start with three things that don't work ⁓ in our experience. So we talked about like. The one that does work is ⁓ annual, we call them off-sites. ⁓ They don't technically have to be off-sites, but it does have to be a sequestered area where you are not allowed to think about the operations of the day-to-day business. And usually that means some sort of off-site. And when we say off-site, we mean a different state, like a place or a different city, somewhere that we cannot be distracted by home. And for us, it's... ⁓ It's always been ⁓ because we have family life and other distractions and those sorts of things, it's easy to get pulled away, especially when you have those things that actually, I think, bind us even closer together as people. When we go to dinner together and we go do entertaining things together and we do those sorts of things that would be really easy to check out of ⁓ if you weren't physically in a different location than the distraction that is your family. ⁓ When you're trying to do those sorts of things. Now. Do we do it in the most healthy way possible? Maybe not. ⁓ Maybe 14 hour days or ⁓ maybe 14 hour days may not be, ⁓ may not be your jam, but like it's.

time about your mothers.

But I do think that as we think about our off sites that we have had, certainly some of them have been very work intensive. We've worked from the moment we got up to the moment we go to bed. But most of them has a healthy balance of that. there's an equal amount of work and strategy that we've accomplished and things that we've done to push the business forward, as much as there is... conversations and team building and things we've done to push each other forward, whether it's our partnership and working together or just us shaping us as individuals, that shit happens ⁓ through ⁓ the dinner topic and the 3 a.m. argument about some political ⁓ garbage that we disagree ⁓ on. All of that is wrapped up ⁓ in part of it, so it's not just about the business aspect of it or what impacts our business. ⁓ It really is kind of the whole package of just kind of backing up and spending spending that time and you know We're not doing fucking trust falls and other sorts of things, but we're certainly doing those team-building activities ⁓ You know whether that's just kind of like Hanging out playing video games ⁓ playing some Starcraft or having to break back into the Airbnb that you lost a key for

⁓ Yeah, or that team building also constitutes maybe warming up a hot tub that wasn't warm with boiled water ⁓ and the cabin in the of the woods. ⁓

⁓ That's problem-solving man They forget they forget to if they forget to heat the hot tub. You got a desperate times call for desperate measures but ⁓ it is I stumble across that photo every now and then I think it's a Laugh every fucking time when I think of just like running ⁓ this like shoots This ramp out the window to the hot tub draining all of the hot water ⁓

⁓ It's true.

through a spigot out the window, it was crazy. But I mean, those are the things. Think about all the stuff that we talk about. Most of them are wrapped up in things we've done at off sites or ⁓ whatever. So I think that's clearly ⁓ an easy one we can pick on as a ritual that works. ⁓ ⁓ I... What's a ritual? don't...

I'll pick on one that sometimes works ⁓ and it's the sometimes problem and it's based on team and probably based on ⁓ work type as well. I don't think daily standups work for the vast majority of teams.

I was teetering between daily standups and status meetings. ⁓ Like weekly cadence status meetings. I think cadence status meetings, well you go ahead with the, I'll steal your thunder.

Yeah. ⁓

Don't steal my thunder, man. So I think daily standups ⁓ for, for groups that are, that are doing repetitive activities. So nurses as an example, my wife is a nurse. did a daily standups as part of their, their daily work rituals. And the whole point was to sort of trade information about what's going on on the floor of that particular day. And if you have work that is like that, where it's sort of firefighting on a daily basis, that might work for you. If, if you have a business like ours and digital marketing, you have various teams ⁓ that are doing different things, you have development, have creative, you have media and whatever, and it works for certain teams, but it doesn't work for others. And so it's sort of ⁓ an environment where you kind of test the waters and figure it out. I don't think it works for stuff that has ⁓ prioritizations that don't change with regularity. Right? If you have clear priorities for some given period of time, unless you just want to hang out and just connect with people just because you like them, that's a whole different thing. Then there's no reason to have that meeting. It's just a, it's a waste of everybody's time and energy to do a daily stand up that way.

I agree with that. think ⁓ that's kind of my same idea around status meetings, right? My beef with weekly status meetings is I think weekly status meetings are a ritual that happens in business because ⁓ everybody does them and they don't work. And they don't work for a variety of reasons, but they also become a crutch and they actually work against you. Because I think ⁓ when you have a weekly status meeting, I hear it all the fucking time, even from our own team, because we have some of those that still exist for clients and things. Everything turns into a weekly cadence. So it's always, I'll ask about that in the next status meeting, or I'll see that in the next status meeting, versus why don't you fucking show it to me tomorrow when you're done with it? Don't wait till next week. Just show it to me, ⁓ continual progression is this challenge that I don't think ⁓ a lot of people have overcome, ⁓ or the way that they think about it. It's hard for them to understand that you can make continual progression. ⁓ So they always think about it in these little chunks of like, from this status meeting to this status meeting, I need to complete these things, and then we'll talk about it. And I'm like, why don't we just share what we're doing as we go and just talk about it as we go? Because then we can nudge the trajectory, but also we escape this stupid ritual that wastes a lot of time and doesn't actually accomplish much.

I have a different perspective on that. I look at status meetings as an accountability tool. I agree with 50 % of what you said. So I agree that we should not wait till a status meeting to whatever to check in to talk about it to ask a question whatever that's stupid unless the status meeting is literally like that day there's no reason to wait you may as well just do do the things ⁓ but i look at status meetings as a way to make sure that we're we're driving towards something that we are doing what you call chunks because i agree with that we're breaking things into chunks and checking on the status of those things did we accomplish as much as we thought we would within this chunk And then the next chunk and the next chunk and the next chunk. it's an account to me. I look at it as accountability tool, but it can get turned into a crutch for sure. A hundred percent of the a hundred percent. If you don't have disciplined teams, you, end up slowing down your progress as opposed to speeding them up because of what you said, because we're waiting for the meeting to check in instead of writing the, know, the two paragraph thing and a base camp message and just ask, you know, asking for feedback or waiting for, for that next question. It can go the opposite way to where. If you don't have those regular check-ins, then everything becomes cold and stale, right? You don't have that regularity with the team that you're talking to. So I look at those meetings as two things. One, it's an opportunity to actually connect with the other human beings that are involved in whatever that thing is. And as part of a connection point, not some cold screen with words behind it that I can't gauge personality through. And then the second is... is the ⁓ accountability tool of just making sure that we're making progress towards things that we should be making progress towards.

Overuse patterns? Yes, that's a real thing.

is a challenge and it's a tricky balance, right? It's like sprint planning or like all of the the scrum bullshit, right? We went down that rabbit hole ⁓ of You know trying to do scrum and and you know, you spend so much time Scrum is like the like that is like the bullshit ritual in business, ⁓ I think that You know a lot of people have kind of navigated away from it, you know You won't end up with this like weird scrum waterfall amalgamation. ⁓ But like you spend so much time trying to figure out like ⁓ what t-shirt size is this fucking card and like ⁓ you know all of these rituals and planning poker and whatever.

We did that.

And then you wonder why the work doesn't seem like it's ever getting done. It's like, well, we're spending some time sizing this stuff and writing user stories and doing all of this other like, formality bullshit because it makes somebody feel good. ⁓ And we're not actually focusing on like, generating the outputs because if I didn't have to assign t-shirt sizes to a hundred cards, I probably could have delivered half of the cards today.

⁓ I have an interesting one that ⁓ I think a lot of businesses probably experience. have certainly experienced this ⁓ in some way, or form over some period of time of like letting process. So this is a ritual, letting process get in the way of quality ⁓ or, or be maybe an excuse for quality. So ⁓ the ritual in this case would be, ⁓ the, ⁓ the overuse pattern of of ⁓ gates and controls within ⁓ an environment to be able to get work done. ⁓ And letting that be an excuse for or rationale for not doing things fast or for not doing things as to high quality or to not putting in extra effort to make it better than what it could have been. ⁓ So there's ⁓ sort of a loose definition here, but there's a lot of things that can get in the way of good work. And I think over-processification is something we've certainly been guilty of in the spirit of making things better, but you actually make things worse ⁓ as a result.

Yeah, I mean, think processes in general, right? Kind of lend themselves to generating these weird little rituals ⁓ of things where, you know, ⁓ whether it's like we've talked about with overdue tasks ⁓ and managing those sorts of things or reassigning things or, you know, whatever. ⁓ Those kind of fall, they just naturally kind of fall into these weird little... ⁓ ⁓ rituals that we perform as a business ⁓ and probably aren't the most useful. ⁓

Yeah. I mean, so ⁓ for, for anyone listening, it's like, what kind of rituals do they actually have in place? mean, the, the, the cookbook formula that we've sort of fallen into just as a quick TLDR is like, we have four, four to six different kinds of rituals. I'll call them meetings. I'll call them certain types of structures or whatever that seem to work with some level of regularity. ⁓ One is, as you said, the, the annual earth, I'm sorry, the quarterly offsites. So usually it's, don't even know how you divide that tri annual offsites. That's what they turn into instead of quarterly. ⁓ a quarterly all hands meeting with the rest of our team, with the entire team to give some level of update of what's going on. Sometimes those could be in person, some, depending on your team structure. Sometimes those are just quick updates ⁓ that happen over an hour, hour and a half with the entire team. ⁓ a weekly standup.

Pretty much, Good or tight.

with the entirety of the team, it's only 15 to 20 minutes. It's just a check-in, ⁓ a way to breed some culture. And then ⁓ some level of team ⁓ check-ins. ⁓ Some teams prefer to do that with more regularity than others. And we've sort of let our teams navigate how that frequency needs to happen. Some daily, some weekly, some monthly, whatever that needs to look like.

Yeah, I think at one point we had ⁓ every team had a daily stand up, right? ⁓ And ⁓ I think moving away from that and just allowing different teams to dictate what works for them. ⁓ think we still have, ⁓ Dev team I think still has ⁓ a daily just kind of quick check in. But again, with their type of work, a lot of like. Every day something has moved and you might have a hey, can you take this thing? I was working on this yesterday And you have some of that information swapping just like really quickly in the morning or just kind of aligning on objectives for the day can be useful As like a Daily stand-up whereas other teams that doesn't make any sense. They need to align once a week or you know, whatever or they have some other way that they manage getting aligned and executing the work. ⁓ One that you mentioned that we hadn't really talked about, but I think is a ritual that we have that I think is really good, and I think other ⁓ companies should adopt it if they haven't, is the quarterly all hands. ⁓ Especially for us, we're a fully remote company, but any company that exists should have at least a couple times a year. in all hands of some kind where you're for us it allows us to establish like what direction are we going as a company? How are we doing? And again that team building aspect, right? We found so much with our offsites of just that team building piece this last quarterly offsite that we did we kind of took a little bit of a different direction where we shared, you know, again, we shared the reinforced our company vision, reinforced the, you know, the who we are, why exist, what we're doing, share financial results, all those things. But then took a totally different path and turned it into an interactive where we spent the next 45 minutes to an hour with small group teams coming up with reactions to scenarios and sharing those. the feedback was that it was engaging. People got to work with people they don't normally work with.

You're working on something that's not your day-to-day work and what you normally do. It's something that's just totally different off the wall. And I think, you know, that's something that has been incredibly successful and helps remind people because, you know, as a business owner, right, we live and breathe all of the stuff that we come up with, with core values and strategy and where we're going and how the business is growing. What do we all fucking remember? Is that shit? We share it with them. And I don't fault anybody for not remembering ⁓ the core values, especially when we tried it the first time, when we came up with 12. We're like, okay, we gotta get a little more core than that. ⁓ So it's a good opportunity to just reinforce that stuff and measure. ⁓ I look at it as like our report card, right? we're gonna have to stand in front of ⁓ the team and show like, are we doing to progress towards our strategic vision or what we're trying to accomplish or, all those things that we said, I've got to tell you how we're doing. And if we're not doing what we need to do, it's a good reflection point too. That's not the end of the year when you're like, well, damn, I wish we would have done better. We can ⁓ look at that and kind of nudge it back the other direction.

⁓ I actually think you hit on maybe an important point that is a ⁓ ritual in business that I think is really dumb. that's like lack of transparency is not strength, it's weakness. ⁓ So I think there are a lot of business leaders that don't share information ⁓ or feel like they shouldn't share that information. And don't get me wrong, there's a time and place to share stuff, right? And there's a time and place to not share stuff that isn't ready for airtime. ⁓ And we do that quite often. ⁓ Offsites are a great example. We'll come back from offsites and we're like, well, we've got about 37 different half-baked principles, ideas, directions, whatever. We can't share any of that yet. It's just, it's not ready. It's not ready for airtime. It's not lack of transparency. We'll share it when it's, ⁓ when, when we feel good about the direction and make sure that there's going to be ⁓ well received. But I, but I do think there's this, there's this group of people that feel like sharing bad news ⁓ or sharing ⁓ negative, anything feedback, any of those things are actually a bad thing. And I don't know how, how and why workplaces evolve that way. You don't act that way with most of your friends. Why do we change our personalities and more at work and become this, this like yes, man person or this.

I don't think that's true. think people do. don't think people, don't think most people, ⁓ there are certain things that like in society we have discomfort with, right? Think about when you ask, it's like the hustle porn bullshit introduction that I always make fun of when it's like every time you introduce yourself to someone you're like, hey, my name is Ryan, nice to meet you. ⁓ How you been? Right? Like ⁓ everybody's like, I'm just super busy. I've never been like more busy in my whole fucking life. And like I remember, ⁓ you know, for years I used to, I would fall victim to that same thing, right? I would execute the same pattern, even if it was true, whether it was true or false, didn't really matter. Everybody was always like, whoever was most busy when, you know, when talking is the winner. And then one day I kind of backed up and I was like, hang on, that doesn't make any fucking sense. ⁓ The reality is like I should do like, it ⁓ shouldn't be, work shouldn't be crazy. ⁓ I shouldn't be overwhelmed, shouldn't be ⁓ just so busy that I can't get anything done. If I'm doing that, then I'm doing a shitty job at something. ⁓ So one day that kind of flipped. So I think that it's like the natural tendency, right? Is like, keep the cards close to your vests. But it does ⁓ raise a question as a business owner or as a leader of any kind, right?

You're doing it wrong.

If you have a team of people that you can't trust to share the good news and the bad news with, why the fuck do you have them on your team?

It's a fair question. ⁓ there's, you know, ⁓ also there's varying degrees of that too, right? I some ⁓ people are ready for ⁓ big PNL ⁓ oriented bad news ⁓ conversations. Yeah, know your audience and some may not.

⁓ You gotta you know, know your audience right like ⁓ You can look at some stuff and be like, alright, this looks really bad. You're like no no, this is This is is ⁓ you know accounting taxes other things there's stuff to understand here ⁓ But you know by and large if you're like, hey, we didn't you know, we set out to achieve this objective You know what we didn't hit it Even it's not you know, not something that's like risky financial whatever. Maybe it's just embarrassing, right? ⁓

Yeah.

Right. Yep.

We thought we would be able to, you ⁓ do this thing and we just didn't. cares.

cares.

I mean, obviously you care, ⁓ but you know, ⁓ if you can't share that with your team, you shouldn't have them on your team in the first place because your team is like, whole purpose is to help you achieve shit. So if you aren't able to share the good and the bad, they're not able to help you. And honestly, you're doing them a disservice, right? Because you're not sharing with them. ⁓

Yeah. ⁓

What ⁓ what they can help with so chances are they're probably sitting there going well, I'd love to help but I just don't know what to help with

Mm-hmm.

I don't know how we got down this rabbit hole, but ⁓ we're a little off. We deviated a little bit from ⁓ the idea of ⁓ rituals, but now it's just rants about stuff that people do in business.

I'm ⁓

little bit.

⁓ I think it's a...

I think a ritual that is, I would say by and large positive, regularly, it could be an offsite, could be a meeting, it could be whatever. So let me back up. So a ritual that we have found to be incredibly, I think valuable over the long tenure of Oodle, especially as we went fully remote, is what I'm going to call the water cooler meeting. And that's where you, John and I, as leaders in the business get together for at least two hours, sometimes three, sometimes four, five, six, just depends on what's going on. But we intentionally have basically a half day carved out every single week for what I'm going to call the water cooler meeting. And the entire purpose of that meeting is that there's no purpose to that meeting by and large. It's us being able to collaborate. move things back and forth on some stuff that's important in the business. Sometimes you're working on your own thing. Sometimes I'm working on my own thing, but it's like it creates that proximity that we can just move on things really fast as they pop up. Inevitably, we'll end up reviewing the budget and we'll make sure we review our sales numbers and all the core things that you would do as like a normal structured meeting if we had only scheduled it for 30 minutes. The value in that meeting is not those things only. The value in that meeting is all the other conversations and ideas and brainstorm that happens throughout that conversation. In fact, I've started encouraging other members of our team to do that with their teams. It's like, just create that sense of meeting after the meeting that you don't experience in a remote environment by just doing a little differently and planning a little differently for your day.

Yeah, I can agree with that.

What else? Rituals and business. ⁓

And so we talked about startups, we talked about standups, we talked about weekly meetings, we talked about all sites.

let's talk about, let's talk about like holiday parties.

Hmm.

This is polarizing, I think.

Yeah, holocaust parties are interesting. I think it's a...

I think ⁓ it's a good and noble idea, especially if you're, ⁓ for us it became a challenge when we went fully remote. ⁓ How do you, ⁓ A, is ⁓ there enough value in it to invest the dollars? ⁓ It costs a substantial amount of money to do that, which obviously takes away from other things we could invest in as a business. ⁓ And it's like the worst time of year to try to ⁓ plan anything. ⁓ So I think, you know, having some of those like holiday gatherings or like events, like we do a remote ⁓ event or get everybody together and do some activities and different kind of stuff. ⁓ And I think that's been pretty successful. ⁓ But you're like traditional, you know. holiday party, I don't know. Some benefit maybe if it works for the business, but ⁓ certainly not something that... ⁓ that I think about often, we're moving from ours.

think ⁓ this goes with really any after work activity. ⁓ So most of the stuff we've talked about so far has been during work activity, but after work activity, or even if it's like a ⁓ team camaraderie building lunch or whatever, ⁓ they have to be authentic no matter what they are. And those sorts of rituals become forced culture. In too many situations, I think where people ⁓ are expected to go to these things. And then you've got introverts that are dreading it and being like, how soon can I leave this thing? I have to go show face for at least a half an hour so that I ⁓ can check the box that I was there. And then you have the extroverts that are table dancing, right? It's like, ⁓ it's a whole, it depends on your personality type and your team structure. And to your point, as long as they're authentic, I think, I think they're fine, but it's when they're forced that. I feel like it really falls off the rails. And to your point, it has to fit with what the business structure is. And ⁓ as a remote company, it definitely becomes trickier. ⁓ not only are you asking people to attend an after work activity, we're asking them to, in our case, attend that from 14 different states, leave their family for multiple days to go attend this thing. ⁓ And you have to make sure that not just financially, but But the benefit of asking them to give up that personal time to come in and share that experience with you is really worth it. ⁓ And you get maximum value out of that. And striking the balance is definitely tricky. ⁓ I will admit that I'm not sure that we've completely found that as ⁓ what the right balance is. ⁓ Try as we may. ⁓ But there's certainly merit to those things as long as they're authentic.

Yeah, and I mean deal with it every year that time of year. Like ⁓ we're coming up on it, right? The next... In about a week, my life will be crazy. Unfortunately. for the rest of the year. And ⁓ part of that is because ⁓ all of my family still lives up in Ohio, so ⁓ we'll be traveling out there, trying to see everybody, fit in holiday parties, fit in birthday, we've got the girls' birthday parties, and ⁓ all of that stuff in kind of a compressed window. ⁓ And ⁓ selfishly, ⁓ I don't miss not having to ⁓ plan and figure out this on top of it. ⁓ I'd rather... ⁓ I would rather do a different kind of event, ⁓ even if we did ⁓ pull everybody together and do kind of like an in-person all hands, which I think could be a great idea. ⁓ I would rather do that in a different time of year when everybody's not already traveling for Thanksgiving and traveling for Christmas and dealing with all of this stress. You're just piling more stress on it. I'd rather do it in some sort of, ⁓ whether it's... October or know kind of backed up a little bit or like the middle of summer right we've always the one that we've always ⁓ aimed for I guess that's another ritual right every year we do a ⁓ kayak trip in the in summer because we were founded in ⁓ June ⁓ something ⁓ of 2009 so we always basically celebrate like our birthday party as like the first you know sometime in the first few days of June ⁓ ⁓ And part of that is we have the ⁓ kayak trip. So a bunch of people, most of them are Ohio and some people will fly in for that ⁓ and do just kind of like a kayak trip and then spend the rest of the day ⁓ hanging out and just ⁓ doing that. It's during work activity that kind of turns into an after work activity for most people. ⁓

And I think it's always a good time to just like, it's one of those authentic things. Like we didn't force that. I think we, what did we, we did a kayak trip like the first time maybe 10 years ago. ⁓ And then it just like stuck, right? Everybody wanted to do it again, you know, every year. And ⁓ now it just kind of organically happens. Like if we didn't have a kayak trip next year, I think people would probably riot.

⁓ So ⁓ we've done different things over the course of time. We used to try to do some sort of event when we were all in person about once a quarter. That was sort of the replacement of our all hands. We did both things at the same time in a lot of cases. ⁓ We've sort of evolved that over time to have probably twice a year. We do that in addition to the quarterly all hands that are more formal. You know, go through the numbers and how are we doing all that kind of stuff? We do those, those more fun, just team building events. One is the kayak slash canoe trip. ⁓ Then the other is fall fest, which doesn't happen every year, but when it does, I think people enjoy it. Similar idea. You get people together that are in close proximity ⁓ and you know, just do some games and some coordinated activities and eat some food. Sometimes there's, there's, ⁓ you know, chili contests involved and whatever else. Those are all fun things.

Yeah, and I think, you know, some of these ones that we're talking about are like, they can be really good if you're in person. ⁓ Remotely, they get a little, they get a little tricky, right? ⁓ In our world, we have probably about a half, I think it's like half the company is like within the Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana tri-state. ⁓

They do get tricky.

That's about right.

So there's at least kind of a cluster that's easy enough to get together. ⁓ I can fly there in two hours, so do, ⁓ you know, ⁓ consistently, but, ⁓ and then we've got kind of like a little cluster out in Denver, so sometimes they'll have their events, but you do still have kind of the islands of people that are pocketed around, ⁓ we try to figure out some ways to do, you know, get together ⁓ with everybody, everybody. ⁓ But admittedly, isn't something that I'd say that we ⁓ have cracked the code on 100 % yet.

No, it's difficult, especially when ⁓ the remote environment adds a whole different layer of complication. And some people listening maybe ⁓ have that as a complicated layer and others are like, I don't know what he's talking about. We're in the office five days a week. In both settings, these rituals can matter and they're meaningful. They all take on their different levels of complexity depending on team sizes, ⁓ locations, ⁓ and ⁓ you know.

you

preferences, these different dynamics. think the main point that I'll continue to drive home with these, ⁓ I'll call them fun extracurricular curriculars, they have to be authentic to what the business is. ⁓ And ⁓ I have a lot of friends that work in corporate world or a lot of friends that even work in similar businesses ⁓ that we work in. And ⁓ the amount of forced culture. that still exists in 2025 is ⁓ not small. ⁓ It's extremely large, ⁓ all probably well-intentioned, but poorly executed of trying to create culture.

Yeah, I mean, think the interesting thing that I hadn't even thought about is like there's there's a whole other host of, you know, kind of rituals that exist in business. mean, hell, there's the ritual in business of driving to an office ⁓ for people who are in person, right? We've been fully remote. We started going down the path of fully remote in 2017. So, ⁓ you know, we're ⁓ I mean, almost. Yeah.

Yeah.

Sounds right.

Shout out Riley. ⁓

Just shy of a decade of being fully remote from a fully in-person Setup so it's kind of hard to even remember some of some of that that aspect But like the ritual of waking up every morning drive, you know getting ready taking on packing up all your shit driving to an office Working all day and then doing all of that in reverse is like that's a ritual that I can't wrap my head around anymore like Is there benefit sometimes to having in-person meetings? Absolutely, we've talked about it already, our quarterly off-sites and getting people together for events and sometimes in-person workshops or brainstorms or whatever, fantastic. There's a level of collaboration and just shit that happens that is difficult to recreate 2,000 miles away. However, we have this fantastic thing called the internet and cameras and microphones and they do a really good job of connecting people really quickly and most work that people have to do don't need all of these other people. Especially for your developers and your designers and those people. They ⁓ thrive in the remote culture because they're like, great, now the PM can't walk over ⁓ to my desk and tap me on the shoulder and interrupt my flow state because they have a random fucking question and I didn't answer Slack for a minute.

You know, I'm on the opposite end of this, or at least have a ⁓ somewhat different opinion to it. I a hundred percent agree with all of that. I think, and maybe there's a whole episode that we should do just around remote versus not remote. What's most effective. I don't think everyone's lived that we're lived through that. And certainly most people haven't. Ushered. ⁓

Cool.

I mean, at this point, everybody has lived through some portion of it. ⁓ Unless you're like a factory worker or like some sort of job that, that work that you just can't do it. Everybody with the, you know, COVID and all of that sort of stuff. Everybody experienced some level ⁓ of remote working to, you know, either success, some degree of sense of success or fail.

No, that's fair. That's fair. Maybe it's true.

Yeah, no, that's fair. I think there's probably a topic ⁓ we can go much, much deeper on. But to finish the thought here and react to what you said, ⁓ I think what you miss in a remote working setting ⁓ is, and like just to go through your whole ⁓ day in the life of, like I miss the commute in a lot of ways. ⁓

I don't at all.

And I miss it. don't miss it every day. I miss it because it's an opportunity for me to ⁓ have an uninterrupted phone call that I won't take the time to do because I'm doing something else ⁓ around the house or I'm helping a kid or I'm doing these different things. I have a captive audience while I'm driving in that, in that commute. And it makes it really easy to make phone calls to people that I haven't talked to in a while. So it's it's a, you know, it's it's a hundred percent a me thing, but I miss that. miss that uninterrupted time. I think the, ⁓ The meeting times, ⁓ yeah, you can accomplish a whole bunch of stuff outside of a meeting in a lot of cases, ⁓ more so than you would need the meeting to solve. The things that I miss about ⁓ the in-person culture of those things is, I've talked about it a couple times during this call, ⁓ is the meeting after the meeting. It's ⁓ the unplanned brainstorm. It's the unplanned, huh, I didn't think about that. Let me draw a little. chart on the table and see how this comes to life. What do you think about this? No, not that. How about this? That is incredibly difficult to replicate. So we've tried to replicate that by having the water cooler meeting, which is as close as we've gotten so far to be able to replicate that sort of brainstorm culture. But I don't think most people that are working in a remote setting have figured out how to crack that code, especially if you're not in a production environment and you're in an environment where You know, ⁓ you're kind of your role is ideas or your role is trying to thread the needle between what a client is trying to accomplish and how the execution works. It's that gap in the middle. I don't know how to do that yet. Right. So it's, it's those sorts of things that we get missed on the pure production end of like, know which widgets I need to create. Yeah. A hundred percent. Like remote is, is where it's at. It's the, it's the space in the middle where we don't know what it is yet. That. ⁓ I feel like can get ⁓ a little bit slowed down is maybe the right answer. ⁓ It's not that it doesn't happen, but it doesn't happen organically. It has to go through a process.

⁓ Maybe I Also think people are just not not necessarily like we're still figuring some of that out, right? We will in perpetuity will never feel like we haven't figured out. That's the that's the reality We're always our our harshest critics ⁓ But I do think that there's you know, there's an aspect that that ⁓ People can struggle with with the transition from in person to remote is like again, you know, we've talked about those rituals of like

group two.

Status meetings and how those can become they can be beneficial, but they can certainly become toxic at the same You know just as much of a negative as they are positive. I think some of those like reliance on you know well, we'll just, we'll pass by each other at some point and we'll, you know, we'll talk about this or brainstorm, ⁓ just kind of like expecting that organicness to happen versus being willing to be like, I had this idea that was really cool. Let me write it up and send it out and just kind of let it, let it fester and see where it goes and have a back and forth conversation through something like Basecamp messages or, you know, whatever, at least in world. ⁓ that can ⁓ accomplish that same sort of idea or push an idea forward or brainstorm something or whatever. ⁓ Or just being willing to tap people. ⁓ I've done it more recently than I have before where everybody feels like they have to have a meeting to have a conversation with someone. ⁓ I'll just call them and be like, yo, I was working on this thing. It's really cool. You want to take a look at it real fast? ⁓

⁓ I agree with everything that you said. think the the there's a lot of challenges ⁓ with it and I think it's human behavior. So

yeah, all the challenges that I see with it are just people. ⁓ It's people getting in their own way ⁓ and thinking, ⁓ not thinking about, ⁓ or thinking about all the things. Like, well, I'll schedule a meeting with so and so. Fuck that. Push the little call button on Slack, and if they answer, great. If they don't answer, fine. ⁓ And it's amazing, I just started doing that, and obviously there was a reaction in the beginning, because people were like, hell.

Yeah, it's just people.

Hello, like didn't even know that you had to call people through there. But, you know, we used to just call people on the phone when you had a question or do things. And now it feels like we've added so much ritual and process sometimes that it's like in order to talk to somebody, we have to schedule a meeting. Like, I don't want you to schedule a meeting with me. I don't want my calendar to be filled with meetings. You're welcome to give me a call and ask me a question and we can go through that real fast.

So I think you're picking on a scab that is a good one. And I don't think it matters whether you're remote or you're in person or anywhere in between for this. that's like, you have three primary ways of communication. You have informal dialogue, be that meetings or water cooler talk or a random Slack phone call, or literally making a phone call on the phone, just sort of randomly on a happenstance. Then you have scheduled meetings, which have some sort of purpose. And usually some level of preparation. That's another one I want to talk about. ⁓ And then the third ⁓ is ⁓ some level of, I lost my train of thought. I don't know what third is. How about that? The team will get a crack at it. Get a ⁓ laugh out of that one. ⁓

⁓ always happens. ⁓ It wouldn't be a Mark's three things if he didn't forget the third fucking thing.

can't hear you.

assume you're audio-tight. ⁓

you

This is the part where we'll insert some Jeopardy music or something.

We're gonna have to fix this in post. ⁓

What the hell happened?

⁓ My speaker is just turned off.

⁓ well, that was cool. ⁓

⁓ It is cool. Last one I want to talk about. ⁓

Well, maybe it's a sign that we ⁓ Wrap up that that bullet point and then ⁓ and then wrap this up. We've been talking for about an hour about different ⁓ rituals and things ⁓ And you know, certainly we could spiral into some other stuff of like are just kind of like the rants of business and in business saying but you know kind of bringing it back to ⁓ to basics here ⁓

Yes. ⁓

I think we talked about what did we talk about some rituals at work? Quarterly updates ⁓ like quarterly all hands with your team ⁓ using that as an opportunity to share good news, bad news, strategic direction, maintain focus. ⁓ The quarterly ish. ⁓ Off sites. for leadership, right? Pulling yourself out of the business, ⁓ focusing on where you're, you know, are you going the right directions? Not allowed to use email, you know, ⁓ none of the things that you're like, that you do on a day-to-day basis, only things that you don't do. ⁓ I think at least the annual kind of like, what we call leadership team, right? It's like one level below the owners. ⁓ Same sort of deal like ⁓ that. I think is ⁓ a really really good thing ⁓

Some that we don't think ⁓ are so great are the, know, the statuses, I guess we'll call that like a neutral, right? They can be good, but they ⁓ can be bad. ⁓ Forced daily standups for everybody, I think that's bad. I think it only works when it works, and doesn't when it doesn't. ⁓

I know I'm missing a couple that we said were bad. Commutes, the daily commute I think is terrible. ⁓ Sometimes you miss it, that's okay.

I think it's a pretty good summary. I think we've got some other things that we can lean into and shoot. Maybe there's ⁓ we can lean into on the idea of rituals and business for future episodes.

Cool. Well, I think we, ⁓ we can call it on the first episode. We're recording. We officially recorded our first episode of the podcast. ⁓

That's a wrap.

WEE-

our second first episode. All right. Let's wrap.

⁓ Yeah.