EntreLeadership - The Keys to Starting and Adapting Your Product with Marie Forleo

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Join us as our host, George Kamel, talks to Marie Forleo. She’s a CEO, entrepreneur, speaker, bestselling author, creator of MarieTV and host of The Marie Forleo Podcast. She shares how to overcome your inner critic, launch before you’re ready, and make adjustments along the way. Later in the episode, George chats with Brendan Wovchko, the chief technology officer of Ramsey Solutions, about how to use iteration as a strategy to deliver value early so your customers get the help they need.   You’ll learn: How to deal with imposter syndrome as a leader The low-risk way to launch something new The key to continual product improvement What iteration actually looks like   Sign up for The EntreLeadership Podcast Takeaways—a weekly email where you’ll get three tangible takeaways and a tactical action step related to each week’s episode: https://bit.ly/podcast-takeaways   Support our sponsors: BELAY: https://bit.ly/33SwBlO Hite Digital: https://bit.ly/HiteDigital NetSuite: https://bit.ly/NetSuiteEntre Exodus 90: https://bit.ly/Exodus90Entre Kyro Digital: https://bit.ly/KyroDigital   Links mentioned in the episode: The EntreLeadership Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheEntreLeadershipPodcast Marie Forleo’s website: https://bit.ly/3ANDamk The Marie Forleo Podcast: https://apple.co/3okhnOa MarieTV on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3gk2QgZ EveryDollar: https://bit.ly/3rkV1hg EntreLeadership Elite: https://bit.ly/30CezmJ Take the New Product Assessment: https://bit.ly/342OHCt Schedule a call with Tim, our producer: https://bit.ly/3bJOSmi   Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipSummit EntreLeadership Master Series: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipMasterSeries   Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: Elite: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipElite Advisory Groups: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipAdvisoryGroups Executive Coaching: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipExecutiveCoaching Workshops: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipWorkshops Weekly Report Tool: https://bit.ly/WeeklyReportTool   Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our app. Download the Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you want to grow yourself, your team, and your profits, you've got to evolve and launch new ways of solving your customer's problems. But it can be paralyzing to try to get it perfect before it goes into the world. And so you wait, and you wait, and you wait, trying to get it just right. But is that the best strategy to serve your customers? From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host George Camel, and today's episode is all of the podcast. about how to start something before you're ready and how to iterate. Our guest today is Marie Forleo.

She's a CEO, entrepreneur, speaker, best-selling author, creator of Marie TV, and host of the Marie Forleo podcast. We'll talk about how to overcome your inner critic, launch before you're ready, and make adjustments along the way. In our second conversation, I talk with Ramsey leader, Brendan Wojko, about what iteration really means and how to use it effectively with your team. Up first, my conversation with Marie Forleo. Marie, it's so great to have you on the Entree Leadership Podcast. How are you?

Oh, I'm fantastic. It's an honor to be with you. Well, we are big fans of yours here at Ramsey Solutions. And for those you that may not be familiar with your journey, give us a little bit of backstory from where you were and what you're doing today. Gosh, so, you know, I remember starting off. My first job was actually on Wall Street way back in the day. And I discovered very, very quickly that I wasn't necessarily built to be behind a desk or to work for anyone else. And I know that there's probably so many listeners that can relate to that. And I tried really hard to be a good employee. I remember working at Condi and Ask Publications, big magazine house. And I was in ad sales for a while. And I was like, oh, maybe this is my purpose

and this is where I meant to be. And after about six months, I kept hearing this little voice like, no, this isn't it. The same voice that I heard on Wall Street that made me quit. And then I, you know, went over to the editorial side of another magazine. I said, oh, maybe this is the right thing. This is really tapping into both my business sense and my creativity. And after about six months being there, I just heard that same still voice again that says, this isn't who you are, Marie, this isn't what you're meant to do or what you're supposed to do in the world. And at that point, George, I remember just feeling broken. I was like, what is wrong with me? I have such a strong work ethic. I want to make a difference in the world. I'm not afraid of hard work, but I can't seem to hold down a

job because my soul seems to be calling me for something greater, but I don't know what that greater thing is. It was just a blank open spot. And there was one day when I was on the end, internet, probably when I shouldn't have been. This is about 1999, to put it in context. And I stumbled across an article at the time that was about a new profession called coaching. And when I read about this new profession where you could strategize and support people in reaching their goals and there was both a business focus and a personal focus, I got to tell you, George, something in my heart lit up like a Christmas tree. And I had the one side of my brain that was like, you are 23 years old. who the heck in their right mind is going to hire a 23-year-old life coach? You haven't even lived life yet.

You've got piles of debt. You keep quitting jobs. This is nuts. And then the other side, the deeper, still small voice said, you got to pursue this. There's something in this for you. Trust it. And thankfully, I had enough wisdom somewhere to trust that voice. And I signed up for a three-year coach training program, which was like the first of its kind back then. And I continued to work at the magazines during the day. Fast forward, probably that's six months, I was still in my coach training and I got a very pivotal call from the HR department. They wanted to offer me a pretty big promotion to go work at Vogue, arguably one of the top fashion magazines in the world. And so I came to this fork in the road. It's like, am I going to stay on the

steady paycheck, health benefits, people understand what you do, it's respectable path? Or am I going to quit and start my own life coaching business, which sounded ridiculous and so terrifying. And I had no idea how to do any of that, nor did I have resources or no, and nothing, but it felt right. And so I wound up quitting that job. I went back to bartending and waiting tables and being an assistant and cleaning people's toilets and doing anything that I needed to do in order to keep a roof over my head and food on the table while I figured out how to build a coaching practice during the day. And so that was over 20 years ago. And so over the course of those 20 years, I have learned so much about entrepreneurship and digital marketing

and what it takes to run a sustainable, purpose-driven, modern business through both things that I've done right and lots of things that I've done wrong. And every part of the journey has been amazing. And I feel so blessed over these past two decades to have helped at this point almost 70,000 entrepreneurs start and grow their own businesses through our content and through our programs and things like that. So I've had a real fantastic opportunity to not only support people, but also have great perspective on how things have changed over the past two decades,

kind of where we're going, what things are consistent, what things are different. It's just really been a fantastic journey. Wow. Well, I'm grateful that you listen to that small voice. The world is better for it and your success is well deserved. I'm sure a lot of people say, hey, you're a 20-year overnight success, Marie. It just took 20 years. It is impressive. You were just so consistent along this journey.

And I want to talk about one specific part of this, which is starting before you're ready. And it seems like you dealt with this, especially in the beginning of this kind of imposter syndrome. And I'm sure a lot of business owners, leaders listening are going, I don't know that I'm qualified to be the leader, that I'm supposed to be running the business. It may have been handed down through family,

and they're just feeling this. The team is looking up to me to make the calls. And I don't feel like I'm ready. I don't feel like I'm positioned to lead this thing. how did you initially deal with that piece when you went, I'm 23, who's going to want advice for me as a life coach? Oh, yeah. I mean, I was so weighed down with that self-doubt and that insecurity for many, many years. So one of the ways that I navigated it initially was that I threw myself into doing my best to master the craft of what I did. And I tried my best to

focus on helping people get results. So I realized that in any given moment, I was either entertaining that conversation in my mind that I don't know enough, I'm too young, who the heck's going to listen to me, why should they, you know, I'm a fraud, all of those different conversations, those inner dialogues that think all of us can have regardless of our age. And I would catch it and then shift my attention back to being engaged in the act of either providing the service, right? So providing value to my clients or learning and training and actually becoming better. And I know it sounds maybe so simple, but it is transformative. If you can catch that inner monologue, if you can catch when you've disengaged and you're being sucked down into a tsunami of self-doubt and just pause, not make yourself wrong, but re-engage in the moment and something proactive you can do to either become better at your craft or listen to your customers or clients or your team and actually receive what they're saying to you, you will naturally build a habit of being an engager, an executor, and someone who's always on the learning.

path rather than being someone who's so stuck and mired and self-doubt that essentially you're habituating yourself to being mediocre. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, it's when you focus on yourself and this imposter syndrome, you're not focused on growing and serving. And when you focus on those things, that part dissipates away. That is, that's a great reminder for all of us. Yeah. And I think over time, too, having just the humility to know that nobody knows at all. But I think what most people are looking for, whether it is your clients or your customers or your team, is they want someone who's really listening to them. They want to feel seen and heard and respected and understood. And those are the capabilities that all of us are born with. But oftentimes,

when we're nervous because we're insecure, we can want to prove ourselves, right? And want to control everything and want to make ourselves look smarter than we are or more experienced than are. When taking a more humble yet strengthful position of listening, of acknowledging people, of mirroring back what it is they've said or how they feel, creates this level of connection and trust that transcends anything that you could posture up.

And so I don't think people have to fake it until they make it. I think they have to get comfortable in the unknown, get comfortable seated in a space of both humility and a desire to connect, and to have faith that if you stay in that position, you will naturally learn, you will naturally evolve. And if you keep challenging yourself to say, okay, well, great, here's the situation. What might I want to do different next time? Or is there someone out there that has expertise that I can go link up with, read their book, maybe go to some type of workshop or training,

or just upskill so that I can become more of the leader that I know I can be? And it's not going to happen in an instant. It's going to be a process over time. and for me, you know, 20 years, I hope I never stop learning. I consider myself a lifelong student. But I think if we can release the pressure of thinking that we have to know it all, or that as leaders that we have to have all the answers, that was probably a big lesson for me was in the beginning feeling as though, well, no one's going to do it as good as I can.

So I have to retain all of the control and I have to do everything. And if I don't do everything right, you know, everything's going to fall apart. And thankfully over time, one of the best things that I've done as a leader is consistently work to surround myself with people that have greater expertise than me, different and greater, so that where I know that I'm dangerously good, I can step up and say, hey, these are my strengths. I'm very clear on this is how we should proceed based on X, Y, and Z. But what do you think about this area? Because that's actually your genius zone.

And I want to rely on you, your wisdom, your experience, your instincts to then help us get to where the vision is, where we want to go. So many mic drop moments, right? We could end the podcast right here, and it would have been a success. Yeah, delegation is so key as you grow in leadership and really focus on the things that only you can do. And you've done that really well. So I want to talk about something recently that you maybe started before you didn't feel like it was quite ready to launch. I mean, you are so poised and obviously 20 years of experience.

You've gotten a lot better at this over time. But it still happens even today. What's an example of that for you? Well, I think there's two really. This was maybe at the end of 2020, and I think, you know, the past couple of years has been really tumultuous, right, for most people in different ways. And I remember we had to make a pretty sizable change in one of our key departments, which was customer experience. And there was just a bunch of personnel changes happening at a very critical time. And I remember going, okay, I have an idea for how we're going to kind of restructure and resolve things.

And it was somewhat risky. but there was a time deadline where I'm like, we've got to make this move now. And part of me didn't feel ready to sign a new contract to try something completely different than what we had done in the business for like the past, you know, 12, 13 years. But I had faith that, you know what, this is a new time and we're going to experiment. And, you know, when you have faith in your ability to be nimble and to say, you know, if it doesn't work out perfectly, that's okay. We're going to learn something.

we're going to take that understanding and that knowledge, and then we're going to keep going and do something different and better. And we're just not going to let any challenge take us down. And it was scary and it was uncomfortable, and it turned out to be amazing. And you know what? It wasn't a straight line of like, boom, we made this decision to kind of completely transform a department and it was smooth sailing. No, there was some bumps, but it was exciting.

And it was also an opportunity to do things in a more streamlined way, to create kind of a new culture in a certain department of our business. And it was phenomenal. And it took all of us linking arms and saying, okay, we don't know what we're doing in this department in this new way, but we're going to figure it out together. And we did that. And I can say that about a year and a half later, it was probably one of the best things that could have happened, even though it showed up in a way that was uncomfortable.

It showed up in one of those, oh, crap kind of moments, right, of like what precipitated that change. So that's one example. I'd say another example. I don't know if this one, I didn't quite feel ready because, again, I do have this 20-year experience, but we created a new program last year that I was really excited about getting into. It's something called Time Genius. And I just remember that there were aspects of our member area or there were certain pieces of the technology, quite frankly, that weren't perfect yet. And I said, that's okay. This is version one. I feel so confident in the core offering

and in how we take care of our customers that, you know what, if there's a glitch here or a glitch there, we'll address it, it'll be okay. And it's an opportunity for us to learn and an opportunity for us to serve right now. Rather than putting it off for three months or six months, and you know this, right? You might never get everything totally lined up. But in those three months or six months, you're not making a difference to people. You're not giving yourself or your team an opportunity to actually road test whatever this new product or service. and do it in partnership with your client base or your customer base. And of course there's nuance here.

You don't want to put out a version one of something that is going to destroy your reputation or create extraordinary frustration for your clients or customers, right? We understand that. But I think all of us can do a better job at understanding, you know what? This is actually really good. This is really good. And it's okay if every single thing isn't perfect right now because we'll get it there after we iterate and we'll do it in partnership with the people.

people that we serve. Yeah, that's some great stories there. And I know a lot of our entree leaders, you know, they have a high standard for excellence. And that can be one of the most difficult things, because if you wait until it's perfect, you're going to be waiting a long time and your customers are never going to get served. So how do you, what is some of the inner dialogue that you experience when there's something new on the horizon? And there could be a lot of time poured into this, money that could be lost resources, people hired. How do you deal with the inner dialogue and move past that into a launch, maybe before it's perfect? Well, I think it's about as much as possible. How can you start or test drive something on a somewhat small scale? So I'll give you the example from that program I was telling about. You know, in our business, one of the blessings of our business is that we've had amazing affiliate partners over the years. You know, I know that I can do only as good of a job that I can do sharing our message and how we can help people. But there's other people who have incredible audiences that may also benefit from what we do. So we've got great partnerships all around.

And with this new program, I was like, no, we are not going to have a whole bunch of people talking about this when it's version 1.0. We want to do it as small as possible with the people who have been our past customers so they know the level of customer experience they're going to get. They know the quality of our training programs. So my inner dialogue is like, look, let's start this as small as possible. Let's test ride it. Let's deliver outstandingly for our customers and clients. and when we get the feedback, if we need to tweak and adjust things before we go bigger, that's what we'll do. So for everyone listening, if there is a version of your product or your service, whether you want to call it a beta version or just a small VIP first looks opportunity,

is there a way for you to test drive this new product or service with a smaller group of your clients so you can get that feedback, you can work out the kinks, then you can roll it out in a bigger way. Put ad spend behind it, whether it's affiliate partners or anything that you want to do to kind of take it to that next promotional level. Yeah. You know, this is something we use at Ramsey Solutions, and we stole it from Jim Collins' concept

of musket balls versus cannonballs, where you have this musket ball approach where you're not going to put all of the team's resources and energy. You're going to do a little test, and then you're going to do a little test, and you're going to get some feedback and listen to the customers and make some tweaks before you launch that cannonball

with all the might you have. And so that's a great reminder that it doesn't have to be this big, scary launch where you're not sure if it's going to work. You know it's going to work because you've tested it over time. Starting small doesn't mean thinking small. Oftentimes, especially for small business owners, it is the wiseness way to dip your toe in the water, to put something in the field and to get that confirmation and that feedback and you can build on the momentum. Yeah.

So describe your process. Let's say you're going to start something new, a new product offering. Where do you start? Where is your thinking process start? How does the team get involved in that? and how do you kind of execute on it? So for me, it's usually instinctual. So I like to pay very close attention,

not only to what's happening in my life and in the world around me, but listening to our clients and our customers through our comments, social media, any place where I can really hear and listen to what's up, what people are struggling with, and see where we can have an opportunity to make a difference. Next, once I've proposed a little bit of a hypothesis

in my own mind of what I think we can do and how we can serve, I like to put out a survey and get the real language, the thoughts, the feelings, the fears, the dreams, the aspirations of the folks who we hope to serve around this particular problem or topic area. Pick up the phone, email them, talk to them, listen to hear what it is even underneath their surface level frustrations. Once we have all that data, once we have that understanding, then I kind of go into my creative cave and I take all of that survey data, I take all of my own understanding and wisdom. And if there's any different holes,

if I need to go find some science or some research, if there's anything where I need to kind of fill in to create a solution that I know is not only going to be extraordinarily effective, but results-based. That's what I'm going to do. And sometimes, you know, that cave will take me a few months. Sometimes it takes me a year or more if it's a book. But that's my process. That's awesome. And it sounds like your tribe loves to give you feedback. You've created this relationship and trust where they're excited to talk to you about their problems because they're excited about the solution that you could offer them. Is that the case? Most people, you know, They want to feel heard, right?

It goes back to where we were at the beginning. They want to feel seen and heard and acknowledge and respected. And when you ask people questions and you ask them follow-up questions with empathy and compassion and you let them know they've been heard and they're understood, folks are often really happy to tell you about what their pain points are. And they're also happy to tell you what their dream solutions can be. And that's where as entrepreneurs we get to be creative and say, okay, understanding the problem, understanding what they would love, where can I step in and be a bridge, either to

provide that dream solution right off the bat or to get them closer to it so that they can get on the path where they're going to have the results that they desire. As you're collecting all this feedback, there's got to be some critics along the way. There's got to be people who are just not for it. They hate it. It's crappy. The V1 didn't work for them. They're upset.

How do you deal with those critics and how do you know which ones to listen to and where there's truth? It's a great question. So part of what I think every business owner has to do, and we strive to do, and we strive to do this and I practice all the time. It is a continual practice, is to get very, very clear on who something is for and who it is not for. So if there's too many critics bleeding in, that's an indicator to me that I have not set clear enough boundaries about who this product or service is going to benefit most. And I've set my net a little bit too wide. So I think that's one of the most important things.

Now, of course, if everyone's complaining about a certain aspect, then we know we have a global problem, but I haven't seen that to be the truth most of the time. Most of the time, it's because I haven't done a good enough job at articulating exactly who this is going to work for and who should actually go to some other solution because this is not what we're providing for you. And so I think that's a depersonalized way to absorb all of the feedback and to use it to become a better business person because it's the most compassionate thing. If someone comes to you thinking that you're going to be able to help them, rather than just try and scoop up that sale, when you recognize they're not going to be happy, whether philosophically,

there's some kind of misalignment between their expectations and what you're delivering. And you can say, hey, hey, hey, we would love to be able to help you, but based on what you're sharing, we're not the best solution for you. You should go to our colleague, you know, someone down the street, something else might be better for you. We want to direct you there because we want you to be happy. Those people will often come back for other things in the future because you've built such a huge level of trust by turning away that sale. There's a lot of maturity in that posture, and I'm sure that took, you know, probably the 20 years to get to this point because a lot of people just go, well, they're just haters and I'm going to ignore them or they're going to go, you know what, there is truth there, and now I'm going to be, you know, toiling in this in my mind for a while going, well, I guess I'm a fraud. And so it sounds like you've really taken ownership, which is great leadership to say, you know what, this is on me.

this is on me to say, I haven't clearly communicated who this is for, set the right expectations, and I've got work to do. And so that takes some impressive leadership maturity to get to that point. I also think, too, it's important to say, in our world today, there's just a lot of humans that are in pain, and they're not happy no matter what. And they're just looking for an avenue to express some of their unhappiness and their pain. And so I know this is hard to do sometimes, especially, as business owners, hey, look, I take it personally because I pour my heart and my soul into everything we do. And so it can sting when people are really mean and vitriolic and it's not just critical feedback that you can actually use to get better. So I think remembering that when people are

hurt, they hurt other people. And to have that discernment to be able to kind of parse through what is actually useful feedback to you versus this person is in pain and they actually shouldn't be our customer or client, and we're going to bless them. We're going to hope that they heal, but we're also going to have our boundaries, and we're not going to let that energy toxify our team, our mission, or the people that we can't serve. Yeah. Sometimes you've got to fire the customer. That's right. That's part of it. The customer is not always right. They really are not. Good or my. A lot of the listeners said, amen. Amen. So you've launched something into the world and you're getting some feedback. What rhythms do you and your team have,

around adapting products after you put them out there? How do you make sure they're continually getting better? That's a great question. So every time that we have, so for us in our business, we have a lot of live trainings that are online. So we take people through as a cohort. So we have our mentor coaches, myself, our customer experience team. So we're all in there working people through the training,

helping them gain their skills. And so we can see real-time feedback. We also always ask for feedback after the course or the experience is done. And we pour through everything. And we start to parse things out into, again, what's like, okay, will someone, for example, be like, oh, Marie, your program B-school, can we have it be six months? And I'm like, no. Like, you have lifetime access to the program, but I'm not going to hold your hand for six

months because it wouldn't serve you and it wouldn't serve us. That's not what our offer is, right? So you kind of parse through things that are people's wish list, but that are not in alignment with your vision of how your business should go. And then there might be other items. Oh, my goodness, that's a fantastic idea. Yeah, let's get that on our roadmap. Let's put it on our project timeline and let's get that in there for the next release.

And the production may be three months or six months, depending on how big that improvement is. Or they might be ideas for a completely other program. You know, one thing that can happen, especially for a business like mine, is people want you to keep just pouring more and more and more and more in. And it can create bulk where it just overwhelms people. But if I start to see enough of a theme, I'm like, oh, this is an opportunity for a completely separate program that I'd like to go deep on to really solve this particular issue that I didn't even realize people had.

So we kind of look through all of the feedback with a fine-tooth comb and we sit on it. We don't just act on it right away, but we think about it, we process it, we talk about it with different members of the team, and then really evaluate whether or not it's a piece of feedback that we can take action on or if it's an opportunity to refer out. to other people who might solve this because it's not in our wheelhouse. We wouldn't be the best provider of that particular solution or service. Yeah, it's a great reminder that you don't need to be all things to all people. And a lot of businesses go, well, if we could do this, this and this, we could get a whole new audience and make a lot more money, but focusing on one thing and doing it

really well and knowing exactly who you're after is so important. It's the difference between the cheesecake factory menu and in and out burger. It's like we got burgers and fries or we have 90,000 options and it's overwhelming and I don't even know where to start and I just want a burger and fries. Take me to in and out. And I mean, most of us in our businesses, especially the small business owners that I've engaged with, it's like overwhelm is such a huge, prevalent, unending issue. So you have to proactively manage that on your own. I always say simplify to amplify. Simplify to amplify. When you simplify your offerings, when you simplify what you do, when you become really, really good at just a small handful of things.

things, you can go so deep. There is so much trust. The word is spread. Word of mouth marketing, one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is. That often happens, right, when you don't have 90 million things that you're trying to do. And for most small business owners, they don't want 50,000 employees, right? Or all of the kind of complications that can come with that level of complexity in a business. So I'd say, Simplify to Amplify as a mantra that you can use to hone in on kind of like the 80-20 rule. Where are 80% of your best customers coming from? Where's 80% of your best profits coming from? 80% of your joy, your impact, the emotional connection, and focus there. And it's usually 20% of your activities, your products, or your services. So it's usually a small

slice of what you're doing that produces the biggest benefit. And you can narrow in on that small slice. You're going to see a huge change in your business, your happiness, your fulfillment, and your stress levels. Yeah, staying focused. That's important on what really matters. So we started talking in the beginning about delegation. And so I want to loop back around here as we're talking about starting before you're ready and adapting along the way.

How do you know what to delegate, what not to delegate, who should this go to, who can I trust on the team? What does that process look like for you? So for me, over time, I've gotten very, very clear on what my unique gifts and abilities are. So when it comes to content creation, right? That's what I do. I'm a teacher and a writer at heart.

So those are where I should be spending the majority of my time. It's like creating the content, delivering the content, and ideating about the marketing because it's a joy for me and it's a love for me. It's a form of art. I love inspiring people to take action towards something that's good for them and good for me. Anything that falls outside of those, I know I need to delegate it to members of my team who are excellent in those areas. You asked about how do I know who we can trust with this? I think trust is earned and built over time. And with your team, it's about the same thing that we talked about

in the beginning. Starting small doesn't mean thinking small. Find a small project that is perhaps new for someone. Set them up for success, a clear deadline. What does success look like in the end? What's the outcome that you're hoping for? Who should they go to for questions in between? Do they have questions up front. How often do you want them to check in and kind of show you the milestones along the way to make sure that they're on the right path? So I think that there's a rhythm you can develop with each member of your team. And that might be a little nuance depending on their work style, the workflow of the project, you know, how long term it is. But the more you can keep things tight, small, and with a quick turnaround, I feel like that is the secret sauce to being able to

build trust up faster. You can see somebody's work. You can give them feedback. Hey, you're on the right track or this part's on the right track. This is completely not. Let's readjust here. And then this way, people feel empowered because they're getting that feedback and they're not left on their own for three weeks and then showing you something and you're like, this is totally not what we were supposed to do. So I think as leaders, we have to take responsibility for that handholding in the beginning, get the project scope down small and then really teach people what success looks like. Wow. I'm seeing a theme here and everything you're talking about, the ownership gets pointed back to the leader. And so if something goes wrong, you're very quick to say, oh, wow, I didn't do XYZ.

I didn't set the right expectation. I didn't communicate properly. I didn't train properly. Which that, I mean, that's leadership one-on-one, is taking that level of ownership. So clearly I can see why you've had so much success in your career. you're an incredible, incredible leader. As we wrap here, what advice would you give the leaders listening who they're wanting to develop and launch and evolve and grow and do all of these things before it's perfect and ready? They're saying, all right, Marie, I'm on board. I'm on board.

I don't want to wait until it's perfect, but how do I go about this process and do it the right way and make sure my team has served well? Well, I think choosing a project, some aspect of the business that you are so committed to either transforming, changing, or launching, and getting very, very clear on, what that vision is, why it's important to the company and your customers, and setting a clear timeline. Then communicating that out to your team in terms of, hey, this is what we're doing, this is where we want to go and why. And look, it doesn't have to be perfect. But here are the handful of things that are the must-havs. And here's all the stuff that are kind of been nice to

have. So if we can hit all of these by this date, great. We'll throw a party. But if we don't, we just need these five critical things or four critical things or whatever it is. If we can hit this, we're going to launch. And then it's about linking arms with your team, creating a very realistic yet aggressive project timeline and then creating enough check-in points till you get that takeoff point to see if you can do it. And I think it's also having the humility, the compassion, the understanding to know, especially in today's climate, we're dealing with a lot more volatility than we usually do. People get sick. There's a lot of things happening in our world that are far outside of everyone's control. So building in some more

buffer. I think that's one of the best things you can do as a leader. You can almost tell your team, this is our date, but you almost have another little date there to give a window for those unknowns to take you a little bit off course, but you guys can still stay back on. So many gems, Drop Marie. Thank you so much for your passion around this topic for the way that you've empowered and equipped so many entrepreneurs out there and the way you brought so much wisdom to our listeners today. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. It was a joy. Thanks so much, Marie. Lots of great advice and takeaways there. If you want to hear more from her, check out the Marie Forleo podcast or Marie TV on YouTube. She talked about how to start before you're ready and keep adapting as you release great things into the world. But how do you effectively use iteration as a strategy to deliver value early so that your customers get the help that they need? We'll have a conversation about that right after this. All right. Up next, I talked to Brendan Wochko, our chief technology officer here at Ramsey Solutions. We're going to talk about how to use iteration to test ideas and get feedback before you pour a lot of time, energy, and money into a big launch.

Here's our conversation. Brendan, great to have you on the podcast. Always great to be here. Good to be back. You are here to talk about an interesting subject, iteration. Yes. And a lot of people listening, their eyes just rolled in the back of their head, and they may be tempted to pause and go listen to something more exciting. Right.

But you've promised me we're going to make this exciting. Yes. Okay. So let's start with this. A lot of people have a definition of iteration in their head, and I want you to reframe this for everyone. What is your personal definition? Right.

So I think probably the best way to explain it is through basically a short example. But iteration as a word is one of those things that has fallen into the category of popularized words that have lost its meaning. Right. And so let me tell a little story as to what. I think iteration actually is. So if you ask the average group of people or just ask, you know, the average business person, you know, if you were to iteratively write a book, how would you do it? And I've done this bunches of times. And most people answer the question. They'll say, well, you know, I'd start by writing chapter one. Or they'd say, like, I'd write an outline of the book

or I'd put together like the table of contents, right? That's usually when people think about iteration, they think about, like, taking that first small step. The way that I think about iteratively writing a book, the last thing that you would actually do is write a book. Where you'd probably start is just by getting together for lunch with a couple people and sharing with them like what you think the riskiest assumption in the book is, right? What do you think the real hook is, the thing that'll get people's attention, right? And you might end up having to have lunch with five or six different groups of people before you like really hone that in. When you get that, like go from having a 15 minute lunch to maybe doing like an hour-long talk on

your team and see if you can hone that in. And you keep progressing with that idea where, you know, when you go from lunch with friends to doing a little talk to maybe write in a blog entry, to, you know, doing a talk maybe outside your company or, you know, or doing like a one-day workshop, every time you're kind of making it longer and more sophisticated, you keep on adding more and more ideas a little bit. But the idea is that the last thing that you actually do is pen a book. It's not about, you know, going off into the forest in a cabin and trying to pump out 17 chapters in a week, right? That's not being iterative. So the idea behind iteration is, like, how can you create value to the marketplace as fast as humanly possible? Yeah. So it's about

generating value early on versus waiting until it's ready until it's perfect. And a lot of business owners, a lot of leaders can get stuck in that quagmire of, well, it's not quite right. I don't want the customers to see this yet. It's not what I wanted it to be. How do you push pass that and launch the V1 or that we call, you know, we have a skateboard versus car metaphor that we use a lot of time here, Ramsey. How do you push through that and go, okay, I need to launch this, it's good enough for now? Yeah. Well, in my mind, and we say this a lot around here, Ramsey, which is perfection is the lowest possible standard. And that's usually the standard that most people play to. In their minds, you know, those of us who make things, you know, for me, it's,

I make software products, you know, I make apps. That's the thing I'm passionate about. But it doesn't matter if you know you make homes or you know install water heaters or you know do electrical work it doesn't matter all of us who do things or make things for a living you know kind of have that perfect picture in their head like ideally if i did my job the best what would i want it to look like and you know the hard reality is is anytime you're solving a complex problem the likelihood that in your brain you can come up with the right plan of what the exact execution of that complex problem is and and to do it perfectly the first time you swing the bat is actually really, really low. So perfection is the lowest standard. What mindset do you need to shift into? And for me, it's real simple, which is just

like find the thing that is valuable in the marketplace and meaningful to people and actually just kind of test it out. So give me an example of something that we've done this for a product here at Ramsey that you can think of. Right. You know, actually the first example is probably one that, people would be really familiar with, which is the first real big digital product that we did called Every Dollar, which is a piece of budgeting software. When we approached that problem, there's actually kind of a funny story to it. It involves Dave. And as the story is told, Dave came into the room where all the people were, you know, building the first version, the early version of Every Dollar. And he got excited and said, you know, I just talked with somebody

on the phone, and they said they think that we could have 50 million people using every dollar in the first year, right? And Dave said that for the purpose of, like, exciting everybody and motivating everybody. But what it actually did is it kind of like struck fear in everybody, like, oh, my gosh, if 50 million people are going to use this, it's got to be like unbelievably world-class, the first thing that we ever put out there. And the reality of what actually happened is everybody got so fixated on the need to make it perfect, it actually really slowed down the development of that product. So we had to self-correct

as you got to do in business a lot of times. And we took another look at the problem and just said, hey, instead of trying to build the perfect thing, let's just build the simplest thing. Let's just build a simple budget that people can use and we eventually added more onto it. But the more conventional example, the one that just happened recently, is actually inside Entree Elite, our digital product that we have for Entree leadership. One of the things that we talk about a lot as an organization is a desired future dashboard. The importance of making a goal for your team and getting everybody around it and making sure everybody's on the same page in terms of executing.

And so a digital desired future dashboard is something that we wanted to bring into our Entree Elite product. And we actually have like a whole group inside Ramsey here that talks about how we do desired future dashboards and helps hold our business units accountable. And there's a lot of sophistication about how we do DFDs internally. But the thing that the entree team had to be really careful of is not like front load all of that insight and all of that into the digital product. Because really what we needed to do first is just build something in a week, put it out there, and see if people even want to use it. Right. And that's kind of the heart of iteration.

You know, I think it was one of the founders at LinkedIn that said, like, if you're proud or if you're not embarrassed of the first version of the product you put out there, you probably spent too much time on it. That's a good reminder. Yeah. Yeah, and it's true. It can be overwhelming to the consumer to try to get it perfect. And instead we just said, hey, let's just do a rudimentary version. Let's get it in front of real people, see what they think, and then make changes based on that. And that's something that very recent that just happened. And with every dollar, I mean, I remember when it was CD-ROM software. Right. And you may be thinking, George, you're not old enough. This is before every dollar. You're deceptively young-looking. That was the best thing we had.

George, that's what it is. And so we've made iterations. No one wants to be the next blockbuster where you go, well, well, we're just CD-ROM kind of people, and if they don't want to use it, then forget them. We've decided, you know what, we need to iterate on this budgeting software. We need to take it into the modern century and go, this needs to be an app. And then we took that app and said, how do we make this app better? So how do you know when it's time to iterate as the leader in the business? I actually don't think that there are a lot of situations where you wouldn't want to iterate.

One of the things we're really guilty of just as human beings is comprehensive thinking. like we want to sort it all out in our head. But there are things that, like, I think it was the Donald Rumsfeld famous thing from the early 2000s, which is you have the known unknowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns, right? Well, in anything that you're doing, for the most part,

particularly if it's new. So particularly when you're going into new territory as a business, iteration is most important. When you're pursuing something new, the known known territory, you always have some knowns, and you always have some unknown unknowns. And if what you wait to do is to start until you've solved for the unknown unknowns, you've missed the bus.

So in any situation, like the kind of self-quiz I do for myself is, am I waiting to do what I know can be done until I've, like, driven out all the uncertainty or all the risk? Like, my goal as an entrepreneur or a business owner is not to like eliminate all risk. That's what bureaucrats do, right? my job is to take capital, take a risk in the marketplace, and see what happens. Now, it's got to be a responsible risk, right? But iteration is a really great way to do that because instead of front-loading, like, an enormous amount of cash out in the marketplace to go do a big thing, just start simple.

Start with the no-known, right? Take that, for the example, you know, desired future dashboard. At our live events, maybe you were part of this, maybe the listener was part of this, didn't know you were actually part of it. But one of the things that we've done at our live events is instead of building software around a desired future dashboard, we had the bright idea of just from stage doing a talk about what a desired future dashboard was. And at the end of the talk, just said, hey, we've got, you know, a PowerPoint template for a desired future dashboard. Who's

interested? Like three quarters of the hands in the room went up, right? I don't have to write any software. I didn't have to spend a lot of money to go do that. You know, we used the live event that we were already doing that we already had, we delivered value to the customer by talking to them about a desired future dashboard, teaching them about a desired future dashboard, but then from there, validated with them that they would actually be interested in using it. So we got that early validation that cost us next to nothing. And then at that point, that's when you decide to go get a whole software development team that's actually really expensive to run and operate, to go focus on that idea and go build it. And even when we go build it, we're still building the simplest

possible version of it and getting it out there and seeing what people like. And I think getting customer feedback is one of the most important aspects of iteration. So here's what iteration isn't. Iteration isn't that you have the perfect idea in your mind today about what you're building that's going to be done six months from now or a year from now. What it's about is identifying the known-knowns, putting those known-knowns out into the marketplace, and then actually talking with customers and finding out what they did and didn't like.

So a lot of times when I'll meet somebody, people know me as having a big interest in project management. And sometimes I'll bump into people and they'll say, Brendan, you know, I followed some of your stuff or, you know, I read an article you wrote on project management or something like that and they'll say, hey, I went and did this thing and I made a plan and I perfectly executed the plan.

And, you know, I estimated the number of people that were involved and the amount of work that was involved and the amount of money and time, and I got it right. We got all the way to the end, and it was finished. And I think they expect me to be like, awesome, great job. And here's the problem with that, George, is that in the economy that we live in now, the world we live in now that's so digitally driven

and people have such short attention spans, if you are developing plans that takes six or 12 months to execute, and you get to the end of that 12 months, and your plan was perfectly right from the beginning, the only thing that that actually tells me, it doesn't tell me that you were prophetic. What it tells me is you didn't learn anything along the way, right? And so the idea of iteratively building something means you take that known, known, put it out in the marketplace,

talk with your customer, and let them co-author what the next version is that you're going to put out. If you're not partnering with your customers and actually talking with them through the process, then the likelihood is you're going to spend an enormous amount of money in the marketplace and come out with something in the end that people don't want to use. And I'm guessing people are not shy about sharing their opinions. Right. So that helps. Yeah. If they can be honest.

Yeah. That's the goal. The ultimate sign of a really successful product is a product that people share. One of the things that's out in the marketplace that's really big right now and has been big for a while is this thing called net promoter score. You know, the idea that if you're not familiar with it, it's a scoring system you use to score how likely somebody is to refer or share your product with someone else. Well, here's the deal. I actually don't care at all how likely someone is to share. What I care about is, did they share it?

Right? And, you know, when you take an iterative approach to product development, it's really simple. Start with the no-nones, get the thing out there, talk with your customers, and actually find out if they're sharing it. If they are materially sharing it, it means that you've got product market fit.

And if you've got product market fit, you can assume the thing that you did on a microscale is going to scale up to a enterprise. you know, scale. Yeah. And for, you know, the businesses out there that are listening, it's a lot of, you know, manufacturing and health care and construction. These kinds of businesses can often be word of mouth, which can be harder to scale. You know, it's not me posting on Facebook about it. It's me telling my friend who needs a great HVAC person. Yeah. And they go, hey, you got to reach out to Martha. They crush it. There's great service. How do you kind of build that into what you're making

as the business. Right. So, you know, everybody knows that I'm a software geek. I'm the chief technology officer here. But a lot of people, you know, hear me talk about this topic, and they're like, well, you know, that's not applicable because I'm in a fabrication business. Or, you know, I have a company that does, you know, electric panel upgrades, you know,

whatever it is. An iterative mindset really applies to everything, right? So let's say that you've got a crew of heating and air people that are going into people's homes and upgrading the air conditioner, that are heating units or, you know, their water systems or whatever inside the house. Yeah, sure, the thing that you're putting in their home, you're not iterating on that product. Like, your crew is not actually materially making a water heater better. But what you can iterate on is the actual customer experience.

You can conduct experiments. You can try things. You can go through fast iterations of change, you know. So if you've got some technicians that are coming out to somebody's house and you want to try different upsell techniques, You know, somebody calls you about a water heater and you want to talk to them about like, you know, do they have surge protection on their house? Right? Well, that's an experiment, right? Now, what you could do is you could develop some big fancy presentation with print materials and, you know, when you go into the person's house, you're trying to show to them like, hey, here's all this fancy material to see if you want to do the upgrade. Well, the simple iterative version of that is don't go through all the trouble to develop the print material. Just have five technicians in a current, you know, in a given day, just say, hey, have you ever thought about what happens when lightning strikes your house? Do you want to put surge protection, you know, housewide? And just see what you get.

You know, if you get two yeses, is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. I'm not in your business, so I don't really know. But, you know, comprehensive thinking would lead you to think that, like, oh, I've got to make this super fancy and super sophisticated and make it look super professional. No, you don't. You're literally using iterative thinking just to more clearly understand, like, what

customers actually want. Yeah. It's interesting that it all comes back to a mindset and critical thinking and understanding your customers and having a conversation loop with them to figure out what do they need because it's always changing, probably, right? And so you can't just go, we put our product out there and now we're going to rest on this for the next 10 years and be successful. You've got to iterate if you want to be successful and continue to be and continue to grow. Yeah. I see a lot of leaders that get stuck in the trap of thinking that like iteration is only some sort of execution strategy,

like somehow it's beneath them, you know, and it's not, it's not at all. Like, I think that iteration is really a critical thinking strategy, you know, your ability, and, you know, I've probably said this before on the Entree Leadership podcast, as a leader in the time that we live in now, you've got to master the ability to zoom way, way in, and zoom way way out. Like, you don't longer have the luxury of being stuck in either one of those positions. You've got to be able to zoom way, way out, look at the strategy, you know, understand the vision, the mission, the strategy, the direction that your team is taking, and zoom way, way into what's actually happening, you know,

in the real world with your team. And if you rely on that iterative thinking only to happen on the line level of your team, they'll probably be doing it, but they're not going to get the most value out of it. Like developing the personal discipline and the personal skill as a leader to help guide your team's thinking through,

like, okay, what's the simplest version of this problem? For my teams, you know, language really matters. So, you know, we build a lot of software all the time, but it doesn't matter what you build. What I don't ever ask my team is I don't ever hand my team work and say, I need this done by X date. What I do is I give my team a problem and say, what version of this problem could we have done by X date? Little nuance in language is a really big deal because if I give them a fully baked idea and say, have it done by March, they're going to scramble, they're going to make shortcuts, they're probably going to make a pretty crappy thing because they're trying to accommodate perfectly what's in my head.

If I give them a problem and I say, what simple version of this problem can we solve by this particular time frame, then actually that's going to trigger resourcefulness on their part. And that's the thing that I think a lot of leaders miss is I do believe in setting a date saying, hey, and by the way, the date's not next week. That's just irresponsible leadership. Like, I believe in setting a date out on the horizon that says, hey, within this timeline, we want to provide some solution to the market, right? Whatever the market wants.

But I try to keep the resourcefulness inside my teams to find a problem for them and ask them what version of that problem they could have done by the market timing that I see. And if you actually do that, you'll see your teams light up. It lights up their creative fuses, causes them to have far better, you know, know, conversations with each other. And it actually really increases the quality of the thing that you end up putting out into the marketplace. Yeah, that's a neat little leadership hack there, just the nuance and language. That's cool. So as we wrap here, what is the first step a leader should take? They go, all right, Brendan, I have not been iterating how I should be. What's the one thing

I need to do, regardless of my industry, that can help move this thing forward? To me, when I look at anything, the discipline that I have had to develop is asking, what is the riskiest assumption I'm making. So when you look at solving any problem, you know, there's not just one angle to it. There's not just one thing that you have to do. Usually there's 100 things you have to do or a thousand things you have to do. So, you know, there's a big difference when you're trying to manage all that complexity to find the essential complexity versus the accidental complexity, right? The way most of us think is we just dive full bore into the problem and what we end up giving our team is a solution that's just littered with all kinds of accidental complexity. The thing I got to do for myself as a leader is

develop the muscle and the discipline to get really clear on what is the truly riskiest assumption that I'm making and try to find, you know, how you put together those early iterations of building something or creating something is by getting down to that essential complexity. What is the most essential version of this thing that if I were to put it out there, I can gain understanding as to whether it's connecting or not with my customers. So that skill, developing that skill of really being able to basically apply a lot of self-discipline and say, what is the riskiest thing I'm trying to prove? If you can develop that muscle for yourself, your team will really benefit from it.

Yeah, and you've got to hone that as leader. If you want to iterate, you want to serve the customers, you want to grow the business. This is part of it. This is leadership. Yeah. Well, Brandon, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I always appreciate your wisdom, your critical thinking skills. Thanks for being on today.

Thanks, George. Thanks so much, Brendan. Always good to talk with really, really smart people. Marie and Brendan both talked about how to start before you're ready and how to iterate so that you can deliver the most value to your customers. So if you're about to start something new or create a new product offering, you should be asking a lot of questions. The Entree leadership team has put together the new product assessment,

which is a list of 10 questions to ask before you launch a new product to help you in this starting phase. To download the free new product assessment, just click the link in the show notes. Hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, leave us a review and subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And we want to hear what you think of the show, what you like, what you don't like, and what we could do better. Give us your feedback by using the link in the show notes to schedule a call with Tim, our producer. If you want to keep up with us on social media, you can follow us at Entree Leadership.

This episode was produced by Tim Hull, edited by Jacob Harrison, and mixed in math. by Will Rudder. I'm your host, George Camel, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thanks for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading.