Richard Banfield: ‘A product is a non human salesperson’

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And boy, did we cover all those topics on this one. You're in for a treat on this one. This was a very intellectually stimulating conversation for me in a lot of ways. Richard Banfield. I've known Richard for about 20 years now. He worked with us at our first company, Thrive Networks. Me and one of my partners, Chris Merrill. And he's now advising us specifically on the sell better side of the house. And he has a very unique background. Born in South Africa, spent some time on this remote island learning a lot of different things about happiness and what it really means and values and how he's really grown in his career through sales and then product specifically.

He's become the utmost expert in product development and also product design, more importantly. So we talk a lot about how sales can learn from product and product can learn from sales and the journey we're all on right now moving towards more of a, I don't want to say sales oriented or product oriented, but a product led growth and customer oriented approach and how we all do need to evolve with that. So we dive into a lot of that and then also a decision framework that he came up with a while back from his book on design sprints back in 2015 and how people can make better decisions in times of inflection points. And we relate that to me and my personal journey over the past year and a half here, as well as the business.

And I'm actually going to be working on this structure here moving forward to see if I can codify it to help people make decisions better in their lives and move forward in a time as opposed to sitting or being stuck. So I hope you get as much value out of this conversation as I did. This one's packed full. It's a little bit longer than usual, but I promise you, you're going to enjoy it. So get your pens out, take some notes. Let's make it happen. What's happening. Make it happen. Family, big shout out to our partners today. Gong, Proposify, Vidyard and Chili Piper. Gong's data is more than valuable. It's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes.

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Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools. And now let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. All right, here we go. Richard Banfield, long time listener, first time caller here. And I am eager to have this conversation because we, before we get it, Richard, we got like started knowing each other back at the Thrive days, right? When Chris started Thrive or was, were you, did you know Chris before that? I'm not even sure, Sean. Maybe that's an indication of just how old we are. We shouldn't be having a conversation about things that long ago. Exactly. Well, look, Richard, we got a lot to talk about.

I am fascinated by your background here, but tell the audience, first some context for the audience. Richard's actually working with JB Sales right now, specifically on our membership side of the house to really kind of take us to the next level there. But we, quote unquote, have been working with Richard for at least, I don't know, 15, 20 years, or at least had a relationship in some way, shape or form. But Richard, your background is extremely unique. And I wanted to talk a little bit about that. And so could you start with your, you grew up in South Africa and something that I read, you know, you have this interesting, grew up as an artist, educated as a scientist, and are still an artist now.

So could you kind of walk us through your background and how, and kind of interweave some of those conversations into the background so we can put some context to what we're going to talk about today? Yeah, I feel like, yeah, I feel like, if you say that somebody's got a unique or interesting background, basically, what you mean is that they're a complete dog, you know, dog sprayer. I think mostly because I have an interest in many things, and I have this, I wish I could call myself a polymath, but I'm really just kind of a distracted individual that has lots of different, you know, things that I want to do. So I've had, I've had both the fortune and also the misfortune of doing many, many different things.

Some have worked out to my favor, and some have just been a complete distraction. But yeah, I thought I was going to be an artist. My mom is an artist, and has always been. She was a teacher as well. And I was deeply attracted to the creative part of the world and of, you know, that sense of creativity that comes from humans. But because I was living in South Africa at the time, I was actually conscripted into the army, and I spent some time being, you know, changed by that experience or transformed by that experience. I've got to imagine. And when I came out, I was, you know, a little distracted by, you know, what I should be and who I should be. I did a degree in business, and then eventually decided that I needed to get some space from that and go and do other things.

And I became a full-time dive instructor on a little island in the middle of the Indian Ocean called the Islamic Republic of the Qumors. It's actually four islands, but I was only living on one of them. And there I met some really, really amazing human beings who were both working as divers and people in that water sports, hospitalities type world, but were also putting their dirty little hands on things that were related to the environment, setting up environmental programs, marine reserves, and things like that. And I got just completely hooked on that. So I went back to school, did a degree in essentially microbiology, thinking that I was going to be a marine biologist. And that's kind of where the science sort of ends, because while I was finishing that degree, I started picking up some design work, really, you know, not artistic in the least.

It was just kind of, you know, designing product, helping people design labels for products, doing some basic websites and things like that, which was like the early, early days of the web, like basic. I mean, really, really like HTML kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, just because I was there at the right time, at the right place, born with all the genetic privileges, you know, white English speaking male who was able to get a job in the tech space while that was happening. Nothing really to do with the fact that I could or should have done any of those things, but really just the right time at the right place with all of those privileges. I was able to then, you know, get a start in the tech world and started my first venture-backed company soon after that.

So I was very, very fortunate, had some great partners who, you know, and investors who helped me along the way. And that brought me to the States. Eventually, we had the global business. We sold that business to WPP, which is the big agency umbrella company that's still, I think, the largest of those types of holding organizations in the world. And my partner went on to be the global head of technology there. And I just got continued to get distracted by other things. So, yeah, I am, you know, here we are several decades later. And I find myself with, as you say, a unique set of experiences, none of which are particularly deep on the T-shape thing. But I do find myself being quite useful in the sense that I can speak lots of different languages.

I can speak to engineers. I can speak to product people. I can speak to salespeople. As you know, I've been spending most of my life selling something, whether it's selling as a business owner or selling the idea of something. You know, one of my early companies was a pioneer in the user experience, user interface design space, and really nobody knew what the hell we were talking about. So, we had to sell the idea and educate them before we could even sell the deals. So, I have lots of empathy for you and your listeners and for the audience that's dialed in here. I've swam in the ocean of rejection all my life. I know what it's like. And so, yeah, here we are today where, you know, this uniqueness is really just a collection of odd pieces that have, you know, come together in an interesting way.

Man, I got so many questions. So, actually, I wasn't going to ask this one, but your experience in that island, can I just do a small sidebar here? What did you learn about, because it sounds like your evolution from South Africa to the army to that island to, you know, all the way now to America and the insanity of work-life balance. What did you learn about happiness along the way? Because I'm struck by people who are in these islands, these remote places that don't technically have a lot of stuff like we do here. And they're some of the happiest people on the planet. So, could you, again, I didn't, this wasn't the direction I wanted to take this, but when you said that, I was, I'm really curious what you've learned about happiness along the way.

You know, I think at the time, it was less about stuff, right? So, we didn't have anything. I mean, this is a country that was described by National Geographic as a fourth world country. I mean, we were really living in one of the poorest places in the world. And we personally, the folks that were living there, didn't have a lot of stuff. And I think that contributed to something of like a kind of a monkish lifestyle where we weren't really connected to things. But there was something else that was happening at the same time. And that was, this was, you know, mid-90s, no internet, no real connection to the outside world. There would be a plane that would bring tourists in once a week. And that was our connection to the outside world.

But no TV, no newspapers, no internet. And I think it was that, that helped me understand something that I've carried on throughout my life. And that is, none of that stuff really matters, right? So, you, you, you don't need to be reading the news every day to be informed or to be intelligent. You can actually go pretty deep on the things that are important to your, your self, you know, the understanding of selfhood or who you are, and also your intellectual pursuits without access to media in its, in its current modern form. We read a lot, I listened to a lot of music, we had deep, deep conversations every night, because honestly, there was nothing else to do, John. Like we, we'd sit around the table every day with like, you know, 10, 15 adults.

And that's, and for two or three hours every day, we'd talk about life and philosophy and things that mattered. And I think that's probably what we seek out when we go on retreats, when we go on vacation, when we spend time with people that we care about is the deep intellectual value of intimacy at that level. Right. You just, you can't find it any other way, but except by just spending time with people. So I think the Island experience was absolutely magnificent from just a superficial point of view. I was the fittest I've ever been. I, you know, I was working on the beach. I was learning new skills every day. I was hanging out with interesting, interesting people in a beautiful place. But more importantly, we were just spending a lot of time delving into ourselves and who we were and why we mattered and why we didn't matter.

And so I think that gave me a platform for what I still believe today. And I, and I have three children, three boys, and what I've always insisted that they do is take some time off to go and do that. So my 19 year old has actually just come back from a year abroad between high school and whatever's coming next for him. And that was really one of those self-discovery things, you know, go away, go and live in a country where you don't speak the language, where it's difficult to understand who people are or who you are. And I think as adults, we should probably give ourselves permission to do that as well. I know that you've had an opportunity to do kind of sabbatical type stuff. And you've talked about that on your show.

Those kinds of things we treat as if they were luxuries, as if they're special, but kind of, they're really necessary. I mean, every, every culture, every religion talks about a pilgrimage. Everybody talks about taking time to go and find yourself and your spiritual core, whatever that might look like. And you're doing that now yearly, right? Aren't you taking the summer and traveling with the boys? Yeah. So pre-COVID, we traveled a significant amount to places like that. Again, we're trying to pick it up and do that this year. We're going to go in June, July. But yeah, it's half vacation, half sabbatical. You know, the Europeans do it anyway. You kind of just slip into their cycle. You know, you go there and you're like, I don't know.

Am I going to be busy enough? Am I going to have enough to do? Will I be bored? And then two weeks in, you're like, I'm good. Yeah, I'm fine. Love it. Awesome. I love that perspective. Like I said, that was not the direction, but when you, I didn't realize about that island. And whenever you bring up some remote piece like that, like James on our team, I remember. So my sister, she did the Peace Corps in Ghana and she married a Ghanaian and James goes to Ghana once every year or so. And he says, it's the most amazing experience because these people literally have, I mean, what you and I would consider nothing. And yet they are the happiest people on the planet. Yes. So, but now I wanted to kind of move into, first of all, what got you interested in product?

With that background that you just shared there, sales and all these, like what all of a sudden got you interested in getting into product? Because one of the, I mean, one of your major experiences, you were the, what is it, the VP of design transformation over at Envision, which is one of the most well-known design. So how, first of all, what got your attention about product? And then let's talk about that in sales. I think when we started doing the web design UI, UX stuff early in the 2000s. So kind of on the back of the.com, I had had a couple of tech focus companies and the problem that we kept seeing over and over again is that really the technology itself wasn't particularly bad or there was nothing wrong with it, but it wasn't reaching the audiences in a logical way.

They weren't able to understand what it was doing for them, what problems it was solving for them. And very often we were seeing fundamental mistakes made with how the product was actually designed. So you could have this, you know, the old fashioned version of this is the sports car on a dirt road. You would have a really good piece of technology, but it wasn't able to perform because there wasn't an understanding of how to use it or a clear interface between the product and the person that was trying to use it. And so I think it was somewhat circumstantial. I'm not sure it was deliberate or intentional. Like I said, my life was not quite, quite as organized as most. But being a scientist, it obviously occurred to me to approach this from a scientific point of view.

So, well, what is the problem that needs to be solved? Do we have a thesis or a hypothesis to form around that? And then once we've got that hypothesis, is there a way to test the different ways that we could solve that problem? And so the business that we ultimately created, a company called Fresh Tilled Soil, was a product design company that was specifically there to help those SaaS type companies, the engineering led companies, add another layer of presentation and interaction that would allow their product to be used in the manner in which they had originally visualized or imagined. And that's what got me into product per se, but it was a scientific approach that actually drove a lot of the work.

The first book that we wrote was called Design Sprint. It was a concept that was developed by a bunch of folks at Google Ventures called GV at the moment. And Jake Knapp was one of these guys who had said, well, we need a more scientific approach. Now, his idea wasn't particularly novel. It was just kind of a derivative of the scientific method. And so we just borrowed that and built on top of that and went to market with that. And that actually allowed us to really, really grow quickly because most companies hadn't seen a scientific approach to solving design problems. They'd seen an artistic approach, which is if we paint this with a different palette, if we make this look pretty, it will be more attractive.

But we took a scientific approach to that. So I think that's the background of how we got there. And then over the following 15 years, I think we had Freshel Soil, that evolved into, you know, we were part of something that was much bigger than just ourselves. Obviously, companies like Airbnb and Apple allowed the day-to-day parlance of design and product design to become something that everybody understood. Like you can go to your, you know, anybody in your family and talk about product design and they go like, oh yeah, that's like Apple or that's like Airbnb or Tesla or something like that. So everybody understands what that means now. But back then it was really a nascent idea. It was new.

So I want to come back to that framework and how we can apply it. But I want to back up and talk about the relationship between product and sales. Because, and something that, one, what can we learn from each other? But two, I want to start with this, which is Dave Cancel, who's the CEO over at Drift. Him and I had a really good conversation and I love his approach. And this might come across as offensive to some product and technical founders and developers. But the concept is, is everything's been commoditized except for the experience. So if you think your product is going to win the day, you know, you're, you're, you're going to lose because if it's a feature function game, then tomorrow somebody is going to come out with a cooler feature function and you're going to be playing catch up the entire time.

So really, as long as the, the table stakes are there, like your product does what it's supposed to do. And it's kind of, you know, good at it. It doesn't have to be great at it, but it's about how you sell it. I mean, you kind of sit in the middle of the design of the actual technology, right? So that's a little bit of the bridge between the gap, but what's your, what's your thought process on how you sell versus what you sell and then the design of it in between? So a product is a non-human sales person, right? Okay. At least the, at least the ones that we're referring to, right? We were referring to SaaS products right now. Beyond that products fall into this category, which we call the, it's kind of like the, the technical term is jobs to be done.

But what it means is what is the job that that thing is doing, the product that you're buying is doing? So if it's a car, the job that the car is doing is, it's providing you with transportation from A to B, it's providing you with status, it's providing you with security, with safety. You are essentially renting that product to provide you with intrinsic value, right? And so a product is no less important than the salesperson and the sales process itself. It must convey the value at the, in the same way that a salesperson would convey value to you if you didn't know what it was. So when you interact with a modern product, we have got used to this idea that we should be able to sense and understand what that intrinsic value of that product is just by using it.

So it used to be that you would buy something and then you would need an intermediate person, like a salesperson or a manual to guide you through the use of that product. That's no longer the case. Now we just kind of accept that if we buy something, we'll be able to figure it out. And I'll give you an anecdotal, but a very good example. I just bought myself a new iPad with a keyboard from Apple. Really, really good experience. Went online, they kind of ship it the same day if somebody arrives in a courier car and just drops it off the same day. And it arrived in all the various boxes. And I have a six-year-old and I said to my six-year-old, unbox it, set it up, I'm not going to help you at all.

And he was able to do the entire thing without any additional help. And that is product design that is taking responsibility for the sale. And if we use the word sale, I'm going to take the liberty of thinking about Daniel Pink's version of this, where it's moving somebody from a state of unknowing to a state of knowing. And that movement is essentially what the product has done. So, James, my six-year-old, is capable of moving from a state of unknowing to knowing. And the sale has been done by the product. Now, in some cases, like especially with enterprise products that are complicated or maybe something that requires a little bit more skill, you still need the intermediate. It's not going to go away.

Probably never go away. In fact, it might even become more important in certain cases. But the product is still responsible for some part of that. So, the relationship between sales and the product design is critical. And if you don't understand that, what you end up doing is unfortunately more of the art and less of the design. You tend to make it pretty and attractive and beautiful, but you don't make it sell. It doesn't sell itself. It doesn't tell you how to move yourself from what we call technically a state of unconscious incompetence to a state of conscious competence. And that movement is the sales process. So, I mean, what you're talking about a lot now is as it relates to like product-led growth, right?

DLG, you know, and this big, you know, it's a new acronym, but, you know, this trend that is moving in this direction of the consumerization of even B2B, right? So, we're all used to the Amazon experience, the Apple experience. I get it. I set it up. I don't need a sales. I bought a Tesla online. Actually, it was funny. I was kind of a little curious. And so, I called the sales office with Tesla, and I got on the phone with the sales rep. And I was like, hey, I got a few questions. And I hear clicking in the background. And I go, wait a minute, are you on the same website that I am right now just configuring this thing? And he goes, yeah. I'm like, so can I, I don't mean to be rude here, but what value do you bring to this equation?

And he's like, quite honestly, not much. I was like, all right then. He's like, I just give you somebody to talk to if you want to talk to him. So, with this idea of product-led growth, you know, I'm convinced that sales reps need to move more towards product and more towards customer success to learn the solution so they can educate the person as they move through it, as opposed to, quote unquote, trying to sell them anything. And I think the negative perception of sales, which I agree with, is trying to convince you to buy something. Like, if I am trying to convince you, then I am doing something wrong, right, from a sales standpoint. So, where does that leave? Like, first of all, I think PLG is very relevant in the SaaS world, and it's very relevant in some.

It's not as relevant in others, like major enterprise stuff or actual products, you know, that type of thing. So, where does that help? Where do we need to evolve to as sales professionals to make sure that we're staying on top of this trend? Because I do feel like we're in this major transition right now in the next few years. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. And I think PLG is a really good inflection point for salespeople to, it's a wake-up call, right? So, it's an opportunity for us to get better at what we do. And as you've said, it's not just the evolution from being, say, an AE to being a CS professional. So, having customer success is your core competency. But it's really understanding what the product is there to do.

What is the problem that it's solving? And I wrote an article about this. It's on Medium. It actually says, should product people sell, but it could also be, should salespeople product? Yeah. It's one of those things. And the premise behind it is that in order for a product to really do the job that it's supposed to do, so if you're hiring this thing to do a job for you, if you're renting that thing to do a job for you, then what is it that it's supposed to do? Well, very often, it's the salesperson, the person who's interfacing with the actual human being, the customer, that knows better than the product or engineering team will at any point because they are hearing the customer talk about their problems.

And really, that's where the insights come from. The insights don't come from understanding the solution. The insights come from understanding the problem. And if a customer is there interfacing with, let's just call it a salesperson for now, but the person representing the company, if that person is able to then understand and listen and grok what is happening in that conversation and really know the problem, they can go back to the product people and be the most valuable part of that feedback loop. And what we often see, and this is the current status, is that sales is a silo, product is a silo, marketing is a silo, right? And that's where you get the breakdown. Where you see healthy companies operating is when the salespeople are able to go back to their product people and act as if they're part of that product team and say, this is what we heard.

Here is the problem we need to be solving. It's not about adding more features and benefits. It's not about doing something so that we can close the deal. It's about solving the bigger problem at hand here. And that's where you really see companies get it. When their salespeople and the marketing people and the product people are all in a conversation together or all part of the same product team. That's when you can get that truly innovative insight that's possible. But of course, we're not quite there yet. We see some companies capable of doing that, but not everybody's quite there yet. And it's mostly just a hangover from the mechanical era of, oh, this is a business and it's supposed to look like a factory and people operate as like cogs within that factory.

We're still getting over that. There's still a bit of a hangover of that. We're getting there, but it's not quite there yet. It's not there yet. I mean, it still pains me to watch what's, I think the predictable revenue model in sales has been broken for a long time. And I think if it isn't already completely broken, it's breaking pretty hard because that sole segmentation and forcing a customer through this process where they have to be qualified, then they have to be transitioned to somebody else, and they have to go through four people before they actually talk to maybe an engineer that can actually give them some answers on some questions that they have about the product. And so I think moving towards really true account-based marketing that genuinely understands the business and creates those touch points to create that interest, to create either the inbounds or enough education where they use it.

And then a sales rep moving back to full cycle sales supported by product and everything else so that they are a continuous loop so that they can get that insights because those insights get lost along the way as well. The insights, for instance, that the SDR grabs don't usually get translated to the AE. And then those don't usually get translated to customer success, and they almost never get translated to product. So I'd see it as a almost, I don't know how it breaks though, because of the downward pressure on VCs and the hyper growth mentality here. Are you seeing, I mean, there's a correction in the market right now going on as far as, I mean, there's probably, I think there was like something like 400 IPOs last year, and I think there's projected to be like 10 this year or something like that, or 15 because of the correction.

So hopefully that's going to slow a little bit down, but are you seeing, what do you think is going to be the forcing function for people to finally wake up, like old legacy businesses who are doing what they've known to do for years and continue to throw fuel on this fire? What do you think the forcing function is? Is it going to be an evolution or do you think there's going to be some, like a point where it's like, you don't have a choice here? So this is where a background or education in biology is somewhat interesting. There is a concept that there was a Harvard professor, a guy called Stephen Jay Gould, who worked with another scientist who came up with this concept. When they looked at the fossil record, they saw that change happens in these very deliberate kind of moments, right?

So things are static for a very long time. They kind of trend in a certain direction. And then suddenly, either because of an environmental pressure or some kind of other moment, there's a massive change. They call that punctuated equilibrium. So things are brought back to balance in a very punctuated way. So yeah, a market correction, 2008, 19 or 2001, like, you know, pick your, it depends on how many gray hairs you have. You can just pick your, you know, your moment. And you and I are old enough to have seen that correction happen. I think a lot of younger companies still live in that, in that space where they've seen only good years, right? They've seen very positive growth. They've seen very high valuations.

And so we, we do see these punctuated things. And I, so from just from a macro point of view, we will see a big change and it'll happen pretty quickly. It may be connected to interest rates. It may be connected to, you know, funding sources or a combination of those things. I'm not a macroeconomic expert. I don't want to even predict that. But what I see happening at the product level or the product company level is that they are currently enjoying a lot of success just by showing up, right? So they, they show up with a product. It's a relatively easy process to get something adopted because there's, there's really nothing in some of these spaces that, that qualifies as being a good solution.

In other spaces, we're starting to see a little crowding and that's when you're going to start to see consolidation. So really good example is that as CRMs, right? There's just way, way too many CRMs. Nobody's lying awake at night thinking, you know what would be great? Another CRM. Jesus, no, please. So there'll be, there'll be, you know, depending on which market you're in, you'll see consolidation. Like we did, you know, at some point we saw all the banks consolidating in the 80s. We saw a lot of service related companies consolidating in the 90s. In the late 2000s and 10s, we saw a lot of consolidation around some of the tech groups, especially when it came to banking. We saw FinTech absorbing FinServe and vice versa, you know, in that way.

And so we'll start to see that kind of consolidation at the product level, like the actual making of the product. We're going to start to see a lot more investment in understanding what the customer actually wants versus how they just deliver it. Now, I'll give you one anecdote. Yeah. A VC that I work with asked me to take a look at their portfolios. One of the portfolio companies, surprise, surprise, has developed a CRM for a particular industry. And this particular industry just happens to be an industry where it's essentially contractors, right? These contractors are going out and doing certain kinds of work. And I asked the VC, I said, where's the fundamental research to show that these contractors who are essentially running their businesses on a flip phone and with post-it notes from their truck, what is it that you think they need in a CRM?

And there was this kind of, you know, awkward silence of like, what do you mean? Like, it's a massive market. Every single, you know, every single guy in a truck needs some way to manage their business because their business is kind of flailing right now. I said, their business is flailing because the average age of a contractor in this country is 52. And the average age of a master contractor is 57. They're aging out. There's no young people coming into the skills market, into the trades market. That whole 50-something plus group of contractors was left behind during the tech revolution. And so what we've got is a misunderstanding of what the problem is. The problem is they don't need a CRM.

The problem is they need a bunch of young kids to go and, you know, put roofs on houses and paint, you know, walls, which 50-something-year-olds can't do or won't do or are just like tired of doing. And that's the problem. So what we need is an upstream solution in the form of like making more contractors who are willing to do the trades, not adding another tech solution designed by a bunch of PhDs who actually have no idea what it's like to run a business out of a truck. So I think what you're going to see is more sensitivity towards understanding what the fundamental research is. You know, we've heard companies like Tesla talk a lot about first principles. That is really where it's at. Like, do you understand what the original core problem is?

And can you build from there with an original solution or at least a derivative solution that feels like it's solving that problem? Or are you always going to be just saying, well, we know how to make something cool. We're just going to make something cool, which is unfortunately the situation we have now. I know this was a long winded way. No, no, I think it's right. But that's what I'm seeing. That's the observation. What's up, everybody? I know you're enjoying this conversation. John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes and our guests consistently bring the heat. We want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity, an opportunity to become better than you were yesterday.

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That URL, one more time, is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guest for this week. I call it the founder's dilemma, right? Which is the tech founder, the engineer who comes up with a product that is fantastic, right? And whatever, because it works really, really well and it solves a problem, whatever. And the funny thing is, is that they lead with product and the technical solution. And the funny, the evolution of it is, I always say sales is the transfer of enthusiasm, right? And you can ask the most introverted engineer, like, are you in sales? And they'll say, absolutely not. No, gross, right? But then you ask them to describe a problem that they just solved or give me an example of something you just created.

And you watch them light up like a Christmas tree, right? So now, all of a sudden, you have a product, somebody who built this thing. They now go out to talk to friends, families, and fools. So usually a pretty friendly audience about this thing that they created. And they, you know, they're passionate about it. So their audience gives them good feedback. They might even get a few people to buy it just because of that. And then all of a sudden, they're like, oh, well, this shit's easy. Let me just go hire a bunch of sales reps. And then the sales reps, because they don't have the passion, they don't have the understanding of the product. They're going through a generic sales process for it. They usually fail pretty hard.

And then the engineer's like, oh, screw it. I knew sales sucked. So now let's go all marketing, right? Let's like marketing, marketing, marketing. And then marketing kind of gets them to a point. And it's funny because Slack, I've worked with Slack, Dropbox, Tableau, and all of them hysterically said proudly, we do not have sales reps. We don't need sales reps because our product is that good. And then they all reach that threshold where they're like, shit, we actually need sales reps. And so that product-led, it's great, but without the understanding of the problem and the process to educate people on that problem, it fails miserably almost. Because it's not about, companies don't fail because their product isn't great.

They fail because they can't figure out, sell it effectively. I mean, at a macro level. Well, also, I think there's, you mentioned the threshold. This is a very important thing for, if anybody's listening and they're thinking about starting a company, there's a very important thing that is a critical part of the success of any SaaS organization. While you might be able to have product-led growth in the beginning and you can have a lot of that groundswell, bottom-up type sales, at some point, your organization will have to consider the enterprise sale. And when you get to the enterprise sale, there is no organization over a certain size that will allow you to use a product without it having to pass through some kind of procurement process.

And for good reason. It's a security process. Yeah, for really good reason. So a lot of people might think, oh, you know, now we have to deal with procurement. Procurement's there for a very good reason. I, you know, just like everybody else, I use a bank and I have some digital product that I use to do my banking. I don't want that company to willy-nilly just start using some SaaS service. I want them to go through, you know, the stock, you know, experience. I want them to go through all of the different checks and balances that allow the consumer of that product to feel safe that some crappy product hasn't just backdoored their way into the tech stack. And so I'm kind of excited that that enterprise checks and balances exist.

But for the salesperson that might feel like, oh, it's a hill to climb. So it's a normal hill. It's part of the deal. And when you're going from product-led growth to enterprise sales, that's an important step. You say, okay, now we need to engineer and instrument our organization for that kind of sale. It's going to take longer. It's going to require personal interaction. It's going to require a lawyer. It's going to require a security expert. That's okay. That's just part of the process. Is it worth it? God damn right it is. It absolutely is. Because a single enterprise customer can be equal to 10,000 regular customers, single self-serve customers. And I think that's the transition that needs to happen.

PLG is not a solution for everybody. It is a solution to a point. And maybe for self-service, it's always a good solution. But at some point, when you want to make the enterprise sale, you need to have a salesperson who really understands the product and can go and talk about all those little funny little details, the security details, the legal details. And that's part of the process. That's fine. That's why we talk about salespeople who have real deep product understanding. And those are the ones that do well. They can go and close the million-dollar deal. It's not that hard if they're willing to invest their time and energy into understanding what it is that they actually sell and what's the problem that they're solving.

And that means everybody's problem, the security guy's problem, the legal person's problem, the procurement person's problem. Those are all independent but related problems. And it's necessary for the salesperson to get really smart about that stuff. So let's talk about the problem. And let's go back to design sprints and the ability to make decisions. There's some common traits. And I'm curious of your perspective on that inflection point that you talk about or that forcing function of market correction that is going to adjust and what COVID was as it relates to that, in your opinion. But also how that kind of accelerated the need. And I'm going to use the word that I know you don't like because you talked to me about it before, is the need for agility, right?

The need to adapt now more than ever and faster than ever because, for instance, the companies that were waiting for COVID to go away so we could get back to normal. Like they failed pretty hard over the past couple of years here, but the companies that adjusted. So I'm wondering, you have this framework of design sprints that you wrote back in 2015 that talked about clarify the problem, brainstorm solutions, and a sketching exercise, which I'd like to dig into, distill the ideas, prototype solutions, test and prototype. So that framework there for a product, A, how has it evolved based on where we are today compared to 2015? And B, how can we use that or a version of that framework to help make decisions for businesses, but also as individuals?

Because I think this COVID has been an inflection point for a lot of individuals to reset what their values are, reset what's important to them, all these different things. And I'm looking for a framework to say, hey, when I'm in that situation, how do I move forward here with some level of confidence that I'm not just pissing in the wind at this point? Yeah. Design sprints is one of many versions of the scientific method of thinking. Essentially, you could call it anything you want. You can call it inquiry-based thinking, evidence-based thinking. It's thinking. It's thinking. It's just thinking. Like we don't do a lot of thinking. Let's do that. And so what is thinking? Thinking is the ability to understand the situation and then make choices.

So you've got the adoption of information through some form, whether it's research, inquiry, conversation, brainstorming, testing, and then using that information to make better choices, better decisions. I'm a huge fan of critical thinking and decision-making only because I don't think I experienced that at school. I got a kind of a traditional schooling, like most of us, where you learn stuff, you learn facts. The critical thinking stuff wasn't always like the highest priority. And as I became a scientist, I was like, wow, there's this amazing opportunity to learn how to think here where you can step back, have an objective or unemotional point of view and say, well, what are the facts? How do we gather those facts?

How do we put assumptions and some of the biases that we naturally have, the predilections that we bring to every conversation, whether that's an internal or external conversation, how do we put that to one side and actually do the work to find out what we need to do? So there's a lot of great thinkers out there on this topic. I'll just throw a couple out there for the listeners to go and dig deeper in. Shane Parrish from Farnham Street does a really good job of collecting these things. There's a book called Super Thinking, which allows you to see all of the different mental models and understand how to use them. There are about 150-ish mental models. And most of them we are familiar with. Most of them we understand, opportunity, cost, trade-off, various things, you know, inversion thinking.

There's a lot of different ones out there that we've seen before or have different names for. But the key thing here is to understand how to make decisions both for your business and for yourself, right? So if you're in a business, as a business leader, you want to make good decisions. They are the fuel for the velocity of the business. So most of us want a business that moves forward at a pace that we like. So it's growing quickly or it's accelerating towards the solution that we're aiming to get to the market. And the best way to do that is to have healthy choices or healthy decisions. And so the first thing we need to do is understand what each of the business frameworks might look like for that business.

So in the context of your business, my business, the business that we work on right now, we have to think about, well, what's the context? You know, how are we going to make choices? How are we going to make decisions? And we built on the sell better part of the business, which is the business that we're kind of launching soon. That's the part of the business that has more events than training, right? So on the traditional JV sales part of the business, it's very much about, you know, training and getting people from A to B. And on the other side of the business, it's a lot about events. It's a lot about getting folks the knowledge they need to be educated. And so what we were able to do is think about those situations and understand what's our decision stack?

How do we make decisions? Just like we have a marketing stack or a tech stack or a product stack. What are the things that we need in order to make good choices? And why do we need that stack in the first place? Well, we need that stack because I'm not always going to be around. You're not always going to be around the leadership of the organization is not available at two in the morning when somebody is trying to, you know, get back to sleep because they've got this thing on their head. And a decision stack is really a way to make decisions that is objective and also not connected to any one individual. So we want to create a business where anybody can choose to make the choices that they make or choose to involve themselves in a decision without having to come to one of us every single time and get permission to do that.

It's not efficient. That's kind of slowing down that efficiency or the velocity that we're talking about. So a decision stack is kind of like a design sprint in the sense that it's asking first. First question is, do we need to make a decision? Always the first question. Should I be making a choice here? The second thing is, how do I make that choice? Like, have we already agreed to this? Because what most organizations do is they make the same decisions over and over and over again. It's Groundhog Day. Instead of saying, well, it looks like we make a lot of these decisions in these areas frequently around branding, around marketing, around sales, around product. What are the things that we can reliably say?

These are decisions that we can make once and we don't have to keep making them over and over again. And can we put that into the stack? So a couple of examples here. What is the vision of the company? That is the decision. Where are we going to play? That's our go-to-market strategy. What is our mission that we're going to achieve over the next couple of months or years? What are our values? All of those are decisions. And if we can stack them and organize them, everybody in the organization can be trained to see those things as decision points. So for example, somebody might come along and say, hey, you know what? I think we should go and operate in Portugal. And you can say, okay, let's look at what the vision of the company is.

Let's look at the mission of the company. You know, you can go all the way down to the OKR level. Where in this organization of decisions, a stack of decision-making tools that we have, does it say that we should be operating in a non-English-speaking region of the world where we have no support? Well, it doesn't. Okay, cool. Does it show that there is a possibility we could do that in the future? Yes, it does. Okay, so it's not completely off the table. But for now, that decision has already been made for us. We have chosen that we will operate in English-speaking countries because that's where we can provide support. That's where we can have language support. That's where we can have good decisions and offer a great service.

If we opened up in Portugal, we'd have a very mediocre service, right? We just couldn't do what we wanted to do, at least at the level we want. So a lot of those decisions can be made ahead of the time. And then the organization and the team can be trained to recognize where they are in that decision-making process so that they can reference the decision stack and get faster to a decision without having to come to a leader every single time or wait for that weekly meeting or that monthly meeting or that board meeting for a decision to be made. They can make it independently. They can make it with confidence, which I think is a word that you were referencing earlier. And they can come back and say, great, I made a decision.

I know that it's an accurate and healthy decision because I've already checked through the stack. And I'm also feeling confident about it, even if it's 80-plus percent confidence. Because I know that even if it's not perfect, it's really, really close to being a good, confident decision. And that's better than no decision at all, right? So no decision is a zero confidence. Right. So that's how the decision stack works. And that's how you can apply it to both the business and to your individual life. You can have a decision stack for your life. I'll give you one example. Yeah. I made, I invested in a business a few years ago. It was a co-working business. And we signed a big, fat lease. And the business was doing great.

And then COVID came along and essentially shut that business down. We were told by the state, you can't open a co-working space anymore. And it was literally the month that we were, the first month that we were profitable. I think we were out of business. And so I looked at this and I said, okay, based on this information, I've had multiple businesses. This was maybe my fifth or sixth business. And I looked back and I said, does owning a lease or having a lease add value to my businesses? And I was able to say, in a couple of cases where I've had a lease, it hasn't actually been helpful. And given the fact that we may encounter something like a pandemic again or some other version of that, I've decided that part of my decision stack is never sign a lease.

That's a frustrating one in some cases because somebody approached me with a business concept the other day, which included having a lease. But I've decided that's actually not for me at this stage of my life. Having a lease is not going to be good. So that's part of my decision stack. It's super easy. It's like putting on the same outfit every day. You put on the, you know, make it happen t-shirt every day. Decision fatigue is reduced and the opportunity of making high confidence decisions is increased. This is where I, this is in what I kind of connect with on that is the values piece of why I think it's so important for everybody to go through a value exercise, like a personal value exercise.

Because most of my decisions, the ones that I always feel uncomfortable with, if I had my values literally in front of my face 24 hours a day and I referenced them every single time I made a decision, if I could go back and reverse engineer some of the ones that I was uncomfortable with, I guarantee you that it conflicted with one of the values that I said is mine. And so that's why I went through that exercise recently to say, no, no, no, no, no, hold on a second. What, what are my values? And then what are our values? I mean, one of the things that I recognized was, you know, we built this business mostly off of my why and my values. Right. And then resetting now with 12 people on staff and everything else, at least sitting down with Chris and Megan to make sure that like, these aren't just mine.

Like, I want to make sure that we're all aligned here because I always tell people, look, this is where I'm coming from. Right. So, so if you get feedback from me, this is what it's based on. So as long as you follow those, or as long as you understand those, you'll get my backing a hundred percent. I tell my employees all the time, like you could fuck up royally. Okay. Customer, whatever it is. And if I can point back and say that you follow those values, I will defend you until I die. But if you break one of those, we're going to have a problem. And I might have to be on the customer side of this one. You know what I mean? Yeah. So for you personally, though, how, I mean, you've been through some, some shit.

You know, uh, relatively recently and, and just, I mean, your history, um, how often do you kind of revisit your, why your personal values? Uh, is that something you consciously do or do you know what they are and you live them? I'm calibrating almost daily. So every morning I start my day by just looking through the things that I believe to be my decision stack. That's my vision, my principles, and what my particular goals are for that year. And I'm constantly asking myself, are these still relevant? So, um, as you mentioned, we've been through some shit. I recently lost my wife to cancer. And, uh, as I mentioned, we had, we also just lost a business and there was a lot of, you know, soul searching about, you know, is this the right path?

Are the things that have been in that vision, in that values collection, are they still relevant? And so I'm constantly asking the question, is this relevant for who I am? Because as a 20 year old, I may have chosen completely different things as a 30 year old. I think you don't really have to be as anal as I am when it comes to checking these things and calibrating them. Um, I like it. I, it's, it's part of like who I am. I, I, I get excited by it. I love opening up. I just have it on my phone and I just kind of read it out to myself aloud in the morning. I'm like, does this make sense? It's like, do I sound like an arsehole reading this out? Like now, um, but you know, I, I think, I think every now and then it's worthwhile to go back and have a look at the things that you've chosen as your vision or your values.

Values hopefully don't change too much, right? Values can be lifelong things. A vision might change in the sense that it might be more, um, contextualized. So the vision you have as a 20 year old is probably going to change. If you say, get married or have kids or move to a different country, all of the things that I've done have, you know, in that respect have changed that losing the love of my life, losing my wife has changed a lot. Like, you know, I asked myself, do I want to get married again? Do I want to, you know, live in the same country? Do you, you know, I'm, I'm living in America primarily because I chose to be with this person. And so I've got to ask those questions again. I don't think it's a bad thing to ask hard questions of yourself every day.

I think that's part of what makes you, uh, I like this word anti-fragile, which is kind of a better word than agile. So whereas agile kind of feels like you're just kind of rolling with the punches and you're, um, responsive or reactive. I really like this idea of being anti-fragile where, you know, you get beat down and you come back stronger. And so in my artwork, I chose the symbol of a peony because in my yard, in my garden, I have peonies that get absolutely slaughtered every year by the winter. I mean, there's just like nothing left. I can look where the peony was and there's like no evidence of them. And then every single year they come back better, stronger with more blooms. And, and I find that fascinating.

I find that absolutely fascinating that something can come back stronger and better than it did after enduring such hardship. And I'd like to believe that human beings are capable of that as well, is that hardship isn't, um, something that's going to beat us down, but it's rather the lesson that's going to allow us to grow and come back less fragile, more resilient. Um, and, and, and my values and my vision are really just emphasizing that they're, they're there to emphasize that idea. And that, as you said, my thesis in my art is to understand this idea that we're separated from everything. Somehow we've convinced ourselves that we're all separate and we're all like doing our own thing and we're separate from nature and separate from our futures.

And somehow we need to reconcile that with the fact that we're not, and we're actually all connected and everything that you do ultimately boils down to those connections and the values that are connected to that. So another good example is, um, you're old enough to realize this, and I, you, you have a daughter that, you know, at first you're like super worried about everything. You know, you're worried you're going to kill your kid just by like holding it the wrong way, feeding it the wrong thing. And then at some point I've got three kids and, and, and the two oldest ones are pretty much adults now and you realize, yeah, they're going to be fine. Are they eating? Yeah, they're fine. Are they, you know, are they getting a little bit of sleep every night?

Oh, they're going to be fine. You know, I went to a kindergarten meeting, parent teacher meeting the other day and the teacher was like, well, here's the report card. I was like, I don't want to look at it. I'm not interested. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's just not that important. I tell you what matters. I'm going to ask you some, some questions. Is James kind to the other kids in the class? Yes. He's one of the kindest kids. Does he show respect to them and to you? Yes. Does he show love and compassion for the people and the things around him? Yes, he does. Great. We're done. I'm out. I'm out of here. We're good. Because that's the stuff your values and your vision should be based on because that is timeless.

And that's something that you can control. What you can't control is, yeah, I'm going to get this degree and I'm going to get this job and all that kind of stuff. Because sure enough, you're going to get disappointed along the way. And then how are you going to respond from the fact that you didn't become the best dentist in your local town? Right. What does that matter? Yeah, you and I are very in line with that. I always say I could care less whether my daughter can pass a math test or a science test. I mean, it's, hey, Siri, what's the square root of 8,472,000? You know what I mean? It's right here for kind of critical thinking and being a good person. Those are pieces. And that's why, you know, and everybody who listens to this podcast has heard me say this a million times before.

But we came up with that little acronym of what can we control, right? Because there was a time where during one of the elections, you know, Kim and I were extremely animated about our disdain for what was happening. And we saw the impact that it was having on Charlotte. And she started acting dissimilarly. Even though she didn't really know what was going on, it was like she was six years old and she was just reacting and being angry. And I'm like, whoa, hold on a second. And we reverse engineer. And I said, hey, hold on a second, sweetheart. Let's stop focusing on what we can't control and focus on what we can. And the acronym that we came up with are what can we control? Effort, attitude, and how we treat people.

So effort, how hard you work, attitude, whether it's good or bad, and how you treat other people. Those are the things you can control. Other than that, I don't care. And so every morning, I drop her off at school and we have a little handshake that we do. And it's like, all right, what can we control today? Effort, like so for instance, today, she's very frustrated with one of her teachers, okay? Because there's some hypocrisy going on with how they react to her. And I said, all right, let's talk about this. What's an approach? And we talked it through last night and on the way to school this morning. And when we did it, hey, effort, I always highlight one of them of the day's focus, right?

I'm like, attitude. Today is attitude. Like you have to have a positive attitude. If you go in there all pissed off and really mad about this, you're not going to get a positive response. So your attitude is everything today as far as how you approach this. And that gives her a framework to kind of take a step back and just keep realizing that there are so many things outside of our control, the market, the industries, the people around us. But if we stay focused on what we can control and have those core values, you know, lead a rather fulfilling life, you know? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, you know, we're kind of coming full circle back to that early experience that I had on the island and not thinking too much about the stuff that the media wants you to think about or that social media wants you to think about.

And rather focusing on the things that you can control and on your vision as a kind of, you know, mentally healthy human being, you will conquer just about everything. And I'm talking not just from personal experience. You know, I think if you look at the list of stressful things that can happen in your life, we have just, my son and I have just gone through that experience. You know, I think of the top five things of the most stressful things that have happened in the last two years. Yes. And yet, I've never met a happier person than my son, James. He is full of joy and he, because he doesn't concern himself with the things that he can't control. Like he knows that there are certain, like other people's paths, other people's health, other people's choices.

But he can choose how he behaves and how he responds with, as you say, with respect, with kindness, with love, with an attitude. And that has actually accelerated our healing in this process, this experience that we've gone through, has been really, really somewhat comforting in the sense that we can rely on those things and not try and rely on controlling the things we can't control. And that's given us much more power in the positive sense over our lives and how we approach things. And it's tangible in everything that we're able to do. And again, look, we're privileged. We have, you know, we have lots of support. You know, my family's still around. I know you lost your dad. Like, I still have my parents around.

So we've got support from family. And, you know, I've had a fairly successful career. So we've got, you know, the financial means to be able to kind of navigate through this very expensive experience, by the way. But, you know, at the same time, I think that our attitude and our ability just to kind of focus on the things that we can control has given us a head start. It's given us a better place, a better foundation. And so, you know, if the listeners are thinking like, well, what the hell has this got to do with sales? It's got everything to do with sales. It's got everything to do with product. It's got everything to do with everything. Because how you show up in the world has a big, big impact on just about everything you do.

It's not just fatalistic. It's not just, you know, deterministic crap that hits you in the face every day. It's how you respond to that, the lessons you learn from that, how you, you know, take that and turn that into an anti-fragile thing where you say, okay, yeah, we got smacked down. Am I going to be the peony that comes back even brighter and more beautiful next year? Or am I going to bitch about it? Yeah, and hopefully, like you said, the people listening, that control factor, those frameworks that you talked about as far as how to make decisions, hopefully will give people a little bit more feeling of control of their ability to make decisions in what I usually call an inflection point, right?

Whether that's as a business where something, effectively something punches you in the face, or there's that gut that something's not right here and I don't know what to do about it. I think that's what struck me over the past year and a half was like, I don't know how to do now because I was so defined by something for so many years. And now it's kind of like the world is open to me, but now I don't know what to do. And then consolidating it down to focusing on a decision stack, if you will, the why, the values, my priorities, and my energy, using that to then dedicate and say, okay, this is what I want to do now and this is what I can do, gave me a lot more control. But unfortunately, without that framework, I didn't, you know, I applied it to my business, but I didn't apply it to me.

And that's why we came out of COVID so fast, I think, and thrived because of it, because we have the decision stack taken care of. But it's why it took about a year and a half for me to come out of my inflection point after dad passed. Because again, it wasn't him passing, you know, as bad as it was, he was an 81-year-old man. I had a good relationship with my father. Do I wish he would have lived longer? Absolutely. But am I, oh my God, you know, he died way too young and I wish I hadn't, no. You know, the inflection point for me was that, wait a minute, my business doesn't need me anymore, right? Because I was ripped out for four weeks and plugged back in. And when I plugged back in, everything was running really, really well.

And it was legitimately the first time, right? And it was the first time in my career, I was like, holy shit, like this company doesn't need me. I don't need to be the number one revenue generator for this thing to go. So what does that mean for me? And I, you know, honestly, you know, and quite openly, I struggled for the past year and a half trying to figure that out. Now, going back to that sabbatical that you talked about, getting that reset, getting some more clarity and having a little bit more of a framework now, I got a lot more clarity and a lot more confidence moving forward of what I want to do. And I'm a lot happier because now I don't feel the anxiety of, oh my God, I have to be busy.

Oh my God, I have to, I have to be doing all these things to be valuable to the organization. And I'm going to add one more thing before we kind of close this out. There might be a lot of people who are thinking, oh, that's fine. You know, these are kind of like middle-aged white guys with money and they can take their time off and do sabbaticals. And I just want to make it clear that these are not requirements for the kinds of, to get to the point where you've got a working framework. It's not a, it's not necessary to go on sabbatical. It's not necessary to go, you know, on a vision quest in the desert or things like that. What you need to do is understand that your identity is not your job.

Just because like in your case, pretty deliberately, you had your name on the door. It is, it's you. You, you, your job, your career, anything that you have defined yourself by, those are not you. Those are things that are characteristics of you that your, you know, your education or your background or your skin color or everything. Those are characteristics. They're not your identity. Your identity is something you can choose every single day. And your identity can be, okay, I am, as you pointed out in your experience, I am somebody who thought I was the most important person in this business because I am, you know, the chief revenue officer or the chief, you know, part of that process. And, you know, my name's on the door.

But the best thing that had happened to you was realizing that your identity is not the business. In fact, if the business went away, you'd be fine. John Burroughs would pick himself up and do something else. I've had that experience. When I first came to the States, I had a business. It didn't work out. It was a horrible flop. I mowed my neighbor's lawns. My new identity was landscaper. You know, it was necessary for me to redefine my identity. I was like, I've got a kid. I've got to raise this kid. Actually, at the time, I had two kids. We were a very small baby and my stepson. And I was like, I've got to redefine who I think I am. I'm not some tech executive. I went from being CEO of a venture-funded tech company to mowing lawns because that was what was required.

You have to tear up your identity. You've got to throw it in the trash. And you've got to start from scratch and say, there is no pride at stake here. There is just the opportunity to define myself. And within several weeks, one of the people that I was mowing the lawn for said, hey, can you help me with the thing? And, you know, that led to another thing. And eventually, you know, I picked myself up step by step. But this is important. You don't have to be a wealthy person to take time off and think about this. You've just got to understand that your identity is not what you do, what your education is, and start there and slowly build a decision stack around what is it that I'm able to make choices about every single day that will help me get to the thing that I want to do.

And reach out and ask for help. I mean, that's the whole point of what we've created here. We've created this thing called Sell Better. It's a community, essentially, an audience of like-minded individuals who want to have conversations like the one you and I have just had, where the line between work and personal stuff is very blurry. And they want to show up as better human beings. They want to sell better, but they also want to be better. And they want to identify as better. They want to identify as human beings that have the ability to make great choices and be kind and loving and compassionate to the people around them. And that's the community we want to have, personally, we want to bring people closer to that in the form of this Sell Better organization so that they can have this conversation and be vulnerable and say, "Yeah, I've got imposter syndrome.

Yeah, I'm not doing so well. Yeah, I had a shitty experience last year. Yeah, COVID sucked the life out of me, but I want to do better and I think there are other people out there who'd want to do better as well." And I think just hanging out with the right people, that's a good start as well. So, yeah, I'll kind of say that and hopefully that'll give some inspiration to folks to be part of what we're going to do. I love it. And I think you're right. It doesn't, because I had the same inflection point earlier in my career and I didn't take a sabbatical. It was when I got fired from Staples and I had identified as an IT services sales guy. And I'm like, is that who I am? I'm like, fuck. I'm like, I don't even like computers.

I'm like, is that what I'm supposed to do now? And I've said this before, but my wife is the one who helped me. She's like, well, let's look back at your career and find out why were you successful at every job you've had? And it was, you know, DeWalt. Well, because DeWalt power tools are badass. It wasn't hard for me to sell it. You know, Xerox. I didn't love copiers, but Xerox was the best, right? Thrive. It wasn't the technology. It was the people. And so the realization for me was that it didn't matter what I sold. It mattered going back to what I believed in what I sold. And the transfer of enthusiasm, because when I believe in something, you can't hold me back. You know what I mean? Like when I genuinely believe that I have something that can make a difference, there's nobody better for me, right?

And so then it just opened up my world to say, well, I'm not an individual sales type of person. I'm somebody who has to go find something that I can believe in. And then the success will come because of that. And so it redefined me and my mindset of who I was. But it wasn't a, I didn't have to take a sabbatical. I just needed, to your point, some help. I needed somebody to show me from the outside perspective, looking at me, right? And saying, well, what are, like, let's take a look back. Let's look at your history. Let's look at what you love to do. Where, you know, what are the things that you enjoy doing? And what are the things you don't enjoy doing? Well, that kind of helps, right? Once you start to identify what your goals are and priorities and what gives you energy, and I'm big into this energy management thing of if stuff gives you energy and helps you achieve your goals, man, go all in.

And once you really identify that, you can do some special stuff. Sure. Awesome, Richard. Well, look, this has been a fascinating conversation. I know we took it all over the place, but hey, two things. If you could, I know you're with us, so you can find people. People can find you on LinkedIn, but I also wanted you just to point people towards your art projects. So where can people find you professionally, like on LinkedIn and stuff like that, or where do you want to point them? Yeah, professionally, I live on LinkedIn. I haven't checked Twitter or any of the other social media for a very long time. I have a website, richardbanfieldart.com, where my art lives, and I have another website, richardbanfield.com, which is just, you know, essentially a kind of a background as to, like, the things that I've done, the projects that I've been involved in.

And the pieces that you sell on Richard Banfield art, a portion of that goes to charity, right? Yes, so the cancer research and support that the PMC, the Pan Mass Challenge, provides. My checks go to them. I'll also be writing the Pan Mass Challenge this year. And I, yeah, hopefully, hopefully you're going to make it. Yeah, right? Awesome. Well, for those of you listening on the podcast, it's Richard Banfield, B-A-N-F-I-E-L-D art.com. Go check it out. Go pick up some of his pieces, do good work, and also have some cool shit in your house. And, Richard, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm looking forward to it. And I'm really looking forward to working with you on some of the stuff that I got going on.

I know you're doing some killer stuff on the better side. Yeah, we'll have to do another podcast about that because that's actually some pretty cool stuff. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you again. And, everyone, I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And like I always say at the end of all my podcasts here, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you can go out there and make somebody smile today. You know you had a good day, and the world needs a lot more of that these days. So thank you all very much for listening, and I will see you on the other side. Thank you so much for your time today and listening to the podcast.

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