Focused - 3: My Curse and My Reward, with Myke Hurley

Episode Date: August 25, 2016

Myke Hurley, co-founder of Relay FM, discusses transitioning from his bank job to a full-time podcaster, including the inherent contradictions in working a dream job that never lets you take a vacation.

David Sparks and Jason Snell spent their careers working for the establishment. Then one day, they'd had enough. Now, they are independent workers, learning what it takes to succeed in the 21st century. They are free agents. Welcome back to Free Agents, a podcast about being an independent worker in a digital age. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my fellow host, Jason Snell. Hi, David. This is episode three. Thanks to everybody out there for giving us feedback about the first two episodes. This is going to be one of our interview episodes. We're going to throw these in every three episodes or so where we interview an independent worker.

And it's only appropriate since this is a new show on the Relay FM podcast network. And it's the second anniversary, more or less, of the founding of Relay that we would have on as our first guest, Mr. Mike Hurley, the co-founder of Relay. Hi, Mike. Hi, guys. I'm very happy to be here on not only your first interview show, but I guess kind of the first real episode of Free Agents. Because the two that came before it, I don't think we'd even set the name yet. So this is exciting. We weren't sure.

People have heard, you've talked about it in numerous places, your job transition, famous stories about broken shoelaces and uh things like that dusty shoes but i thought it would be useful for us to at least start with you talking a little bit about sort of where you were and uh and and what made you decide it was time to uh basically make a career change because you were working in the financial industry for a little while um buying and selling people like no that's not what you were doing but uh i like to imagine that like like get get get the stock on the phone or however businesses work i don't know yeah that's what they say jason get the stock on the phone the stock sir the stock's calling for you um anyway what what was the what was the uh just a little gloss on sort of like where you were and when you made the decision to do something completely different?

So 10 years ago in 2006, I decided I would take a one year gap before I eventually went to university because I changed what I wanted to do at the last minute from being what you would call an English major. I wanted to be a media major instead. So I had already applied for my university, so I couldn't change. It was too late. So I decided I would take a year off and get a job. I had that job for six years, maybe eight years, somewhere in between there. I don't even know anymore.

It's a long gap year. It's a long gap year. I'm still on it. And I took a job working in a bank, and my first job was like opening bank accounts, giving people loans, that kind of thing. We would kind of call it a customer service agent. I then moved up into branch management and became a manager of people. So the buying and selling of people thing is actually not too far away from some of the stuff that I was doing. And that that

I did that for a couple more years, I was actually a manager more for a longer period of time than I was actually a customer service agent, I moved quite quickly. I became a manager in two years, I broke some records in the area, actually. Because that's what I thought I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life being a bank manager, it seemed like a respectable and good position to have in the world. Then I found podcasting in 2010. I found my way to it after many failed attempts at having some kind of presence online, and I fell in love with it. Once I found the thing that I really wanted to do, nothing that I could do in my professional life could match up, and everything just felt like a distraction.

My job felt like it was getting in the way of the thing that I really wanted to do. So I kind of fell into a bit of a bad place and I knew I needed to make some changes and I ended up getting a job in the same company but working in marketing and it was the stuff that I was doing on podcasting at the time that helped me get that job because I was proving that I had some kind of skills in trying to sell stuff at least. So they gave me the job in marketing and I did that for a couple of years whilst getting ready to leave to transition into my own thing. And then maybe after a couple of years of doing that, I was able to be in a place where we could launch relay fm now the thought that you were going to leave you know the legitimate job for podcasting did it kind of sneak up on you or did it hit you like a bolt of lightning so i knew it was always going

to happen like starting relay fm was the plan was that we would both be able to do it full time at some point but the actual leaving of the job was a bolt of lightning thing. And it's a story, there's an episode of Analog, which I guess you guys can put in the show notes where I talk about this in a bit more detail. But basically, I had a really bad day. And then I was at home, saw that my shoes were dusty, decided I didn't want to buy any more shoes because it would be like I was committing to the job and then i decided that i would quit the next day so i did that so my actual decision to quit like the thing that made me go and write my resignation letter uh that was a bolt of lightning moment but but i more specifically at what point because you knew when your shoes were dusty that

you were planning on leaving but most people have a job with insurance and benefits. And the idea that they're going to go independent doesn't hit them that way. At what point did you know that you wanted to leave? Forget about the time you decided you're going to give your notice. Probably in like 2011. So as soon as I started making any money on podcasting at all, even, you know, like a couple of hundred dollars a month, when that happened, it was like, well, this is a thing that I can do. This is the thing that I'm good enough at that people will pay me. So why can't

I do this for my job? Just before we move on from this, I want to back up slightly and ask when, because you were doing podcasting for quite a while while you were doing that job. You've described like you had a moment in your actual job where you had some realizations about your job and your career. Was there a moment in that continuum of doing podcasts as a hobby where you thought, this is actually what I want to do and made that switch to realizing that your future didn't lie in the one direction? Yeah. The second podcast that I ever launched was a show called Enough, and my co-host was Patrick Rohn of Minimal Mac, which is maybe the thing that he's most famous for, which was a great blog that he used to write about Macintosh stuff and minimal lifestyle. And we launched that show,

a minimal lifestyle. And we launched that show. And it went straight to number two on iTunes. And up to that point, my audience size has been in the hundreds. So we'd never did that. But we kind of launched this show and it had like 10,000 downloads on its first day. And it was then when I was like, Oh, like, I can do this and be successful at this if I just keep kind of fighting to work my way up the ladder. And I remember coming downstairs whilst living at home with my mom and talking to her about it and saying to her, this is what's happened, and I was super proud of myself. And I remember saying to her, I could do this.

This could be the thing for me so this was like in 2011 so it kind of then took another five years or so four or five years for me to actually get to the point where i could do it once you had the discussion with your mom what did you what steps did you start taking to plan your move? Well, so this, the plan was never in place, right? Until Relay, there was no plan. Like the plan up until that point was just keep doing this, keep trying to get better, keep putting stuff out there, keep trying to find new people to do shows with that can kind of help push you up the ladder and then do deals with people to move to their network

because it will help push you up. And I kind of went through all of those stages. It's just like more rungs up the ladder until I could get to the point where I could start making money that was close enough to my salary. That was always the goal. It was like whenever I can make enough money that it's close enough to my monthly salary is when I can do this. And then as I started moving further down the line, it was also becoming a point of

and can control it. That was kind of how I ended up being. It was that caveat which kind of pushed me and what made me do Relay. It was, okay, the money is fine, but if you don't control the money, if you have no sense of where the ads are coming from, who's booking the ads and can't actually make that move yourself, as in myself, I felt like I couldn't do it. I wouldn't be able to trust it because I'd have no visibility of what was going on. So that was part of what it was for me. It was those two things. It was when I could make enough money and when I was able to control the flow of money as much as somebody can. So that was what made me feel like I needed to go out and do the thing on my own again.

And then the thing that actually was able to push me in was when we were just starting Relay. We were a few weeks in, and we knew we had enough money for the next three months in bookings. That would be enough for me. So that was the enough for me. So that was that was like the sensible financial decision. No, the reason that I made the bolt of lightning thing is because I already knew that piece of information. Like I knew that the next three months would be okay. But I just needed the thing that will push me into actually taking that leap. So I'm interested by the fact that what you didn't do, which you hear a lot of people talking about doing, is know that you were going to set up

Relay as a business and that this was going to be, the entire plan was this was going to be your livelihood. But what you didn't do is leave your job to start the business. You kept your job, started the business, got it running at a speed where you could essentially jump from one place to the other. So did you ever consider the alternative of taking that leap and leaving your job and having no income but the new business? No. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One, I had no idea if it was going to work. We had no idea if anyone was going to care about us, right? Like if anybody was going to come and listen to our new shows.

We were confident. The whole reason that we did it was because we believed that was the case, but you never really know. And also the other part of it was I knew I could do it. You know, I could run it in a limited capacity in my spare time because for the, you know, five years prior to that, that was my life, right? Like coming home at 6 p.m., working until 2 a 2am, five nights a week. And I knew I could keep doing that. And also my job was pretty lax in that, you know, you kind of, you didn't really

have anything to do but meet your deadlines, right? So you could work as much as you want, or as little as you wanted, you just had to meet your deadlines on my marketing job. So I was able to pick up some relay related things in the daytime as well. And they were kind of cool of it. Everybody knew I had this thing on the side. I just needed to make sure that I was doing my job properly, which I was. So for me, it was it would have been maybe a step too far to go all in on day one. Mainly because I knew that I would be able to keep doing it in some way. And then it was, you know, it was at the point where, okay, we've done this much with us being able to put in half time. Now it's time to see what we can do if we go full time.

It's good that your existing job, you didn't have to keep a secret. When I was planning my move, and actually for the years I was building up Max Barkey, I never said anything to anybody. And I kind of had this idea in my head that they would find out about it at my funeral. I just did not want them to know. There are benefits and disadvantages. The benefit for me was I never would have gotten the marketing job without it because I have no marketing training. So I needed to show that I could apply myself in interesting and weird and wonderful ways, right? That I wasn't just a run-of-the-mill

bank manager, like I had some skills. And the thing is, like, when people know, it can be awkward. Like, sometimes it would have been nicer for it to be a secret, because everybody knows you as the guy that does that thing. And some people can react to you in a negative way, you know? Bosses, bosses might think that you're not applying yourself correctly, that kind of stuff. Sure, you're not a company man. Yeah. You're not giving us 100%.

Exactly, exactly. And that would come up every now and then, you know, it was like an excuse that people could use for the way that they would maybe give me pay rises or something. When you left, it sounds like you'd done a lot of work and even started making the widgets in your new factory. So you knew that your factory could make widgets. But how much time had you spent preparing for kind of the business side of running your own business? So both me and Stephen were just learning as we were going along because we'd never run businesses properly.

You know, this was like our first attempt at running a real business. And one of the good things that we did was we found people that we could pay or could help us to do things properly. And we kind of found those people along the way and we were able to clean up anything that we kind of got wrong at the start. But I think that's the way so many people do start their businesses, right? They kind of just go for it and you'll eventually bump into things and the tax man will eventually send you a bill and you'll understand how that works. You know, we were kind of like, we knew the product that we were making. We felt like we knew that part. And then the business side of it would kind of just pick up as we went along. It was the same for me with the advertising stuff, know like i knew how to read an ad i'd done a small very small

amount of selling ads before we joined five by five but very very small and i kind of was just like all right well i know some people now that do this stuff uh i have a good sense of what the value is i know the product that I'm selling. I know how to read an ad. Let me just call these companies and see if they're willing to give me a shot. I remember I had a call. Well, the first call that I had was of a company that we love very much. And they asked me for an insertion order, which is a contract that you write up,

which basically just says, these are the ads that you're going to book. that will sign here you need to give me this by this date this by this date it's a very simple contract they asked me to send them an insertion order and i had no idea like literally zero idea what that document was i didn't even know if i got like if i'd heard them correctly and i started googling and they said to me have you ever heard of this before i said no no i have not uh and they sent me theirs, have you ever heard of this before? I said, no, no, I have not. And they sent me theirs, which has been the template for our insertion orders ever since. So that's kind of the way that I've always been with this stuff. It's just like, I'll work it out.

You've got a unique business in some ways, although I think it's rapidly becoming less unique in the 21st century. It's much more common now and will continue to be where you've got a digital business, it's a virtual business, and it's an international business. And I'm curious what kind of things you've run into about the fact that... So, your co-founder, Stephen Hackett, is in the United States, you're in the UK, and you're on the internet. So, you're in the UK, and you're on the internet, so you're everywhere. So how do you deal with those issues of different countries? Because, you know, the

world isn't set up for businesses like yours. It's mostly upside with the way that I run my life. You know, my days are long. I kind of wake up between 8 and 9 a.m. and then I go to sleep between 1 and 2 a.m. That just works for me. I'm fine with that, you know, and I'm good. So for me, I'm able to be awake for the majority of working time of all of our hosts, except for maybe Russell who's in Australia. I'm still not 100% sure when Russell's awake and asleep. But for everybody in Europe and the US, I'm there for most of the day, But for everybody in Europe and the U.S., I'm there for most of the day, which is good because I like to be able to help people when they need it and deal with things as it comes up. But if I'm not, you know, and they're based in the U.S., if I'm sleeping, Stephen's there.

So we actually like the relay thing is a funny thing to us because it kind of feels like that sometimes. He goes to sleep and sends me some messages or sends me some things and then I pick them up when I wake up and I send him stuff which he will get when he wakes up. We pass the things back and forward to each other as we're crossing through the time zones. So most of the time it is actually beneficial. There have only ever been a couple of times where something's exploded and I've been asleep. But one of the benefits of having the

time zone stretch that we have is there's probably somebody awake so it kind of works quite nice if it was me on my own it would be way more difficult like or if it was steven on his own it'd be way more difficult so you decided to set up relay as a united states business too on top of that what what was the rationale there it had to be somewhere the majority of our sponsors were going to remain to be american companies because that's where the money's being spent uh we have a like a vastly american audience over 60 percent of our listeners are in the u.s and then it's like 10 in canada 10 in the uk and then it splits out from there. And that's very basic averages. Some shows differ, of course. So because of that, we knew that we were going to continue to work with a lot of American companies. So just for purely the financial perspective of like where the money is

going to be paid to, it made way more sense to set up the businesses, an American company and have an American bank account and all that stuff. If I was on my own, if me and Stephen never met and I did this on my own, I would be in a bit of a bother because I wouldn't have a US bank account. At least when I started. Since there have been companies that have sprung up to help this type of thing happen. But when we started, I would have been completely lost. I never could have opened a U.S. bank account.

So yeah, we're a U.S. company because that's kind of RelayFM's home. It's in America. So you mentioned your routine a little bit. And I wanted to get back to that. One of the things that you often say is that you're living in American hours because you stay up late. And it sounds like you don't get up too late, to that one of the things that you often say is that you're living in american hours yeah because you stay you stay up late and it sounds like you don't get up too late but you stay up late and that that helps you sink when you come to the u.s you're not as jet lagged as somebody from the uk

might be who is keeping sort of normal business hours has that been something that has changed since you started doing relay full-time that your your whole day has shifted late i was always late you know like i was always up until like one or one or two anyway, and waking up to go to work the next day. So one of the big changes for me is that I'm able to be more comfortable in that. Because if I'm up particularly late, like last night, I was up particularly late. I think I fell asleep between three and four. I stayed in bed until 10 today. And I wouldn't have been able to do that when I was employed. I would have just had to be operating on three hours of sleep. So that's one of the biggest changes is that I'm able to manage it that way.

I'm always surprised at your hours, Mike, just from like, I'll leave you a message in Slack in the evening in California time, thinking, well, he'll see this when he wakes up. And I get a reply and I'm thinking, does this guy ever sleep? My hours are weird and I feel like I'm able to operate on not too much sleep. And I'm somebody who really likes to sleep. Like I could go to bed at midnight and wake up 12 hours later if I wanted to. to bed at midnight and wake up 12 hours later if I wanted to. Like I really enjoy sleep, but I can function on little sleep, which is, it works relatively well for me. I expect that at some point in the not too distant future, this is going to catch up with me.

I was just thinking that. But for right now, I'm just going to keep riding this wave until I can't wake up anymore. Well, I love the idea of you living on whatever time is necessary for your business. So, even though you're the UK, you're sort of on East Coast hours, US time. But the fact is, you live in a world surrounded by businesses and other people that you interact with in London. So, how does keeping weird hours impact that part of your life? Is your family, is your girlfriend frustrated that they're all going to sleep and you're going to get up and work for another five hours? I'm able to do without disrupting my family

too much. So, one of the things that's really important to me is when adina comes home i do my best to spend as much time with her as i can it's one of the reasons that i do stay up until until like two because then when she goes to sleep i can then pick up some more things to do right which if if when she came home i just carried on doing my own thing then i would have all that stuff done but that's not how i want to live my life you know when she's home i want to spend time with her because that's what I like. And someday she's the only human being I see. So I like to try and keep her happy. No, I just want to stay happy. Human companionship. Yeah, it's good. It's very important to me. So that, you know, so that's one thing. The thing about businesses is I never struggle to like, if I have an appointment with someone and it's in the morning, I will just adjust my day to deal with that. The problem that I have is my expectation that everybody should be working when I am in UK businesses.

all American businesses for my business, mostly, I am expecting that they will be working and awake whenever I am. But when I'm dealing with UK businesses, well, they stop at my 5 o'clock. And 5 o'clock for me, their day has barely started. I have a very slow, my day feels like it was very slowly up until about 3 p.m. my time, where I'm doing kind of work on my own, but nobody else is really around. So it's kind of what I consider to be my good, solitary, relaxed working time, where I'm able to get things done, but I can also chill out.

I can have a nice lunch. I can watch some YouTube videos. I break up that time into little chunks up until about three o'clock, which is usually when any recording would begin. Do you not give yourself credit? I mean, I find myself doing that as a podcaster. I'll get the end of the day. I'm like, man, I didn't do anything today. And I realized I recorded three podcasts. Yeah, I do feel like that. I think about people that I know that do things or I'll see somebody on Twitter and they're like, here's this thing that I just did or his. And I think, oh man, I wish I made something, you know, like that.

I wish I actually made something, you know, I did something or I spent some time on something. And then I remembered that I spent 15 hours making a text adventure, you know, like I do make stuff, but I do have to remind myself sometimes that there is an output to my business, but it's nothing I can touch. It's nothing I can really see. And also with everything that we do, or I do at least being on a schedule, it can be very easy to fall into just the routine of these things coming out. And sometimes quite a lot of the time, I forget the amount that I output because it's just the routine it's the churn and i don't treat the shows that way i put as much work and effort

and care into all of them that i can but that's also part of the routine you know so once i'm in that routine and it's kind of spinning whilst i'm then kind of in the zone and i'm actually getting it done it sometimes then makes it hard for me to remember that I'm actually making something that is of value. It's kind of a weird feeling. Something that I learned when I was unhappy at IDG was I didn't realize that I had a personal scoring system that I used to give myself credit for the work that I had done until my job changed to the point where my responsibilities were not to do things that I was capable of keeping track of as part of my score. And so I would leave work demoralized every day,

even though I had worked hard all day, because the stuff that I was working on was not stuff that I counted toward my feel good, you did a good job today total. And I hear what you're saying. One of the things about creative stuff, making stuff is that the act of releasing things into the world is not the work that goes into making them. And yet somehow, it can be very easy to take the credit when the thing is out there in the world, but not take the credit when you spent all day working on it. And that's something that I was actually thinking of the other day with podcasts too. It's the same thing is I need to try to make an effort to give myself credit for the work I do because even to this day, like literally yesterday, I said to my wife, I didn I recorded two podcasts and released one, but I only wrote one short story. And I realized I need to give myself credit for the things that aren't just the things I write, and it's still hard for me. I have a couple of things like that. One of them is pretty much every day, Adina will ask me, like, what did you do today? And then I'll start by saying, oh, not much.

And she's like, just tell me. So then I'll go through, and I'm like, oh, no, I did do a lot. The other one is I run a very lean omni focus um i my only focus forecast is kept quite small and i do this purposefully because it is an internal checklist and barometer for me of how busy i am so i look at my forecast if i have over seven or eight tasks on a day it's a busy day like that's a that's an overly busy day and when i'm checking those tasks off if i get to a very low number or to zero then i know i've had a productive day but it's also like i woke up today there were three tasks from there i was like great today's going to be a simple day yeah it's even more confusing for me

because i'm essentially running two careers at once. So I judge myself on one career when the other career I was having gangbusters and it's very happy to make make the shows and sometimes i struggle to like detach those two things from each other like they are two different people that that is two different jobs to do you know that you have business owner and and sales guy and podcast producer like they are different things and and sometimes i struggle with that a little bit and have to remember that really that they're not the same. What an excellent segue, because I'm thinking about your earlier comment about saying I don't get much sleep and I'm OK with that. And I think ultimately that is going to catch up with you. And now you've been running this business a few years.

What is your plan? I mean, what is your long term plan to make sure that you don't run yourself into the ground because that can happen and you have two jobs as you just said uh what is what are you going to do about that mike so let's say like the best in the best case scenario in a few years time all i do is just record and maybe talk to sponsors you know if they want to talk to me then i'll do that like it's like kind of the head of that thing. But like the best case scenario is we have a person or two to sell ads for us. And we're not at that place yet. And we don't want to be at that place yet. And right now I don't want to give that control away to anyone. But that's kind of like the best case scenario is all of those things, people do them for me. What I love to do is record and

release shows, you know, like, know like and you know maybe somebody would then edit them for me and you know there would be a whole suite of people quite frankly i don't think we're ever going to get to that point but what i do think will happen is we will have people that can help us with a bunch of things and this is something we started talking about now is is there is there a role for a kind of an assistant, uh, for me and Steven and what does that job look like? And we're starting to kind of rough that stuff out. Uh, cause I, do you know what? I actually don't think I want to run an empire where I have four employees. I've done that, you know, like I've had people work for me and it's very different, but

I don't like dealing with that. I would like to maybe have one or two people that we have help with and some freelancers that maybe do some stuff for us, which we have now. And that works pretty nicely. And I don't know, like in the future, with the way that I feel about things now, I don't know how much control I could give away to other people. It's something that I struggle with and have struggled with for quite some time is I want to make sure things are done right. And in my mind, there are a lot of things that I feel only I can do.

And I don't think I'm alone in this thinking. Oh, yeah. I think that's a sickness among all of us independent workers. And I know it's holding me back. It's one of my big challenges. My belief is, quite frankly, nobody can do the things that I do the way that I do them. But I need to be happy with having somebody else do them their way. Does that make sense?

Yep. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, that's a lesson I learned as a manager too. In a big business, it's the same story, which is you have to let things go. The difference is when it's very personal to you, it's that much harder. And when you're in a small business or you're an independent,

you realize that every dollar that goes to someone else is a dollar that's not going to you or pound, but you're working in US dollars. So I'm going to say dollar. And it's hard. It's hard to make those things too. I talked about this. I forget. I'm on many podcasts like Mike, so I can't remember where I talked about this, but I did talk not too long ago about the idea that I started noticing things in my job that I would, although I enjoyed doing them, it was more work than I thought it was worth and that I could pay somebody else to do that. And they would be happy to get the work and I would be happy to pay to not have to do that work. And that was a big moment for me in my life as an independent person to say, this is something I'm not going to do. I'm going to choose to give up control of it. I'm going to pay somebody. So money's going to come out of my pocket.

But in the end, the net will be better because I'll be able to use that time on other projects that will hopefully make more money than the money I'm spending. But it's very hard to divest yourself of that and put it in the hands of someone else. And the fact is, that person who does that work now does a very good job. She's not making all the decisions that I would make, but of course she isn't. But she's doing a good job, and I'm happy not to do it. Yeah, I did that recently with my accountant. I just turned it all over, and it was freeing. Yeah, it's scary, it i think it's important to always ask yourself those questions um hey mike what uh now looking back on almost two years of being on your own um what what are the biggest surprises in terms of how your life has changed in in the last couple of years of of

being an independent worker instead of going in every day to the bank? I think one of the biggest surprises for me is just how generally happy I am. Because I spent, you know, I spent like six or seven years in a feeling of being upset every day, going to the job that I hated. And one of the things that's always surprised me is whilst things can anger me and things can annoy me and things can annoy me and bad things can happen in my job as they do with every job right i have things go wrong my general level is still a happy one because things are going wrong in something that i love to do as opposed to things going wrong in something that i hate to do one of the

other things is kind of trying to work out my limits. And I don't think I've worked them out yet. And I think I overstretched myself all the time. And this is still something that I'm battling with. And I have not found that level yet. And I don't know if I ever will or how long it will take. But I'm still kind of working on stuff like that as well. Yeah, I think they're kind of the biggest things that I'm learning about myself as I continue to do this after a couple of years. Also, you know, you're saying about like giving people things to do and giving them jobs. I found out that if I don't like something, if I find something boring or something that I hate doing, I'm more than willing to pay that person, you know, to pay a person, to bring them in and have them do it.

And to pay that person as much money as I can pay them, right? Like I was doing some accounting because I have my own kind of UK company that I have to run things through. I think lots of self-employed people are this way because I have to get paid somehow. And I have now just started paying a bookkeeper because I don't want to input the 25 transactions every month. You know, like if there are, because these are distractions for me, that's, you know, an hour or two, maybe more because I tend to get it wrong that I was losing out of my time that I didn't want to be doing.

So I'm happy to find people there and pay them. The problem that I have, the next step is things that i'm good at things that i enjoy the things that take a lot of time and and splitting those things up and giving some of the tasks away to people like a lot of editing stuff you know i feel like we're very precious about a lot of my editing but i probably don't need to or shouldn't be doing it all a lot of the processing a lot of the emails that i sent, someone else could be doing them. And as I kind of look over the next few years, there's probably some of that just starts to change. Unless I just want to stay doing this forever, but I want to keep pushing this and see where we can take it. If you had to do over again, this whole transition, is there any big mistakes or tips you'd give somebody out there thinking about the same thing?

I don't feel like I've made any mistakes. There have been things that I wouldn't do again, but only if I had the knowledge that I gained from doing them. If I went back to day one and could give myself simple instructions, but I didn't have the knowledge, I wouldn't change anything. Because the things that we've done and maybe haven't gone the way that we wanted, I learned very, very valuable lessons from them. So I don't consider any of the things that I've done a mistake, I would maybe just tell myself back then to go a little bit slower. You know, we realized that we doubled our shows on year two. I love every show that we have.

We maybe could have spaced it out a little bit more. But when someone has an irresistible show like Free Agents, how can you say no? How can you say no? This is both my curse and my reward with my job is these things come my way and they're amazing and I can't say no to them because I don't want to say no to them. But then it's more work for me to do.

And maybe I could have still said yes to all of them, but at different times. We had a lot going on in the last year, which we maybe could have spaced out a little bit more. But to be honest, I wouldn't change it really. I would just maybe say to myself, just be aware of this as you're doing it. We're very aware of it now because we physically couldn't do this again. We could not double again and we wouldn't want to. And it's too much for people to handle. But imagine if that wasn't the case. We just can't facilitate that many shows and people. can't facilitate that many chosen people. So as we go into this year and beyond, it's just about understanding what the value of these opportunities are and seeing the best way to make them happen. Now, being in this now for a few years,

what is the hardest thing about what you do as an independent business owner? That I don't do or think of anything else. My whole life is my business i don't know if i'll ever take a vacation again right like i was thinking about this today because me and adina have been talking about a vacation we haven't had a proper vacation together this year which hasn't been tied to something she's come to some conference stuff with me or whatever but it's like a nice beach vacation and i was thinking that you know she wants that so she can switch off from work

i can't do that like i can't people could manage it for me but i can't stop thinking about it i wouldn't be able to you know i would still be wanting to check things and just making sure that everything's okay like and i've come to terms with this and and to be honest i'm fine with it but it's just a thing that is, it just plays on my mind a little bit, which is like this, this is all I ever think about. And it's all I do. And it's my dream. So I'm happy. This is not a complaint. But it's just an observation. And I think a lot of people that listen to the show that have their own businesses can probably attest to that it just becomes all consuming. So there is issue of of of of taking of trying to find

time and take a break and it's almost like the uh spending carving out some time during the day writ a little bit larger you just sent me a message in slack a couple of days ago about moving a recording of upgrade the podcast we do together so that you could uh you could take a weekend away and i i liked that idea, right? That it's like, well, I'm going to try to carve out some space here. The fact is, you were pushing it back a few hours rather than saying, I'm going to be on vacation next week. But that was an attempt by you very clearly to try and carve out some space

where you could have a weekend away instead of just continuing the work routine. Yeah, and that's totally something. That's totally true what you're saying. But the other part of it is those types of trips, they're really great, and I like to do them, but the work still needs to be done. So I'll be squeezing it in at random places. Like when we'll be on this vacation, there will be times when I'm working, like when Adina might be doing something, or if she's sleeping, I'll be working. When we're on the train to go there and go back, I'll be working

because I still need to do the stuff. But what I can do and what I make an effort to do is when I'm doing the stuff, why not try and make that stuff more comfortable? So that might mean doing it from the seaside, or it might mean like, you know, breaking up my day by watching some professional wrestling videos for fun. You know, like this is the type of stuff that I will do in my day to try and make it better. Like I will just take nice little breaks in the day. And it's why I like to have this long, slow day, you know, because I'm able to kind of break it up with some stuff that I enjoy because that's what keeps my sanity. We're just planning a family vacation for January.

And we had that same experience where we were looking at different houses to stay in. It's my wife's extended family and my family going to Hawaii. And they were looking at all these different places to stay. And they found a couple that I had to veto. And the reason I had to veto them is no internet. And the fact is, I'm not planning on recording any podcasts while I'm in Hawaii, but I can't not be on the internet for a week. I just, I can't. And so, I had that same thought, which is, I'll be on vacation, I'll be in a beautiful place. I will not be working. Just like when I was in Southern California and I visited David, you know, my family was on vacation that week. I was working less than normal and from a different and kind of that's one of the advantages of being independent is I was able to do that instead of taking vacation days from work out of my small allotment.

because I'm not going to be able to do this again in a few months, I was able to sort of work some and not work some. But the idea that we would go down to Southern California or go to Hawaii for a week and that I would not think about my business at all in that time, it's just not possible. It's just not conceivable. In fact, when you were here, you and I had a conversation about weekends where weekends don't really exist for independents. I mean, it's just another day. And the good news is, maybe on a weekday, you can take an afternoon off to do something with your daughter. But don't think that on the weekends,

you can just shut everything down and not worry about it like you would if you had a nine-to-five job. Most of the time, it's because I can't remember what day of the week it is. That's why we record podcasts on set days. My week is bracketed by, on Monday morning i do upgrade and on friday afternoon i do tv talk machine and i do and dead center on wednesday

i do clockwise and that's how i tell time now yeah it's it's more the stuff i'm doing on the days as opposed to when the days are themselves so you answer that question the hardest thing is that work is all you think about. Does that worry you? No. Because I love what I do. I love it so much. And this was what I always wanted. And it was my dream.

And I'm happy about that. I'm building something that I'm really proud of and it's enabling me to do great things in my life now. We're trying to buy a house right now and I could never have done that in my job. The route that I had, the level of skill that I had,

I was never going to be able to afford something like that in London because I had no training. Nobody would take me. The only thing I could do was move up in my company and they wouldn't give me big pay rises because i was already working there you know so all of these things and all the things that i'm able to do in my life take trips to america to see friends and go to conferences all of this stuff is because of the business that i run and there's no other way i could do it so right now like i'm totally fine with this i had a hallelujah moment a few

weeks ago i was signing up for a web service i don't remember which one it was and you know i answered the security questions yeah and the security question was what is your dream job and i realized that i'm living my dream job you know and it just hit me like a ton of bricks good bricks though was the. Was the answer right? Did you get it wrong? She said, this one? That's what I wrote. I wrote this one.

Which is the first time in my life I've ever written that. Yep. Mike, thank you so much for joining us on Free Agents and being our first guest. And for saying yes to our idea for a podcast, too, I should say. Oh, it's a pleasure. All right, David, that's say. Oh, it's a pleasure. All right, David, that's another Free Agents in the Books. But we'll be back in two weeks with more topics. So people can check us out, relay.fm slash freeagents slash three for this episode.

And we're collecting feedback. We're going to do a feedback show. We're not going to cover it on every show. But send us your feedback. We appreciate it. If you heard something you're interested in. You can also send us a note over on Twitter. We are...

Preagents FM. All right. Thanks to everybody out there. David, pleasure as always. As you, as well. Jason? We'll see you in two weeks. Thank you.