EntreLeadership - #386: The Importance of Looking Upstream with Dan Heath

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

If your average day at work is consumed with putting out fires and dealing with one emergency after the other, you’re on a very slippery slope. It’s a place New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath likes to call “downstream,” and before you know it, he warns, you’ll be stuck there. Tune in as Dan explains why adopting an upstream mindset—i.e., focusing on preventing problems rather than reacting to them over and over again—is crucial to moving your business forward and uniting your team.   entreleadership.com/podcast Upstream by Dan Heath Scarcity by Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan #342: 5 Buckets of Leadership You're Responsible For with Dr. Henry Cloud Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath #380: Engaging With the Marketplace with Chris Ruder 25 Things You Can Delegate To A Social Media Strategist from BELAY Critical Thinking Cheatsheet Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever gotten those spots where you start treating your business, your leadership, your team, maybe even your family, and quite frankly, your entire life like a game of whackamol? Like you hit this one thing and you think you're good and then another thing pops up and then another thing pops up and then you have to hit two things at once and then you need five hands because you have to hit five things at once and they keep coming up and you're going frantic and you're going crazy and you just can't get to all of it. Have you ever been there? Whenever you engage in that version of life that's a lot like whackamol, you start to realize that. that you're focusing only on symptoms and you never actually get to the source. From the Ramsey Network, this is the On Trade Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Alex Jed, and today we get to talk with Dan Heath,

who's an author and researcher who has spent over a decade working on this exact topic, not just how you as a leader solve problems, but how do you prevent them from ever occurring? How do you not just attack the symptom, but get down to the source, to the root cause? Now, he calls this Upstream Thinking, and it's the title of his new book, Upstream. And this whole idea that can transform your priorities, your leadership, and your team, well, it all originated with a parable about you having a picnic by the river. So you and a friend are having a picnic beside a river. You've laid out your picnic blanket. You're just preparing to sit down and eat when you hear a shout behind you from the direction of the river, and you look back. And there's a child in the river. river kind of thrashing around, apparently drowning. So you instinctively jump in both of you and you fish the child out. You bring them to shore. And just when your adrenaline is starting to recede a little bit, you hear a second shout. You look back and it's another child also apparently drowning.

So back in you go, you rescue them, bring them to shore. And no sooner have you done that that, you hear two shouts. Now it's two kids in the river. And so you're in, you're out, you're rescuing kids and you're starting to get exhausted. And about that time, your friend swims to shore and starts walking away as though to leave you alone. And you say, hey, where are you going? I can't do this by myself. All these kids, they need rescuing. And your friend says, I'm going upstream to tackle the guy who's throwing all these kids in the river. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about. It's about this phenomenon, what's so often in life, whether it's our personal life or our businesses, we get trapped in this cycle of reaction. We're putting out fires. We're responding to

emergencies. We're always downstream dealing with problems after they happen, but we rarely make the space. We rarely devote the time and attention that we would need to go upstream and forestall and head off these problems before they ever happen. And that's what I'm chasing with this. I'd love to know what was the genesis of this thought being a book for you. Where did that come from as something that you said, man, I want to spend a ton of time studying, researching, and writing about that. The first time I started a file called Upstream was in 2009. And two things had happened. One was I heard that parable for the first time then. It was the first time this notion of upstream thinking was planted in my head. And the other is right around the time

I heard that parable, I had this conversation with the assistant deputy chief of police in a Canadian and city. And he told me this story or this thought experiment really that stuck with me ever since. And he said, imagine you've got two police officers. And one of them goes downtown in the morning during the morning rush. And she positions herself in this intersection that's kind of notorious. It's chaotic. There's a lot of accidents there. And just by being a visible presence in that intersection, she calms people down. She gets them to be more cautious. And she prevents accidents from happening. So that's Officer 1. And then Officer 2 goes to a different part of downtown where there is a prohibited right turn signal. And she hides around the corner. And when people cheat and make that

prohibited right turn, she jumps out and slaps them with the ticket. And this deputy chief said, which of these two officers do you think did more for the public good and for public safety? And he said, indisputably, it was the first, right? She probably prevented some accidents, may have even prevented someone from being killed. But if you ask, who is going to be praised, who's going to be rewarded, who's going to be promoted its officer two, because she comes back with a stack of tickets that show what she's accomplished. And meanwhile, if you think about Officer One, how does she prove she did anything? You know, how do you prove that something did not happen?

And we might say, well, you can look at data, and that's certainly true. I mean, we could keep a log of how many accidents happened at this intersection before and after the officer was stationed there. And if there's a downtick, we could claim credit for that. But notice even in that scenario where we have the data backing up our work, we still don't know who exactly was helped. There was some guy headed downtown to go to his job that morning. And he noticed the presence of the officer. He slowed down a little bit. He was fine. In an alternate reality where she wasn't there, he would have been in a crash and died that morning. He'll never know that. That's right. The officer will never know who she helped. So there's this kind of maddening ambiguity about upstream work that even though it's essential, even though it can stop problems before they happen, it also brings a lot of ambiguity and complexity. And that idea coupled with that parable kind of got me hooked and I've been fascinated by it ever since.

I love this because when the team told me we were talking to you about this topic specifically, I was on a coaching call literally later that day, and one of the business owners came into the call and just look frazzled. And someone asked her, like, what's going on? Like, why are you so stressed out right now? And she said, I just feel like I've been in reaction mode all day. And I think that is so often the life of the small business owner. And it's not like anyone sets out saying, like, man, I just want to have a really reactive day to day. Right.

I just want to be a hundred percent reactionary. I just want to put out fires all day long. But none of us, and we laugh at that because none of us set out to do that, but so often we still fall into that. Why is it that we are so susceptible to that pattern, Dan? Well, it reminds me of this study that was done that speaks to this. It was done by a woman named Anita Tucker who did this research as part of her dissertation at Harvard. And she followed around a bunch of nurses for hundreds of hours just to get a feel for what their day was like. and she wanted to understand how they solved problems.

And so in a typical day, the nurses would deal with broken equipment or missing supplies or improper prescriptions. One nurse might discover she needed a towel for a patient, but they're out of towels. And so she has to dash over to a nearby department and steal some of their towels and come back and deal with the issue. Anita Tucker talked about this one day when there was a nurse who dealt with a new mother, about to be checked out of the hospital with her baby. and as part of that, they have to remove the security ankle that's around the baby's ankle to keep them from being abducted.

It was missing, and so they had to scramble around, look for it. It turned out it was in the baby's bassinet, problem solved, so the mother was checked out. About three hours later, almost the exact same situation happens. It's a different mother, different baby, but again, the ankle is missing. They do another frantic search. This time they can't find it. And so the nurse goes to her boss, and they figure out another way to safely discharge the mother and her child. And so Anita Tucker shows this is what a nurse's life is like. It's constant problem

solving. It's improvisational. It's reactive. It's prideful. You know, nurses don't go running to the boss every time something goes wrong. They like the idea that they're scrappy, they're resourceful. They can deal with it themselves. And there's a lot to admire in that portrait until you flip it around and look at it from the system's angle. Because if you see that work as a system, what you realize is something pretty horrifying, which is this is the description of a system that never learns, that never improves. What these nurses had honed was an ability to work around problems, and they were brilliant at it. But the thing about working around problems is they're going to persist. Every time you work around problems, it's a guarantee that that same.

class of problem is going to recur in the future. Now, to be clear here, the point of this is not to throw stones at nurses, right? We all do this. This is not a nurse thing. I think Anita Tucker could have studied small business owners or flight attendants or lawyers or anybody. And this is a trap that I want to call tunneling. And that's a word I'm borrowing from a psychology book called scarcity. And tunneling says that when we feel like we have a scarcity of resources, whether that's money or time, we adopt this kind of tunnel mindset where if you just picture yourself visually in a tunnel, there's only one direction to go, right? Forward. We've got to just keep scrambling forward. If we run into a problem, we run out of towels, can't find the security ankle on a baby.

What do we do? We do whatever is necessary to get by it so we can keep tunneling forward, right? And that's a pretty good description of what most of our work lives are like. We're trying to it forward, we run into something, we get it behind us. But of course, the great trap there is any problem that is worked around rather than solved is one that will recur. We can doom ourselves to staying in the tunnel forever. And I think that's really the crux of the issue that keeps us downstream rather than upstream. Wow. We talk a lot about the difference between working in the business and working on the business for small business owners. And we had Dr. Henry Cloud on this program, not long ago. And one of the things that he talked about in our conversation with him is he said working

in the business, activities related to working in the business are always characterized by the fact that because you're doing it today, you're going to have to do it again tomorrow. And it sounds like that's what you're talking about with regard to tunneling is because, yes, you're solving the problem. You're putting out the fire. But at the same time, you're also not really solving the source of the problem. Is that right? That's exactly it. And so if you just kind of admire and appreciate this horrible trap. And the trap is to be crystal clear about it. And by the way, this is not a new idea or insight that I have. We've all recognized this trap in ourselves. This is like Stephen Covey's important, urgent distinction. I mean, we've all grappled with this in some way or another. But just to put a

fine point on it, the reason we get in this trap is because we lack time and we lack resources. We're scrambling, which forces us to work around problems. Why? Because we don't have the time or resources is to deal with them at a systemic level. But the very fact that we do that guarantees we can't get out of the tunnel. And so the obvious question is, well, are we doomed to do this for the rest of our lives? Is this a horror story? It sounds like whatever is the picture of the guy rolling the giant boulder up the hill. Yeah, this is the myth of Sisyphus reenacted every day.

I think the good news part of this story is it really doesn't take much to begin to fight against this if we're disciplined about it. For instance, in health systems, they've become well aware of this problem, and many of them have adapted routines that fight the tunneling instinct. One example is what's called a safety huddle, where everybody, doctors, nurses, staffers will get together for a very quick meeting, say every morning for 20 minutes, and they'll talk about any safety near misses from the day prior, you know, medications that were almost given improper doses or equipment that would malfunctioned, or it would have been the perfect opportunity for this nurse to say, had this weird thing happened yesterday where two different babies had their ankle fall off. And I'm just curious what's going on with that. That is, in essence, a way to escape from the tunnel for a precious period of time, to get everybody out thinking, as you said, about the business rather than being stuck in the business. And it doesn't take long. And it takes 20 minutes. And even better than that, it feels good. Tunneling is stressful. Being out of the tunnel and reflecting on the work is less so. It actually becomes a kind of highlight of the day.

And so one, if you're a small business owner listening to this, think about what's that tradition or that habit that you can build among your team to allow them some regular guaranteed escape from the tunnel. I think that's part one. So if you're talking to a small business owner and they say, okay, Dan, I am in the tunnel. I'm smack dab in the tunnel and I'm just continuing to drive down the tunnel, I've probably been in the tunnel for a year now. And this is where I am. And I'm telling you, or you're telling me even, that the reason why I'm in this tunnel is because lack of time, scarcity, but then you're telling me that the solution to get out of the tunnel is more time. How do I reconcile that? How do I do that? What are your thoughts there, Dan?

I deal with this as a father all the time. I'm kind of an older father. I have a four-year-old and a 19-month-old. You know, things like teaching your child to put on their shoes. You know, it's going to be a huge pain in the butt to teach them to put on their shoes, right? And on any given day, if the choice is, do I just put the shoes on my daughter or do I teach her to put on her shoes? I mean, guess what the lazy father is going to pick. I mean, every day, I'm just going to take the two minutes. It takes for me to put on the shoes. And some other day, I'm going to worry about teaching her how to do herself. And so that's the tunneling trap, right? I have a scarcity of time. I'm always going for for the easy solution. But notice the fallacy there,

right, that it might take a hundred times as much time to teach her how to put on her shoes herself as it does for me to do it. So in a day, it's like 100 to 1 loaded for the short term. But then I do that a thousand days in a row, you know? And so if you think of it over the long term, you're actually just burning up time, right? Over the long term, solving these problems systemically does you a favor. And so I don't dispute at all that in the short term, this may be a net add to your time allotted. I think that may well be true. I mean, if you've got fires to put out, they've got to be put out. Where's the extra time come from? Maybe up front, it does take a little extra time in the morning or at night. But the point is that this is high return on investment,

that what you're buying yourself is a future free from firefighting. And that's pretty attractive. I love that you talk about that mindset shifts because one of the other kind of shifts or perspective shifts that you talk about in the book is the fact that a lot of times putting out the fires or solving the one-off problems or dealing with the customer issues or things like that, those can appear to be very heroic. And so can you speak to that distinction between that appearing heroic versus what is actually heroic? Absolutely. And this is one of the biggest ahas I had in researching this book. It really speaks to our definitely. of heroes. So if you think about who is a hero, you think of a firefighter, you think of a cop or a first responder, a lifeguard, you know, people who save the day. Those are our heroes. Or Captain America or Thor. Captain America, yes, exactly, exactly. And then there's this whole other class of people

who keep the day from needing to be saved, you know, rather than needing to put out a fire in a burning building, somebody invented smarter building codes that made things less flammable, or there was a high school coach who was such a good mentor for a bunch of teenagers that kept them out of trouble with the law, or there were really boring safety protocols embraced by the public pool that kept a lifeguard from needing to jump in and fish out a kid. And I started to get really interested in that idea of upstream heroes. Their work is often invisible. If someone jumps in, the YMCA pool and saves your child. They're an instant hero. I mean, they're going to be in the newspaper. You'll remember them for the rest of their lives. But how would we ever recognize that

person like the police officer, remember at the busy intersection, who kept your kid from ever being in the situation of drowning? It's almost impossible to answer. And so I got really interested in this idea of heroics. And when I started talking to business people about this idea, they spotted it immediately in their own culture. And they said, you know, we reward the firefighting. You know, somebody stays up all night to deal with a critical client problem or to respond to an RFP or whatever. And those are the people that get the praise. And then they started to catch on like this kind of heroics can actually be poisonous because what we really want is quiet competence in our organizations. I mean, we don't want firefighting.

The need for heroism is often a sign that you've got a bad. system, to be honest. And I heard from this one reader who had this wonderfully practical tip, I want to pass along. And he said he had worked at a company where this kind of glory from firefighting had started to become a thing. And in fact, some of his colleagues actually whispered that they had team members who would kind of light a fire for the sake of putting it out for the glory. You know, that's called being an arsonist is what that's called. Yes, right. And so they were, they were struggling with what to do about this. And one thing we know for sure about human nature is that you get more of what you reward and what you praise. And so they said, we need to start

praising people who prevent crises. And so they created what they called the Smoky the Bear Award for Problem Prevention. And I just love how kind of corny that is, but it's perfect, right? Because you're saying, let's stop praising the last minute heroics. Let's start praising Marge from accounting who figured out a way to keep us from staying up all night every month as we close out the books. you know, a smarter process, a more enduring process, a more sustainable process, those are organizational heroes. Gosh, that's so good. And I love that you use that phrase, quiet competence, because it seems like so often

those heroes that are actually doing the work that saves people a ton of time, if business owners and business leaders aren't careful, those people will be completely unseen, unheard, and absolutely anonymous to the organization. That's exactly it, and that's the trap. So I think as small business owners, you're in a wonderful position to be an antidote to that and to start paying attention to who are those people who are just making the systems run smoothly, who are attentive to them, who are tweaking the knobs of the system rather than doing this kind of roller coaster ride of heroics. I mean, what we want are people who just get the job done, slowly improve over time, squeeze,

out errors and defects from processes. And let's hold those people up. And I love that too, because I think it hints at the idea that you can create a culture or an environment in which it is not only just acceptable, but praised and created that we're going to focus on and solve for upstream problems. We're not just going to put out fires. Are there other actions business owners can take or other things they should be thinking about to really create that culture? in their organization? I think one kind of deeper layer here is to start thinking about business models. And it's amazing how many business models are actually tuned to reaction. You know, if you think about tech support or if you think about pest control, if you think about plumbers or electricians,

you know, inevitably what's happening is something went wrong, something failed, and then they get a call. And so I'll just give you a personal example. My wife and I, we have a townhome, and periodically we would have a problem with spiders. And both of us are sort of mildly bugphobic. So this always became a drama in our household, right? The spiders would come in. We would freak out. We'd call the pest control people, get on their schedule.

They'd come out. They would save the day. And then we'd breathe a sigh of relief. And then nothing would happen until when? Until the next crisis happened, right? The spiders come back. And one time the pest control people came out and they said, hey, we've got this service where you pay us a monthly fee. And basically, you never call us again.

We're just going to quietly take care of this. And we said, well, what do you mean? Don't you need to get inside the house? And won't we have to do appointments? And they said, well, if you manage this properly, they won't get inside the house. So what we do is we use our best knowledge of how frequently to come out, how to treat outside the house. And what we're saying is we're warranting to you.

We're going to make this problem go away. And in exchange, you know, you're going to pay us monthly. And you'll probably never see us again. You'll probably never call. But you're also not going to have spiders ever again. And my wife and I kind of struggle with this. We were thinking, well, are we getting suckered here, you know, or are we just kind of grossly overpaying?

And we thought, you know, this makes sense. They're the pest people. They know what they're doing. We don't. They are in a position to own this risk, and we should pay them to own that risk. If you think about just extrapolating that idea outward, there are so many situations in the world where we're paying on the wrong side of this dynamic, right? We should be figuring out ways to pay people before problems happen.

In fact, I was talking to this guy named Brandon Ridenauer, who runs Angie services. They own Home Advisor and Angie's List. and we were talking about this exact phenomenon, and he was mirroring back. He said, you know, most of the time our work is triggered by a problem, the plumber, the electrician, the handyman, and so forth. And he said that they were starting to ponder a model that was more like estate management, which, of course, you know, the one percenters in the country have like estate managers.

That Beyonce doesn't call the plumber, in other words. There's somebody in the middle there. And he was saying, you know, we could conceptually be the people to bring state management to the masses. He said, because we have this massive database, number one, of the kinds of problems that people have in various stages of the lifespans of different kinds of appliances ranging from air conditioners to, you know, water heaters to dishwashers, whatever. We know what the problems are going to be and how they can be forestalled and on what timeline they need to. to be serviced and we can do it proactively. And we have the network of people who can do that service. He said, couldn't we automate a lot of this? Like rather than having a human being that's like Dan He's a state manager, couldn't this all be kind of run largely with AI in the

middle? But then, of course, you know, the right plumber comes out at the right time to do the preventive maintenance. And I just got fascinated by that idea of it feels like the right time in the world to start thinking about pivoting business models away from reaction and toward prevention. And I think consumers are going to be increasingly willing to make the kind of choice that my wife and I made with the pest control people. Man, that's so good. One of the things we talk about on this program all the time is it's one of our core fundamental beliefs is businesses exist to solve problems.

But I think one of the things that, I mean, this is literally like an aha moment for me as you're talking about this, it is our choice, or it is the founder or business owner's choice, at which point on the pain level scale, they're solving that problem. Are they solving it whenever the person's house is infested with spiders, or are they solving it way before so the person never sees spiders? But it seems like still, though, even in the model that you're talking about with the guy from Angie's list, they're still solving a problem for customers, and that problem is the customer doesn't have time, and it's always super inconvenient whenever you have to change the oil

or whenever you have to do the regular plumbing check-in or whenever you have to do routine maintenance on your HVAC. And it's like if he can solve the problem of that inconvenience, he's just become an absolute rock star in the eyes of his customer. That's exactly it. And I think the way to get a foot in the door with this kind of model is, is number one, as you said, part of the value proposition is just avoiding inconvenience.

You know, I think probably all of us have been in that situation where it's August, it's 99 degrees outside. side and our AC goes out and you try to get somebody out and guess what everybody else's AC broke too so you can't get anybody right and and so avoiding those situations i think really resonates i think probably with especially with younger customers who are used to you know app type service where you want something you can get it in 30 minutes the second point is i think we have to learn to start making the case to people that long-term savings matter and that when i get someone in this fictional world of estate management, if I could get someone to kind of nurture all the core

systems in my house, the HVAC and the hot water heater and everything else, I am almost by definition extending the life of those things in a way that creates value out of thin air, right? If you extend the life of an AC three years from careful maintenance, I mean, that's a good chunk of change. And if you take that economic value and you kind of divide it up, you know, the homeowner gets to keep part of that as savings and the business owner gets to keep part of that as profits. That's a beautiful exchange. And I think we need to train customers to start thinking that way. And it may be unnatural as first because we're used to this reactive model where we want to see the fire get put out to prove to ourselves that something happened.

But at least for my end of one with this pest control thing, it's like eventually you grow into that. It starts to make sense in this world where everything is a subscription. I feel like there will be more people in the market for these preventive subscriptions, if you will. You've got to have an online presence today to be successful in business, but it takes time. We don't have time for it. We've got all this other stuff to do. So if you're like me, you need a team to help you with this. You know, if you need help with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, well, guess what?

Our friends at Belay Solutions, they've got the answer. They actually have social media strategist who can help you out. You know, if you need to schedule content and engage with your online audience, they can do that. If you need to respond to online inquiries and get feedback from clients and share customer success stories, yep, you guessed it. They've got you covered there too. But that's not all they can do. So today, Belay is actually offering a free download of 25 things that you can delegate to a social media strategist. You may not even know all the things that can be delegated.

And there's a lot of fear around delegation. Is it going to work right? Are they going to say it the right way? hey, they've taken all that into consideration. And in this free guide, they're going to teach you what you should be delegating in exactly how to do it. So that you can get back to doing what you love the most, which is running and growing your business. To get this free resource, just text the word belay to 3196. You get this free resource today.

That's B-E-L-A-Y keyword belay to 3196. Check it out. We've seen on the consumer side, really, both sides of that coin. here recently with the whole pandemic that we've just gone through. Our founder and CEO, Dave Ramsey, does a radio show for three hours every single day on personal finance. He's been doing it for the past 27 years, I think, now is what it is. Every day for three hours. That is an amazing talent. I mean, I just can't imagine. Yeah, he's unreal. It takes me like 10 years to come up with three hours worth stuff to say, and he does it every day. But all that to say, it was crazy just recently because he has been

pounding his fist on the desk for 25 years telling people you need to save up $1,000 in an emergency fund and you need to be out of debt because someday something unexpected is going to happen and you need to be ready. You need to be ready. You need to be ready. And in that moment, he was literally selling preparedness is what he was selling to people. But now this pandemic is happening and we're coinciding in the marketplace two types of customers. We're coinciding the people that are coming to us And they're saying, thank God, I listened to you. I was out of debt. I had $1,000 in my emergency fund or even three to six months in my emergency fund.

I was ready for this. I got laid off. I got furloughed. I wasn't able to work. But I'm okay. We're okay. And then we're running into other people. They didn't think upstream.

And so essentially they're saying like, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I will never go back here again. And they're putting out that fire that is this experience. And of course, we hate that for the. those people and we want to be able to serve them and help them get that back on track. But it's crazy to see that dichotomy of people that were prepared and thinking upstream and the people that weren't. So I'd like to know, is there something different in the wiring of people or in the personality

type of people or even in the skill set of people that start to actually think upstream and take upstream action, Dan? There may well be a difference. I could certainly believe that there are people who are more natural upstream. thinkers or system thinkers than other. But I think what's true of everyone is, I remember I was talking to this guy named Steven Speer, who's an MIT lecturer and a systems thinker and consultant. And he said, every system's improvement starts with an insufferable frustration. And I thought that was so powerful. You know, back to the nurse study, it's like the eighth time an anklet falls off a baby,

she's going to be like, by God, come hell or high water, we're going to solve this because I'm tired of looking around for the anklets. For those of you listening who do run a business or help to run a business, I would be keeping your eye out for those things that are just such a recurring irritant that you're tired of it. You know, like those people calling into the show. Like you said, you've just reached a point where you're fed up, you're tired of treading water, and you're ready to do something.

That's the moment where you head upstream. And I think sometimes you can use, in certain kinds of businesses, you can use data to help you navigate that. Like I heard a story from a friend of mine at LinkedIn. And, you know, LinkedIn sells this subscription service to corporate recruiters. So if you want to hire people, you can use LinkedIn's platform to find the right candidates and so forth. And so years ago, they had this habit. It's an annual subscription. And so right about month 11 of someone's subscription, they would start to get really.

interested, you know, to see if you're going to renew for the next year because renewals are everything in a subscription business. And so they would send in the A team. If it looked like a customer really wasn't using it that much or was in danger of churning, they would send in the great sales team to kind of rescue the account. And my friend Dan Shapiro, who was running sales at that time, he said, I'm curious, we have several years worth of data now. Looking back across that data, let's figure out, of the customers who churned, who canceled their subscriptions, at what point in their subscription

could we have predicted that pretty reliably? And so, you know, they're thinking, well, probably month nine, month 10. They run the data. It turns out they can predict pretty well who's going to churn by week four. Four weeks into an annual subscription, they have a pretty good sense

of whether you're going to renew the next year. And so they were just fascinated by that. They're like, what's, how could you possibly know that early? And what they figured out was that people either tended to get value right away from their LinkedIn accounts or they never did. And so Dan Shapiro's aha was, hey, let's stop sending in the A team at the 11th hour. And let's take those resources and let's shift them up to the first month to give everybody a world-class onboarding solution.

So we make sure every customer who signs up has something great happen in the first month. And back to that notion of heroism, saving the day. day versus keeping the day from needing to be saved, they did the latter. And in fact, this onboarding process cut their rate of customer churn in half for a business the size of LinkedIn. I mean, that's potentially like a nine-digit windfall where probably hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake from that. And so if you're in a situation where you have data or even if you have just accumulated wisdom across customers where you can start to find patterns like that that may not be intuitive on the surface, but if you dig in a little deeper, you can say,

aha, wait a second, we could know as early as week four, who's going to stick with us and who's not. That can be a very, very powerful leverage point for upstream work. And I love that they went beyond the surface level of the data. They're not just looking at their turn rate and month over month turn rate and year over year turn rate and things like that. They're saying, okay, let's look at the user habits of these because there's a lot of companies out there and maybe this is what LinkedIn was doing previously, is they say, okay, we just need to improve training and hiring for our retention specialists. And we just need to develop our retention program. And it's like, clearly they went upstream from that. The other story that you tell in the book that I think is so

compelling with regard to this concept of data is the one about Expedia. So can you share, this is crazy. This blew my mind whenever you share this story. So share the story for our audience and then kind of detail the principle that it teaches, Dan. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up. I should have done it myself. So I realize Expedia is a big company. A lot of people listening are in companies with 10 people or 50 people or 150 people, but I'm going to promise you the same phenomenon I'm going to describe is happening in your organization. So here's the backstory. In about 2012, this guy named Ryan O'Neill at Expedia, who was in the customer experience unit, he was looking at some data and he came across a fact that absolutely flabbergasted him.

What he had discovered was that for every hundred people who book some kind of reservation on Expedia, car, a hotel, a flight, 58 of them ended up calling the call center per support on their reservation. 58 out of 100. And so that is like evidence of something didn't go according to plan, right? They should just be able to go through the website and book it all through the website, right? Yeah, I mean, imagine if you went to the gas station and you were able to swipe your card at the pump, but six times out of ten, you still had to go inside for something. That was essentially what was going on at Expedia.

And so he rallied his boss. They started digging through the data. They're like, why are people calling us so much? The number one reason people were calling was to request a copy of their itinerary. 20 million calls were placed in 2012. 20 million calls, people asking for a copy of their itinerary. And so they're all just kind of slapping their forehead in unison and Expedia. Like, how could we let this happen?

And the CEO authorized a war room. they put together a cross-functional team to kind of tick down the list of, you know, all the things that people were calling about. And the technical fixes were very simple. I mean, the reason people weren't getting a copy of their itinerary, it's not like Expedia just forgot to do that. They were sending them, but they often ended up in the spam folder or customers deleted them thinking there were a solicitation. And so they changed the way they sent the emails. They added self-service capabilities online and on the IVR. You know, press two if you're calling for a copy of your itinerary. Very soon, 20 million calls goes to effectively zero. I mean, and that's a hundred million

solution at $5 a call. But here's the moral of this story. What's interesting about this is how could a problem like this ever escalate to this scale before it got someone's attention? Right? You would think there would be a pretty loud alarm bell ringing by the time you got to like your fourth millionth call for an itinerary. And so here's the answer. At Expedia, like virtually every other company, including probably yours, if you're listening, is divided into functions. You know, you've got a marketing team at Expedia, and they're measured on how effective they are at getting people to the site. And then you've got a product team that wants to design a wonderful website experience, very smooth, intuitive, to funnel you toward a transaction. They might be measured on what percentage of visitors end up with a transaction.

Then you've got a tech team, and their job is to keep the plumbing flowing smoothly. They might be measured on things like uptime. And finally, you've got the call center, people responding to issues, and what are they measured on? How quickly they can respond and how happy the customers are with the resolution. And so on a piece by piece basis, all that tracks, all that kind of makes sense. But then you ask a question, whose job is it in this ecosystem to answer the question, How do we keep customers from calling us? And the answer is, it's nobody's job.

I mean, nobody. And it's even worse than that. No one in this whole set of functions would even be rewarded if the number of calls went down. It's just no one's job. And I think that's the key to tune into here is that so often we have designed our organizations to specialize. And the reason we do that is because it makes people. more efficient. It makes them more productive. These are good instincts. It really does work. You know, they got more and more efficient at Expedia at fielding itinerary calls, right? They were whittling it down

from three minutes to two minutes and 45 seconds to two minutes and 35 seconds, right? They were winning. But they weren't really winning because they missed the big picture. And the big picture was, why are we taking any calls? And so that's what I would encourage you to think about is, might you be organized in a way where you're trying to get more and more efficient at solving a problem that never needed to exist? Wow. Fascinating. Whenever I was reading that, I thought about here, I think it was a handful of years ago. We have an operating board here, and each of the operating board members, it's not like they're removed from the business. They are actively working on and in an area of the business. And I think it was a while back that Dave realized the organization, ran the risk and was maybe already falling susceptible to becoming very siloed and very separated because the operating board member was caring about their arena and their area. And sometimes if they weren't careful, that was at the expense of other areas in the organization. It was at that time that they

realized, like, we called the different business units. We call them divisions. And he said, and then we asked, why are we divided? Like, well, probably because we call them divisions. And so they started calling them business units. So that was one fix. But then the other change. that they made was they started paying operating board members off the P&L of the entire business. And so they started caring about their compensation was directly related to, and their incentives were directly related to the success of the entire thing. And one of the things he always talks about is he says, yes, every operating board member has responsibilities for their core area, but they are also supposed to be thinking holistically about the business. And it seems like,

what you're talking about is the type of thing we're trying to avoid where we get so siloed that we don't see these just glaring problems and it's no one's job to solve them. Are there other things that you would recommend leaders do to start solving for and creating an organization where a massive red flag issue like that can just go unseen? I think you just hit on it with that setup, which is measurement plays a huge role in all this. I mean, one of the things about upstream solutions, you know, earlier I talked about how I think all of us, given a choice, would vote for an upstream solution over a downstream one. I mean, we would rather prevent a problem rather than react to it. But it's complicated. Back to that question of the police officer, how do you prove when something does not happen? And it's not that you can't answer that question.

You certainly can. And usually the answer involves data. And so we've got to be very careful about what are we measuring? How are we going to detect when something improved? in the data. And here's the crucial twist. I have a friend Joe McCannan who works in health care. And he drew a distinction between data that's used for inspection and data that's used for learning. And data for inspection says, we are going to judge you based on your performance in the data. So it sounds like this. Heath, you know, your sales numbers are down the last quarter, down 8%. What are you going to do about it? you know, I'm being judged based on my performance in the data or maybe my cost are up 14%.

Okay, well, that's an issue. Let's do something about that. Data for learning is something very, very different. In fact, it's, I think we're also used to data for inspection in the business world. It's hard to even imagine anything else. But data for learning is more about giving people access to a fresh, hopefully real-time set of data that allows them to navigate. So back at a. Expedia, the reason Expedia got in that pickle is each of those silos was being administered by data for inspection. It was like the call center. We're watching our reps. We're going to make sure those call times are ticking down second by second, right? I'm going to watch you, Heath, and make sure you're not making too much small talk on these calls. But when they flipped it around,

they started thinking upstream about how to prevent calls from happening at all. All they really needed to equip people with was the data that they needed to track. Are we making people? progress, you know, was there one less call today than there was yesterday? And just to get out of their way, you know, that we don't need the scold standing over our shoulders saying, hey, you know, tick this down. What we really need to do is get people on the front lines who have the power to solve the problems, give them the data they need to succeed and just remove obstacles. And so I came away from all the research I did for this book, really with an appreciation for the double-edged sword of data and measurement. And it forces us to admit, number one, there's almost no hope that we're

going to succeed upstream without good data and good measurement. On the other hand, if we pick the wrong measurements, we doom ourselves. You know, one of the things I write about in the book is CompStat, the database system that was used in New York City to reduce crime. And probably a lot of people listening have read about this somewhere it's been going on for decades and the instinct initially was was very very strong the idea was basically we are going to start using data to inform how we allocate our police resources so we're going to break the city down into a grid uh i mean literally down almost to the block by block level we're going to map out patterns of crime if it looked like there been a rash of burglaries and Neighborhood X, we're going to devote more police to Neighborhood

X, just basic strategy and prioritization. But then they took it one step further. That part is a good story so far, but then comes the data for inspection. Now it's, you know, every precinct commander is going to be judged based on their ability to reduce the rate of crime in their district. And that may sound innocent at first, but you should be wary that every time we get into data for inspection mode, part and parcel with that is squarely behavior is going to come out somewhere. I mean, almost every time. If we're going to punish people or reward people based on how they do against certain metrics, they are going to do everything in their power to bend those metrics in their favor. And sometimes that will just be about stretching the rules a little bit. And sometimes, as we've

seen with places like Wells Fargo, it will just create a massive fraud where people were beat over the head so hard to hit certain metrics that they don't mind breaking the rules to get there. Anyway, back to New York. What happened was, as the crime rate went down year over year, it became harder and harder to budge those numbers downward. I mean, they did a fantastic job reducing the crime rate, but then you start to see things like downgrading, which is where, you know, police officers may have responded to a rape situation. One example that I read about a couple of officers encountered a rape victim and one of the officers found that their supervisor was trying to code that as sexual assault rather than rape because rape would count against them

in the worst way when it came to the data that they were being measured on versus sexual assault was a lesser crime it wouldn't count against them as much and so you know your jaw drops when you hear this stuff and you say guy what what an outrage you know but as leaders As creators of measurement systems, that's on our shoulders, at least partly. If you set up the wrong system of carrots and sticks, you can't object when your employees enthusiastically or over enthusiastically embrace them. And so I think we've got to be super, super careful about measurement, and especially, you know, to trace back to your original question, especially we've got to be thoughtful that they don't just exist in a siloed world, that the measures are not just for your little team of three, that the measures are not just for your little team of three, that the measures. measures have to correspond to some macro component, whether it's the organization as a whole or the customer life cycle or something broader than an individual group.

You can know that there's maybe a systemic problem, and you can be aware of that and that you're putting out fires, and those fires are not just the result of fires, they're results of a systemic problem, but you just look at changing a system, and it's like, well, that is huge. I don't know even where to begin. Like where do I even start to change that? What are your thoughts in just getting started, Dan? Let me throw a quote in the mix here from a guy named Paul Bataldon who said, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

And I hope that's the kind of thing that will stick in your brain. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. So if you find consistently you're having a pattern of customer complaint, you've got to trace that back and say, we have designed a system that yields this pattern of customer complaint. How can we alter that system? I mean, even as parents, if you have a pattern of every night you have fights with your kids at bedtime, that's a consistent result.

Then you have to look at yourself and say, we have designed a system that yields arguments at bedtimes. What can we do to alter the system? Because you cannot expect different results to manifest when you've wired your system that way. So the question that you're posing is, once you know you've got a systemic problem, What in the world do you do? And I think the best instinct we have is to get proximate to the problem. Like one of the case studies in the book was actually about the crime wave in Chicago or the perpetual crime waves in Chicago. And there were some academics at a new institution called the University of Chicago Crime Lab that were interested in and helping to bring an evidence base to public policy to reduce crime.

and there had been a wave of violence among young men in Chicago right around the time they were founding the Institute. And so they were looking into it. And they said that the conventional wisdom at that time was all this homicide was the result of gang activity, you know, gangs jockeying for power and, you know, stuff that might have come out of the TV show, The Wire. But the academics just wanted to check themselves. I mean, they didn't have much personal experience with gangs or homicide or inner city challenges. And so they said, we need to learn something about this and make sure our intuition is right. And so they made a deal with the medical examiner to look over the last 100 cases of young men who had been killed by homicide. And they poured over them.

They considered them from every angle to try to figure out what's at stake here and where could we potentially intervene. And they said the big surprise was, even though there were some homicides related to gang activity, what was far. more common was a different pattern. It looked more like this. Two groups of young people had a confrontation in the street and a boy from one group accused a boy from the other group of stealing his bike. And so the argument escalated. And the guy who'd been accused of stealing the bike turned his back and started to walk away. But the person who had accused him found that disrespectful pulled out a gun and shot him in the back. And that was what they saw again and again in the data, not gang activity. But

stupid stuff that teenage boys fight about all over the world that inexplicably escalated into gunfights and homicide. And so this guy named Harold Pollack, who was one of the academics, he said, you know, at University of Chicago, we have to have equations. And so our equation coming out of this work was young men plus guns, plus often alcohol, plus impulsivity, equals homicide. And so if you think about that, that is basically an equation of leverage points in a system. You could imagine, I mean, it's hard to do much about the fact that they're young men, so that may be one that's out of reach. You could imagine interventions to try to keep guns out of their hands. You could imagine interventions to try to keep alcohol out of their hands. What they chose was, they said, what about this quality of impulsivity? You know, might we be able to do something about that? And in fact,

I won't go into the whole story now, but in the book, there's a long story about the program they found called becoming a man, which indeed did intervene and reduce impulsivity among teenagers who went through the program. It cut violent crime rates by half for people just by teaching them just to linger for a second, to think before escalating, to try to instill a little bit of patience. And I think the moral of that story, none of us listening or me talking right now are dealing with how to reduce, homicide, but the instinct to get closer to the problem, to begin with a study as granular as you can get, the last 100 customers who canceled their subscription, study them, the last 10 employees who left that you wish who would have stayed, go back over those records, maybe do a post-mortem with them. What we're trying to figure out is what fueled the problem, what are the possible intervention points like that equation from Chicago, and which one of the, of the, those points of leverage, do we think that we could affect? And that's the seed of upstream action.

I love that. Are you familiar with the game Spike Bowl? No. Okay. It's a great game. It's a killer game. You should check it out some time. We just had the founder of that company on this program recently. They're on a mission to try and create the next great American sport. That's what they're out to do right now, which is just awesome, and it's exploding. Like, I think they went from being, they made a million in revenue their first year, and I think that was in 20, maybe 2013, and they're now a $21 million organization. Just absolutely explosive growth with this game. They've blown up. What is Spike Ball? I love the name. Sounds promising. If you ever seen people in a park, it's four people around a round net, and they sand it in a circle, and you hit this ball,

kind of volleyball style, into this net. It's killer. It's an absolute blast. But all that to say, I was thinking about what you were just talking about, because one of the things that he said, they were struggling as a company because he was marketing to volleyball players thinking that they would love it. And he was doing paperclip marketing, paperclip marketing. And he looked at the data. He said they're visiting our website. Traffic is great. Conversions are horrible.

So he took it to a volleyball court and they played it and they hated it. So then he said, okay, well, let's go look at the people that actually are buying. And he literally, as the CEO of the company, just started emailing everyone that was buying sets from his site. And he found out that a bunch of them were part of this organization. organization called Young Life, and then he just started sending sets to young life groups all over the country, and that's when it became viral and it blew up. So I say that to say, is that an example of swimming upstream, not just to solve for a problem, but can you actually swim upstream to amplify things that are going well? I think absolutely. And in fact, my brother, Chip and I wrote a

series of books before Upstream, one of which was Switch, which is a book about change. And one of the, what I think is one of the most important concepts from that book is the idea of studying bright spots, which is to say, in times of change, it's really important not just to celebrate successes, but to obsess about them. And so what you just described, in essence, is the mirror image of the Chicago story. The Chicago story was about getting really close and studying problems, you know, the medical examiner reports and seeing what you can distill from that. And you just described the opposite situation of studying successes. Who is it exactly that's passionate about our product and why? Rather than just celebrating hitting the sales numbers, ask yourself, why are people attracted to

this game? What brings them in? What do they have in common? And how can we find more people like that? And so I think it's a parallel discipline. It's really interesting because it's almost like this paradox. We get this idea that if we want to think strategically about, our business. We need to go to a cabin in the woods for two weeks and just be by ourselves and blue sky and just make sure the cabin's covered with whiteboards and just dream about what the future could be. And I think there is a level of that where we do need to have that bird's eye view and think about the big picture and think holistically. But at the same time, what you're saying is that you also need to have this like intimate proximity with the things that are actually going on in

the organization. My money is much more on the latter than the former. Really? Yeah. I mean, certainly five parts getting closer to one part, you know, whiteboard, fancy thinking. And the other thing I would add to it that I haven't really talked about at all is one consistent theme of upstream success is integrating different perspectives. We can point back to the Expedia story, right, that if you ask how many people does it take to service a customer request for an itinerary, it takes one person, right? It takes the call center rep. They can do it by themselves.

If you ask, how many people does it take to prevent a customer from ever needing to call, that's a much more integrated effort. You know, you need people from marketing. You need people from product. You need people from tech. You need people from the call center working together. That different people kind of have different lenses on the problem and different facets of accountability, if you will.

The two kind of evergreen principles, I think, when you're reaching that moment of insufferable frustration. You say, by God, I'm tired of dealing with this problem. Two instincts are, number one, get closer to the problem, really immerse yourself in it. And number two, start stitching together people who have different pieces of the puzzle, people who see that problem from different perspectives. And I think you're almost bound to get smarter about how to prevent it as a result of that. Are there ways or practices or habits that people can establish to not just think in terms of the instant solution, but to start thinking in terms of the systemized solution, how do we start rewiring our brain to not just think about solving the one-off problem and start thinking about

like, how do we protect this and create a sustainable system? I think some of that may happen organically, because I think, you know, back to the safety huddle idea, it's like you may start a safety huddle in response to a problem. You know, and in fact, I think it's probably now. And that a lot of upstream work starts with the crisis. You know, you experience something that is just unacceptable and you say that that can't happen anymore. And so you start looking for something corrective. And so maybe in a health system, they have a terrible patient accident. Someone's killed inadvertently and that sparks the safety huddles. And so they may start the safety huddles in response to one problem or one particular kind of problem. But I think what happens very quickly

is people like to be in that mode. The thing about upstream work is it's kind of like, like a detective story. You know, it's like, hey, we keep having this problem with baby anklets falling off. Like, what in the world is going on there? Are we just putting them on too loose? Well, no, that can't be it because I did it myself the other day and it was, it was on tight. It takes detective style insights to figure out exactly what's going on and how you can tweak the system to prevent them. And I think that kind of work is addictive in a wonderfully positive way. And so I think once your team has had a taste of escaping the tunnel and seeing how it pays off where they literally no longer have to deal with the

problem that they'd been dealing with for months or years. I mean, that is the taste of victory that keeps people coming back and doing more upstream work. Man, with regard to the whole pandemic situation, I think we've all seen that quote posted and talked about a lot, that whole idea that crisis doesn't create character, it reveals it. And And we've seen that true organizationally is that there's a lot of organizations that this crisis revealed a lot of the deposits that they had made that were really, really good. And their team is okay. Their culture is okay. But then there's also businesses, and some of them are even really great businesses, that this crisis has revealed a lot of things and uncovered a lot of things and exposed a lot of things that they didn't see before.

And so they're now saying like, okay, I've got this host of things that we need to solve for. is there a method that you advocate for prioritizing the things that you're going to solve for? How do you decide where to start and what to start with first, Dan? It's like the old Warren Buffett quote. Only when the tide goes out, do you see who's swimming naked? That's right. A situation like the one we're going through has really revealed a lot of difference. And I think to a large extent, I think you can judge the quality of leadership by how they've handled

this crisis and how would they prepared for something like this? Like I read a fascinating article by Charles Fisherman in the Atlantic and he was asking, why has the internet basically held up during this mess where traffic just spiked like crazy out of the blue? Why didn't it break? And so he dug into it and come to find out that people like AT&T were doing pandemic simulations last year in 2019 to prepare for something exactly like this. And you say, aha, well, there's an explanation for why the internet didn't break. They looked ahead and they, yeah. Why wasn't our federal government doing pandemic simulations? What the heck? Amen. Amen. What is going on? What the heck? Yeah. We should put AT&T in charge, apparently. And you look at, as a smaller example, there's a software company called

Trello that had considered an important value for its employees to be able to work remotely. which is something that would be a valuable skill for a variety of reasons, not just pandemics, but you can imagine a lot of reasons why you would have to suddenly start working remotely. And so they had made it an organizational routine where if they had a meeting at Trello, a staff meeting, whatever, and someone in the meeting had to join remotely, everybody logged on. Even if they were all sitting across the conference table, they still fired up Zoom on their laptops just as a way of training them, right,

of building those muscles of remote work. And I think stories like that are really, really powerful. And I think as a leader, you know, having suffered through this situation now for several months, I hope one thing that comes out of this is a permanent appreciation for the importance of preparing for next years and next month's problems rather than just today's. And I don't know whether it's a burden or a privilege, but as the leader of a business, you're really the only one who has to think about next month and next year's problems. There are a lot of people working for you that their first demand is to solve today's problems,

and that's what you expect to them. But if there's anyone's shoulders on which rest, you know, upstream work, it's going to be yours. And so be thinking about, you know, is there a discipline? Is there a habit that you can build to force yourself, if need be, to look into the future and be thinking about how to see around corners and how to prepare for things. I love that you use that phrase, force yourself, because a lot of what you're advocating for,

I mean, it is hard work, it's challenging work, it's ambiguous work for a lot of people. It's out of their comfort zone and out of their strength zone. And then you add on top of all of those great things that a lot of times it can be very, very thankless work as well. And that people don't. It's a great recipe, isn't it? Yeah, it's like, oh, dang, I'm a hard.

to go do this thing. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah, that maybe should just be the subtitle of the book, is the recipe for thankless, hard, uncomfortable work. All that to say. But let me flip that around. Let me tell you the flip side, because I think all that is true. But here's the other side of the story. And that is, I think we've all heard that quote, you know, leave the world a little bit better than you found it. Or leave your enterprise a little bit better than you found it. Leave your team a little bit better than you encountered them. the only way to do that is upstream work. That's the only way. You know, we never fish enough kids out of the river to make the population of kids permanently healthier.

It's only by going upstream and addressing the problems that led them to be drowning in the river that we make things better. And so it's a hard slog, yes, I won't disguise that. I won't dance around it. But that is the road to improvement. And presumably that's what we all care about. Man, you beat me to the punch. That was my question. and why is it all worth it? And you just crushed it. So thank you so much. Y'all, if you've read any of Dan

and Chips Works before, you know that incredible stories, incredible research, extremely well-written, and so original and powerful and practical. And this book, Upstream, is no exception. I absolutely recommend it. Dan, we're so grateful for your time. We're so grateful that you ran with that idea that you started with back in 2009. You stuck with it. And we're now keeping kids. out of the river because of your research and your work. So thanks so much for sharing it with our audience today, Dan. Thank you. It's a fun conversation. Gosh, there were two reasons why I got so beyond excited that we were going to have Dan Heath on the podcast. The first is that I know he brings such a level of intentionality and forethought to everything he writes and everything he speaks about.

And this whole idea of upstream thinking absolutely exemplifies it. It is an opportunity for you as a business, but it's also kind of an obligation so that you and your team aren't just focusing on the urgent or the immediate, but you're actually putting your eye and putting your focus on the things that are important to move the business forward. And there's a second reason why I was excited, and that's because Dan is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. Dan, hookum horns, the eyes of Texas are upon you. Thanks for being on the podcast. And here's the deal. We believe in that idea of upstream thinking. It's something that before we even heard that phrase, we were engaging in here and coaching business owners to engage in because we know that it's what actually

helps you as a leader get some bandwidth and get some margin. And so we create a resource called the critical thinking cheat sheet that will help ask you the questions to get to the root causes, to get to the true answers of what's behind the challenges you're facing as a business. We call the resource the critical thinking cheat sheet and it's completely free. So if you want to get that cheat sheet, text the word critical to 33444. Again, that's the word critical to 33444 or just click the length that's in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25, Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the length that's in the show notes.

And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm Alex Judd. and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team. Thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like Borrowed Future. Not so fun fact.

America has a $1.6 trillion student loan crisis, and it's out of control. I'm George Camel, host of the Borrowed Future podcast, where we uncover the underbelly of the student loan industry and show you what you can do about it. It'll inspire you to see that it is possible. to avoid student loans and graduate college debt-free. Listen to borrowed future wherever you listen to podcasts.