Ecommerce Therapy: 3 Nine-Figure Operators on Focus & Passion

Welcome to the Operators Podcast. Today, it's a therapy episode. We have Q4 right around the corner. You can go to 9ops.com/blackfriday. There's already been a webinar giving you tips, tricks, everything for it. But today, it's about passion and priority. What makes us want to keep doing this? How do we stay engaged in the world of AI? And how can you run teams as teams change? Are they going to get bigger, smaller? If there's excess work, what are you going to do with it? There's good tips and tricks in here, but a lot of it is us just Spilling our guts out, putting our heart on our sleeve. Listen to the therapy episode with Matt, Mike, Sean. Let's get into it.

I think right now the thing that I'm focused on the most is how do I make sure that my organization is focusing on the right things? How do I lead them in doing that? How do I teach that skill? And one of the tendencies I've noticed in myself is that as we're getting bigger, I mean, we sell so many different things in so many different places. that I do have this negative tendency whenever I feel like we're not focusing the way that we should to just be like, we should go back to the way we did it, you know, 6 years ago, 7 years ago. It's not realistic. It's just, um, I sometimes I really kind of long for the simplicity of the earlier days in the company and now it's much bigger, much more complex. And so I'm just kind of wrestling with, as a leader, how do I help people to have good judgment about what it is they need to be focused on at any given point in time?

How are you figuring out how to do that? Like, what tips and tricks do you have?

Well, one of the things that we've run into, everybody probably has some kind of an annual planning cycle, and we've been on an annual planning cycle for several years now, and we're going to change it. We're going to change it to triannual. And that might not even be frequent enough because we started realizing we were setting these goals in December and by like March or April, it was like, those are the wrong goals. And we're just, we're in a trend industry that's moving and changing very quickly. Plus, you know, like we don't control the market and our customers. So this year, um, kids has just been awesome for us, way better than expected. We thought it would be good. It was way better than expected. Kids textiles has been way better than expected for us. And so even if we had different plans about the things we were going to focus on, At what point do you just say, hey guys, stop everything. The market's spoken. This is what it wants us to be doing. This is what it wants us to be focused on. And I think that the way I verbalized it at a meeting last week was if you think about everybody that works at your company, they probably have this array of things they can work on, tasks, projects, and they range from exceptionally high impact, but really ambiguous, hard to figure out what to do, all the way down to super easy to figure out, but are barely going to move the needle at all. And I think I've seen this observation made by others before, and I think it's true that if you're not careful, people in your organization will pick these middle-of-the-road tasks where they feel reasonably confident that they can do them and do them well and will make some impact, but aren't really the most impactful things. And so you end up having your organization not necessarily focusing all their attention on the most important things because those are always the most ambiguous. Those are always the most challenging questions. the ones where it's the easiest for you to look stupid, the easiest for you to not be able to come up with an answer that actually works out. And so there's this kind of like self-preservation, like fear of looking bad that can make our organizations and the people in our organizations drift away from doing like the best work, the best things to be working on at any given point in time.

So like there, you guys have heard of EOS, right? Like Entrepreneur Operating System, and there's like Rockefeller Habits. So they've got this very prescribed, you know, annual planning cycle, and then you do quarterly planning in between. And there's a nuanced thing that we did, Mike, that helped a lot, which was we just stuck. We went to a quarterly planning cycle, but it was always a 12 or 18-month rolling planning every quarter because everything was changing so quickly. So like we no longer had, like we set annual plans once a year and then we update as we go. We literally Every 3 months we set new 12-month plans on a rolling basis just because things would shift around too much. The hardest part of that was product, 'cause product cycles are just so damn long.

Yeah. I mean, and you don't know when they're gonna get done is another thing. So when you're dealing with, and all of us have to deal with tools, but when you're dealing with tools and especially tools with plastic, it just, you can think, hey, this is gonna be a 3 or 4 month process. And then 9 months later you finally get it. So it's really difficult to say, hey, we're gonna finish this product and launch it in this quarter when you're actually developing the, the tooling or doing something fairly new for the first time.

Sean, how do you do this? Like you, you set, you guys always set your big priorities, right? Like you, you deliver that at some cadence. Like here are my, here are the most important things in the business. How often do you change them?

You're talking about the patented Sean Frank 12 things. You know, we're not, we're not doing EOS, we're not doing the Rockefeller system, whatever the hell you're talking about. We do the Sean Frank 12 things and we've gotten, I've, I've personally gotten a lot from other people who run companies, they think 12 is too many. Dude, I think it's perfect because like we try to hit like, you know, if 8 of them get done, we did a bunch of shit that year. So like this year, one of the 12 things that's done now was celebrity in sweeps. So that is like the objective to the company. And this is, uh, you know, my CMO and my creative director is we're gonna do sweeps this year. We do sweeps every single year. The way we're gonna elevate it is we are going to get a celebrity in it. I'm like, I don't care who the celebrity is. Here's your budget, you have to get this done, and that this— it's a deadline. You have to shoot the content by May so it can go live in July or whatever, right? So that is like a concrete, makes the company better if we get this done. Another one of our goals, probably more, you know, ambiguous— ambiguous, there you go, nailed it— is I want to find an affiliate offer. Like, we have, you know, every year 5 million men come through our website and make a purchase, and I try to sell them other stuff. Sometimes it works, usually it doesn't. So I'd like to find an affiliate offer to go with that first purchase or upsell them later, like give them Netflix or HBO or whatever, so I can make at least $1 of incremental profit off all these customers. That's not going to get done. We have not found a good affiliate offer. But I can explain the rationale of why we're looking at this and why it'd be interesting. The only people who want to do affiliate offers with us are gambling apps, and it's like, okay, do we really want to make that jump to try to get people into gambling, right?

Do they change at all, Sean? So when you set the 12 things for the year, do you go back and replace any? And then how do you decide who decides that?

Yeah, so 12 things only come from me. So that is like one of my jobs as CEO is to set those things up. I've never changed one midway through the year. We've abandoned them, but I've never added one. you know, it's maybe I'm not being ambitious enough, but like what the symptom, the symptom both you guys just described is that the year is too long for a business changing fast. But at the same time, we wake up and the year's over. It's like crazy how fast these years just start piling up, right? Like, you know, we're midway through the year and like Sweeps is over at this point. We're getting into Q4. Like we already started planning for 2027 and the product cycle for us is already on 2028. So Yeah, it's one of these weird things where like there's never been more change inside of a business with AI and everything else, but at the same time, the years just go so fast, man.

Well, that's kind of the thing that, Mike, I don't know if you're dealing with this, but the promise of AI is you can do so much more because the nominal cost of doing everything is getting lower. Now the problem is like, should you do it all? How do you decide what's a good choice? Like what's a good decision? What's a bad decision? 'Cause I think the, when you get to your scale, Mike, what you have like team size that big, the risk you're identifying is real, which is people aren't entrepreneurial by nature. So they're not going to have this like inherent, I need to choose this, like the, uh, what is it? That asymmetric risk reward thing that we do as founders. People don't do that, right? They, they choose like that one looks safe and AI makes a lot of safe look great. you can package it all up. So I don't know how you handle that. It's—

Well, I think you're saying exactly what people need to hear, which is that the technology makes it easier than ever to do stuff. And 90, 95% of the stuff you can do probably won't move your business forward at all. I mean, we were all impressed in the early days where it's like, wow, I can tell AI to write this thing and it just effortlessly spits out 10 pages at me. But what we know today is nobody's going to read that. Nobody wants to read that. It's kind of a useless skill that it can just generate crazy amounts of text output. And I think that in a similar way, you can say, well, I'm going to really leverage the technology to automate this or that, but that doesn't even necessarily answer the question of whether you should be doing this or that. You know what I mean? That's one of my favorite Elon quotes that the problem with engineers is they'll spend a bunch of time optimizing a task that shouldn't exist in the first place. And that I feel like it's my responsibility. Sean, I like your list because it really makes it clear, like, hey, here is how I'm evaluating our year and here's what success is. And I think that the CEO has to do that ultimately, the CEO or the head shareholder, somebody has to say, like, this is the way that I'm going to grade the performance of the company this year. And you really have to shine a spotlight on those things. Or like people just, they, it's not that they don't work hard and it's not that they don't want to do good work. It's just, there's this organizational drift to things that don't actually move the needle sometimes.

Dude. And our whole companies, there's, we all have one really special thing about us that is driving us forward. And then it's like not 95% of what we do is basically pointless. It is like, It is, it's feigning in support of the main important thing.

It's depressingly true how much that is the case that like most companies, it's a singular product market fit, product channel fit type thing, and everything else orbits around that one thing.

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You end up building structure and, uh, you know, like checks and balances and everything, like to try to make them more secure. But like, it's kind of like you're building, you're building all this, uh, scaffolding around a building, but it doesn't touch the building. You know what I mean? Like the build, the building's going to stand regardless.

You know what I mean?

You're not actually supporting it. You're just, it just looks like it's supporting it.

Yeah, but so then do you need to do that at all? And how do you identify what is waste, wasted work? Is it worth identifying that it's wasted work? That's another question. It's like, does it even matter?

There's the perception of work is valuable to outside, to like to outside investors or whatever. Like if you were just like, you know, let's say Mike's business really nails down to, and you could correct me if I'm wrong, it's like wholesale sales and Amazon sales. And it's like, we get rid of everything else. It's like, and that's probably 50% of all people, 90% of all work. We just get rid of that. The business would be incredibly profitable, but it would scare the shit out of banks and lenders and acquirers. It's like, wait, you don't have an HR team? You don't have finance? You don't have an operator? Look, no, we have one guy in the warehouse who does the wholesale orders and one guy who does the Amazon orders. And I'm sitting here collecting checks. But I do worry that a lot of that scaffolding work will be replaced with just AI over time. And then businesses get to just do their core thing. But that's when you talk about job displacement. What's everybody else going to do?

I don't know if you guys, like, I'm sure you've looked at AppLovin's, uh, financials, like their P&L. They're so profitable. The first time I saw that, I was like, well, that can't be right.

Right?

Because like, I was just so used to these big tech companies like Google and whatever having a certain amount of EBITDA. And then AppLovin shows up. It's like, well, no. And if you just don't hire all the people and do all the other crap, This is the margin of a large software company. Uh, so it's a good point, Sean. I just don't see anybody doing it.

We're the older dinosaurs, you know what I mean? Like we're, we, we, we gotta make sure we don't get extinct. We gotta make sure we, we, we stay, you know, evolved. But like there's some brands coming out. I won't, I won't name 'em, but they're $50 million a year brands and the, you know, 4 people work there. And then the founder also has a software that's doing $5 million a year, right? Like you, you have these entrepreneurs who are really leveraging their time, network, influence to do a bunch of different stuff. Um, where, you know, I think we're, we're all more of an older school CEO where it's like, oh, we gotta be in the business coaching these people, like, you know, driving up. But maybe you're coaching some, coaching somebody on something that just doesn't actually move the needle. And that's like the scariest thing. Like, like inside of Ridge, I gotta make new products and I gotta put them on Facebook ads. It's like, and it's like, you know, our Amazon team's run by one person right now. Amazon will be 8 figures this year and it's up 8 figures this year. It's, it's more than doubling, right? And it's one guy doing that work. but it's like that work is coasting off of the work of our paid media team, that coasts off the work of our product team. But if you're not in those 3 funnels, it's like, what the hell are you— are you actually making a meaningful difference? I think that's what Mike's getting at.

You have support staff and then you have people that are in more kind of value creation roles. And I think every organization works that way. What I really want to do is get better as a leader at teaching people how to look at the array of things they could work on and sharpen their judgment about what would be the thing that would drive us forward the most. Because ultimately everybody wants to earn more. Everybody wants to be able to have more potential in their career. So whether or not they own shares in the company, like it's in their best interest. And sometimes I think that we've done a pretty good job of that. And sometimes I'm like, I don't know that we have. I mean, another thing that I've suggested to our group is I think we need to get back to having some kind of like a, either a very short weekly standup or a very short weekly, like, hey, This is our definition of success for this week, which, um, we had gotten kind of all the way into the other ditch where it was all like, hey, here's success for this year. And sometimes I think it's hard maybe to boil that down into, okay, but what am I supposed to be working on today in order to make sure that we're as successful as we want to be? And this is an advantage of small teams is it's very easy for everybody to be on the same page about what matters right at this instant.

Oh dude, yeah, it's incredible. Like, uh, working with Cody right now on Winx is just so fun. There's 2 of us doing like on all the like standup of the brand because we're recording this and we were launching literally today, um, while we're recording this episode. So by the time this comes out, it'll be live. But, uh, it's just a lot of fun when you only have to really talk to like 1 or 2 people. It's like Curtis, Cody, and I are just like What do you wanna do? Okay, do that. Let's, that's the most important thing today. Next. And, and it's multiple times a day, which I actually find really refreshing. Uh, it's like, it's very work, like it's blue collar work for sure, but it feels great. Like we're just checking stuff off lists. Like you're just making things happen. You're making ads, you're loading them into the accounts, you're writing copy, you're getting emails approved. Like, so that feeling is great. Uh, it just doesn't scale that way as you add people.

It's interesting. I think I've said this before, but if you get on elevators, a lot of elevators, the door shut button isn't actually tied into anything. I mean, it's there, but it just doesn't do anything. And they also do this at crosswalks. I've been told that a lot of crosswalks, the button doesn't actually do anything, but the button's still there. And the reason is that we like to feel kind of agency and control that when I get to control when this thing closes or when this uh, crosswalk changes. And man, more and more I feel like e-commerce is just littered with those types of buttons. It's like, oh, there's this little config, this number I can change. I should, I should play with that. I should change that. That maybe that is the doorway to future riches. Who knows? And it's like, it's not, it's just like, there's a, there's a million little things that you can end up, you know, wasting time and attention and capacity on that, that don't move the needle, but they sure look interesting.

On the standup point, and then I'll talk, Mike, we got to pull you out of this depression, dog. But on the standup point, do I sound depressed?

Maybe. I mean, maybe it's that I have a freshman now. Maybe that's more my problem. You know, Mike, I can pay for car insurance and have somebody, but my son driving, that's scary enough. That is depressing. All right. There you go.

Real depression.

My son got a tooth last night, so he has his first tooth. So I'm right there behind you, bud.

Yeah, we're in a little bit different worlds.

But dude, on the standup piece, I would not be able to run my company if we did not touch base every single day, right? And if I was on the same coast, because we have people all over the world, I would do it twice a day. I'd do it at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. And I know people think it's bad or crazy. The first one would be an hour, the second one would be 15 minutes, and it would just be, okay teams, tell everyone else what you did today. And I know that sounds micromanagey or whatever, but it's the only way to hold these people accountable and to make them accountable to each other. Like we're all trying to work off the the same playbook here. But one way I've been able to make sure teams focus on what's important is on those daily standups on Tuesdays, we tell you sales for last week. So you'll see growth rates by product, by geography, by channel, the whole thing. Growth rates, what's happening in this business. And if something's broken, I say, hey, that's bad. We need to focus on that. Or, hey, this is the most important thing in the business right now. I think it's I've never found a way to scale that up past literally being the one telling everyone in the entire company on a weekly basis what's important. So yeah, Mike, you got to bring back the weekly standups. You got to go, I think daily standups. You're paying these people for 8 hours a day, dude. You can use it however you want.

I think it's a good point, Sean. And maybe this is one of the questions that we're talking about is how much do you talk about doing the thing versus doing the thing? And it's easy to be like, well, we want to spend the maximum amount of time doing the thing, but it's like, Well, but if you're not on the same page about what you should be doing, then no, you shouldn't. No, you should spend more time on communicating about the thing. And so like, you don't want to fill your people's schedules with meetings because you know that's a path to not where you want to go. I don't know what's down that path, but bankruptcy, you know, baldness, anger, hypertension. But it's also like if you're not spending time really making sure everybody's on the same page and focused on the same things, then they're off working in disparate directions and that's not going to work either. And so I'm trying to figure out, hey, in this world that we're living in, especially as the technology's getting better, how do you kind of balance those 2 things? But I definitely am leaning more towards what you're saying, Sean, where it's just like, And I don't even know if it has to be a standup, as maybe it's an asynchronous thing that happens at the beginning of every morning where it's just like via written form, people are able to understand, okay, what is everybody doing and what's being worked on?

Dude, I think everyone listening to this should just break the bone. Why cannot I, why can't I talk to my employees every day? It's like, what, it's like, what's, what's so important? Just make it 30 minutes, dog. If you're a founder using AI for analytics, you know the trap. Claude plus BigQuery gets you answers that are fast and wrong or slow and right, never both. The problem isn't your analyst, your data, or your tools, it's your business context gap. Sarah's IQ fixes that. Connor, who runs my marketing, cut his reporting time from 10 days to 45 minutes. IQ answers in plain English built on your business logic, consistent, deterministic, and fully transparent with the assumptions and SQL behind every answer. Same answer whether you ask, your CFO asks, or your board asks. And if you're a Claude user, the IQ MCP is ready to plug in today. Claude plus BigQuery isn't enough. It needs your context. Get it at the link in show notes or go to sarahsanalytics.com to learn more. I was just going to say meetings are bad. You should try to avoid as many meetings as possible. And I think our version of standup, when everyone gets together and everyone talks, that is, that, that removes meetings from the calendar. Because I, I've been— Jason's not on the pod, but I've been inside of HexClad meetings and like people spend all week putting together reports to then present to other teams on. And it's like you're actually narrowing the band of communication. You think you're doing this, this thing to like help make clarity, but you're actually making it— you designated time to talk, so problems wait until then and you end up putting way too much time into the report. You should just show up and be like, hey, this is a problem, let's fix it right now. And that's, that's what a daily communication lets you do.

And you theme your standups, right, Sean? Like every day is a different focus. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Yeah.

I know standup isn't the solution to everything and Sean's version of the 12 things isn't the solution to everything. And sorry, I'm cramming those down everybody's throats, but—

I'm a huge fan of the standup, like huge fan. Uh, and I know really large companies that still do it dailies, whole team, like hundreds of employees. So I know it scales.

I was talking to a chief of staff over at Robinhood, and she asked me if I had ambitions to ever run a 5,000-person organization. And I'm like, no.

I'm like, who says yes to that?

Yeah. I'm like, I don't even know how you would do that. I have—

there's a psychological profile of that person, and I bet you it's really close to might also be serial killer, right? And some other negative trait like that. Just that person.

The entire managerial class are serial killer sociopaths. I love it.

My ambition in life is to run 5,000-person organ— like, what the fuck is wrong with you? Like, no way.

I, I think that it's, it's true that it's a totally different skillset. And I think this is the hard thing about entrepreneurship. The more entrepreneurial you are, the less you're excited about just managing big groups of people.

Yeah.

I'm like, I, I, I had that. I'm like, I don't think Zoom has a limit to get 5,000 people on a call. I don't know. I don't know what I would do. I, we'd have to get them out there every day.

It'd be 12,000 things, not 12 things.

12,000 things.

Totally, dude.

All right, Matt, what's, what's your piece of therapy you need support on?

You know what? I feel like I have whiplash. So going from like most of my day being what Mike's talking about, like running larger teams and, you know, bigger company with rhythms and just stuff on the go to now being in the weeds building Winks, it feels like it's like a total different animal, right? It's like I'm back to hands on keyboard. Lots and lots of button pushing. Cody and I talk a weird amount, uh, just standing everything up right now. And I suspect that we'll settle into more rhythms as we get going and it becomes more about like just straight up marketing. But right now it's just like launch mode is such a slog of like, like yesterday I spent all day, literally all day just reviewing copy in every email flow, making sure that links weren't broken, using AI to do a lot of this shit. too. But still, like, the work has to get done, you know, generating like any missing assets, like we got to get those made. It's onboarding vendors, you know, setting up whatever those weekly rhythms are. Like, it's just a lot. It feels like blue-collar digital work. It really does. Like, I know we joke about it, but man, when you, when you're launching and you're small, yeah, this is a lesson.

Yeah, dude.

It's a lot of fun. I love it. But holy It's a lot of work.

It's the true zero-to-one nature, man. You know, a lot of people celebrate that zero-to-one, but when you're doing it, it's boring. You know what I mean?

It's so boring, man. Like, yeah, last week I was, I focused on like landing pages and I just, every so often I would just Slack Cody. I'm like, all right, this one's done. Let her rip. Because we're just trying to take our best shot on goal at a good launch. Right. And like, we cut, we, I mean, we've been in this game long enough. We know what the game is like. It's a marketing game. It's like, we gotta find product market fit right now. And so it's like, what are all the best ways that we think we can do that? Like the minimum effective dose to find product market fit is the name of the game. And to do that work is just boring work. Like, I just don't know how else to put it. Like, it's, I just sit down and I write copy. Like, that's it.

It's hard because all of the growth happens so much slower early on, not just like revenue, but like, okay, so you write some new copy, how quickly can you get a feel for whether or not that's working? The way that everything progresses is slower. And I've seen this with people that have run companies that are whatever, doing $50, $100, $100+ million, that you get really romantic about the early days of like, I'd love to do zero to one again. And then you do it and you realize like, oh man, it's I've been running at 10 miles per hour on a treadmill and now I have to jog on a treadmill going 1 mile per hour. It's just like, it's very frustrating. Like you want it to be going faster than it is because you have the muscles and the capabilities to be running that thing at a much bigger scale, but it just can't, you can't just kind of hit a button and something be at that pace.

You know what else, Mike? Honestly, like I had this thought Yesterday, I don't think you can do startup mode, 0 to 1, while you're also running something that's at large scale. Like the modality and the mindset and how you're spending it is so freaking different. Like if I had to switch from, hey, I'm running like day to day at Simple Modern to now I've gotta go and like dig into the weeds for hours on end, that is massive whiplash. Like you are, that's a serious amount of context switch. I think that would be very hard. I don't think I can do it.

I've definitely done it. That's been my last year. So I, and I think that going back to that point I made earlier, like the, one of the risky things of doing that is that it's just very easy if I'm frustrated about something in Simple Modern to be like, I'm going to go work on Trevi, or I'm going to go work on our new projects. And if Trevi's going slower than I want to, then I'll just kind of be like, I'm going to context switch over to this thing over there. But that doesn't mean I'm necessarily working on the best thing. Uh, or the highest leverage thing. So, and you're right, it's a huge, I do a huge amount of context switching. Um, and, and I'm probably less effective as a result of it. You know, I think I can do it, but the research says you're probably not very, is it, you know, like multitasking, you're probably not as good at it as you think you are.

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Do either of you have a strong take on that on with AI now? 'Cause like, I don't know if I'm actually more productive. I've got like 6 fricking terminal windows open. They're all doing different shit. It's, I feel it. I feel, feel like a badass, but it's like, am I actually more productive or should I just shut it all down? And like I did that yesterday. Yesterday was copy day, email. I shut everything else off, didn't do anything else, and all I did was work on email. Uh, got a lot done.

I'm sure Zero to One teaches you guys lots of empathy because, you know, like you have David Herman freaking out about Facebook bugs or whatever. And I'm like, whatever, David, I don't care. But you actually have to do it. You have to like deal with a crashing ads window.

So, you know what else I'm, what I'm really appreciating? Like one of the pieces of feedback that we always, that we get frequently for this show is like, make more content for the smaller brand. Like the, the zero to one, the one to 5, the 5 to 10. It's like, oh yeah, this is going to be really easy. Standing this up now, because that's all we're doing is in the weeds. Don't have all of the accoutrements of a company, like, which sounds great. I mean, but you hear Mike, it's not that great sometimes.

Well, it's like I've said as we were getting ready for it that like, there's like 3 or 4 episodes early on in us building something new that'll be like super easy. It's like, oh yeah, we got to set this up. We got to stand that up. We got to do this, whatever. But If you don't find some kind of traction, product market fit pretty quickly, it's gonna be a pretty boring show pretty quick. 'Cause it's like, yeah, this is, uh, episode 18, still hitting $300 CAC. Uh, have no idea. Gonna throw some more stuff at the wall. See you next week.

Yeah, dude, don't spoil—

You really are depressing today.

Yeah, don't spoil season 2, dude. That's season 2. Just be in mind.

That's right. Huge cliffhanger at the end of season 1 where we go from $300 to $200 CAC. You'll have to tune back in to find out what happens next.

Well, look, I think at the very least it'll give us a great postmortem about like the realities of launching a modern-day brand. And I think it's gonna be so fun to listen to that. Um, Matt, on your thing about are you more productive with AI? For sure. But I do think there's this degree where you get, you end up having so much productivity and so much free time that then you're like, okay, well, what else can I do with it? And that is, that is the danger zone. Me and Connor talked about this. I do think AI is gonna let people work 4 days a week because at a certain point, all projects worth doing at Ridge are going to get done. Like, we're getting to the point where, you know, we're— we call it a 100-person organization, but we're probably doing the work of 300 people. And then how much more work could there be? It's like we're launching thousands of ads, you know what I mean? We're working with tons of partners. Like, we have all the product stuff going on. And I do think like the real The real curveball in AI is that productivity will just, all the work's done. Okay, well everyone can take Friday off. Like that's what I think we're going towards. What do you guys think about that?

Well, quantity doesn't make up for judgment, I think is the big takeaway from AI that yeah, you can fire out 10x the code. You can write 100x the output, but that doesn't replace the judgment of what should you be working on? What should you be talking about? What are the things that matter the most? So yeah, Ridge can launch 100 products, I'm sure, if you wanted to, but that doesn't mean like your top 5% are still gonna be your top 5%. You know, it's not like there's that many ideas out there in the universe of things that Ridge should even think about launching. And so I think that what you're saying is a really good insight, Sean, which is just because you have the capacity doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing, especially if that capacity Takes you out of judgment mode of like, what is important to work on right now and what is likely to drive the bottom line. And don't confuse, you know, like we talk about this sometimes when it comes to like the people that work with us, that it's important for them to understand and not confuse like showing up and working a certain number of hour weeks or being productive and doing something that's not actually success in your job. Success in your job is actually being able to drive output. and successful sales and profit and stuff like that. And so I think there is definitely, we're in this era where we're very in danger of confusing productivity with being effective.

It's the activity versus accomplishment thing.

Totally. And it's like, look, we're getting to the point where every company has 200 additional digital workers in AI, right? And it's like, Great, put them to work. But at a certain point, how many more digital workers do you need? And maybe I'm just not thinking clearly enough about the future. Maybe I'm not being ambitious enough, but at a certain point, if I have 1,000 free digital workers, I'm only going to send an email every day. You know what I mean?

So I totally have a take on this, Sean. My take is, and I think the data already is proving that this is where the market's going, is that organizations are going to get smaller and there's just going to be a lot more of them. But if you think about thematically what I've been talking about today, that's exactly what you would expect. happen that you would expect that as our tools get better, organizations will get more and more focused on doing like a thing super awesome, right? Like Ridge can sell toothpaste, I guess, but like, are you ever going to do that at a world-class level? Probably not. And why would you? Why not just start a separate company that sells toothpaste? And like, I think about that even with Simple Modern, and this is one of the reasons why we've gone the brands route where we're just exploding things out. Very small teams, very focused. So, uh, my guess is that that's gonna be one of the ways. It's not gonna be like, oh, this team now does 10x as much. It's just like, no, there's just teams are smaller and there's a lot more teams that are hyper-focused on a thing. If you're scaling an e-commerce brand today, ads alone aren't enough. AfterSell focuses on the one moment that every brand already owns after checkout and turns the post-purchase moment into more profit. Monetize every order with post-purchase offers and thank you page experiences without disrupting checkout or hurting conversion. Enterprise-grade tech used by Gap, Ticketmaster, Macy's, and Target, now driving results for brands like True Classic, HexClad, Ridge, and Jones Road. I would know. This is the reason I ended up buying 3 pans from HexClad instead of 2. AfterSell has already generated over $1 billion in additional revenue for e-commerce brands, revenue that doesn't require more traffic, Or higher CAC. So check out AfterSell and tell them that the operator sent you.

To take that a step further, Mike, the other end of it would be you do just get lots of time back and you decide to do something else with it.

For sure.

Right? So like, I think that's the question, Sean. It's more a question of goals. It's like, because why stop at a 4-day workweek?

Have you ever seen the graph of hours worked in the United States over the last 150 years? What do you think the average number of hours that was worked by a person in the United States at the end of the 1800s?

120?

It was like 95 because most people were farmers. It's like you just have a ton of farmers and it's like, yeah, when the sun's up, I'm working. And so it's crazy when we talk about work-life balance of like, yeah, man, my 40-hour-a-week job, I don't know if I've got work-life balance. And previous generations are just rolling over in their graves. So, but yeah, I mean, that's the trend. It's been the trend, and I don't see any reason why that trend is likely to stop, which is all this like doomer mentality about the technology I push back on because I'm like, what if the technology means that we are much more connected relationally with other people and that work takes up less and less of our mindshare? And, you know, there's less and less disease. And like one of my theories is that we're at peak screen. Peak mouse click that from this point on, you know, the technology starts to become less and less intrusive in our lives. And so anyway, like, yeah, it's like, how can you not be excited about a future that makes that possible where more and more of my week is not spent trying to figure out, you know, how much this type of PP plastic is going to shrink and what that means for a mold and like actually like spending time with my son or like getting to know my neighbors or whatever else.

people will spend less hours working on one job or one thing just because there'll be more. There's— I, what I'm starting to realize is I think there's a finite amount of work an organization can actually absorb, right? And then outside of that is actually a detriment. You end up doing more process for the sake of process to fill up hours.

Yeah, I, I agree. I think the, what Mike is hitting on is important. I think the other thing I would add is that most people don't actually like to work. Like work is not something that a lot of people want to do. You could argue that like a lot of people like to create and maybe they just don't have jobs that allow them to create. But if you said to somebody like, you can make the same amount of money and work half the time, they would ha— like very happily do that. And they probably would not go get another job to make more money. They would probably just take the time. You know, I think entrepreneurs are just weird.

Yeah. Like, you know, all of us are talking about like, yeah, maybe we'll have multiple companies and the average person's gonna be like, I'm gonna go to the movies twice this week. Right?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'll watch football all day on like whatever the night is. Yeah. Uh, yeah, it's, uh, I had a friend once we were talking about this. Like, what do you think? What, what happens when people have AI do all the work for them? What are they going to do? He's like, whatever they do on the weekend. That's the answer. It's like, whatever you do on Sunday, you're going to do that every day.

Yeah. Look, and do humans normalize? Like we're, we're talking about how everyone's talking about how this is the worst time ever and capitalism is stealing money from or whatever. And then you just heard Mike say that. 3 generations ago, everyone you know worked till they died on a farm, right? And it's like, and, and, and now you have self-driving cars and iPhones and you can order, you know, private burrito taxis or whatever, right? It's like, nah, dude, life's great. Everyone needs to shut up.

So Sean, what about you, man? What's going on in your world?

Yeah, so I, I originally come into this pod, I was like, therapy episode? My life's fucking awesome, dog. I'm killing it. But I, you know, I started thinking about what are, what are challenges that I face? And it really is, how do you stay passionate about something you've done for so long? Right. Um, I did not found Ridge Wallet. I'm not passionate about wallets. You know what I mean? Like, this is a— I'm passionate about e-commerce and system building. So like, that's what I, that's why I got into this. And the longer you do a business, the bigger it gets, you know, it does start to lose some of the luster, right? The actual shininess of being in. 'Cause I, I see the reality of it. I'm sure every business is like this. And the other thing is we are 5 years into a stagflation cycle. Like interest rates have not come down. The signals from Wells Fargo point to the interest rates are actually going to go up, right? And that just makes it really difficult to be running a discretionary consumer brand. Like the market's at all-time highs. Like people I know are getting fabulously wealthy and I'm like, yeah, no, I'm still selling the wallets on the internet. And it just seems very unvalued in today's market, right? Where I'm, you know, I'm very— I'm a 1% outcome. I am so happy and blessed to be doing this, and I have a great job, and Ridge is growing. It's all great. But BAEZ is a great brand. They got to $230 million in revenue, then they had a couple down years. They're at like $200-ish, whatever, $210. Uh, they just sold for 1x revenue. And it's like, all right, everybody, that is the reality of the e-commerce market. They got about 10x EBITDA, right? And that's, that's a really good outcome to a strategic That's basically all you could pray for. And I'm like, you're looking around, it's like, oh, goddamn, I just spent 10 years of my life and you missed that one window. Timing is everything. You know what I mean? In real estate, people say location, location, location. If you're in any sort of business, it's timing, timing, timing. If you're too late or too early, it could take a decade of your life.

Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos. This is why I'm loving what Rich Panel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together, made it practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting, they flipped the whole script. Their AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it. It works. It's freaking amazing. Rich Panel even guarantees 50% of your support volume will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no-brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild, about $0.20 per conversation instead of most other vendors being like $1 to $3, which is a little nuts. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com/demo, not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. Do you guys actually believe that you can be passionate about the thing that you do? Like, or like the product, the category? I just feel, I sometimes wonder if that's actually just like not the right frame. Like I've never been passionate about any product I've sold, but I love building companies. Like I like the act of creation. I like creative. I like writing and all that stuff. So there's like an element of it I like, but like the product, I don't give a shit. I'll sell anything. I will sell toothpaste happily.

Yeah. Michael's talking about Rich selling toothpaste. I'm like, I'll write that down. Toothpaste. All right.

What if I had a power bank that could just shoot toothpaste into my mouth? Huge market.

I love products like that so much.

But I actually think you can be passionate about whatever you do, trying to do it at a standard, Matt. And I think that that's probably the way that a lot of the people that think about the world the way that we do, the way that they approach it is. And so like, If I'm going to sell water bottles, then I want to do it well. And I think you're right. I'm kind of more agnostic about product. It's not like, oh, I could only work on that or sell that. And I get kind of annoyed, especially in the consumable world. There was a little bit of a Twitter kerfuffle about this of people kind of running down other people's products. Oh, well, you use monk fruit. You use sucralose, like, oh, well, you, you know, you're not really serious about making a good product where the, the— Yeah. And it's, it's like, I just think, I think it's an honorable thing. So I'll give it, I'll give a story that illustrates the way I feel about this. Um, took my son with me on a trip to Utah. We work with a partner there for all of our Trevi production, and we're going to do some other things with them. And I'd never taken him on a factory visit with me. Like I said, he's 14, he's about to turn 15. And the guy that's the CEO of the factory was real gracious. And at one point he took my son around and was just showing him all these things in the factory. The line was running and like how they worked and what they did and whatever. And so it was cool. It was cool for Carter to be exposed to that. And then I pulled him aside right in front of one of the lines and I said, I said, this is what it takes for all the people in the world to be able to have the kind of lives that they want to live and the kind of standard of living that we're all used to. And it is an honorable thing that we get to do, that we get to work hard so that people are able to experience life that way. And that is what it's all about. And I think that, I think you can get excited about that. Like, I am adding value to the world by doing this thing and doing it with excellence. And that's the lives that we all get to enjoy today are just a result of countless people, businessmen in the past that took that mindset and did it with excellence. And so I don't, that's kind of more the framing I'm using for him as I'm giving him vision. He wants to be an entrepreneur. And I think that that's the framing I try and take to my day-to-day when I, especially when I'm doing stuff that I'm doing it for the 800th time.

Both what you guys said, I think kind of sums up the like passion is just like any other skill. It's like either have a lot of it or a little bit, and you can kind of train it over time. And then once you have a lot of passion, you could be passionate about whatever, you know what I mean? If you're going to sell rocks, you'd be the most passionate rock guy on earth, right? I think there is rare entrepreneurs who are able to exclusively work on something that's very meaningful to them, you know what I mean? Like maybe it's Epic Gardening and Kevin over there, maybe he really loves gardening. Like this is, this is like his life's work or whatever, right? Uh, but it's not wallets for me. Um, yeah, anyway, so it's like the thing that I challenge with every single day right now is like, look, our industry used to be way cooler, okay? Used to be like way more prestige working in e-commerce. Now that's gone entirely to AI. I think if you're in SaaS, you're probably like, people are making fun of you like you're like a rapper or a stripper or whatever, you know what I mean? Like, it's like low-value work, right? I feel like e-commerce—

A SaaS stripper, my goodness. We've got, we've got everybody who is a manager is a sociopath, and we got the SaaS strippers.

Tune in next week for—

yeah, anyway, so it's like, it's like, it is, it is hard to manage that, right? Like, things are going well, but at the end of the day, it's like, it's, it's— imagine working on a public company and your stock's down 80%. That's, that's what a private e-commerce business is, or whatever. It's like, anyway, so that's, that's one of the challenges.

I do think the point that was made earlier is that People work for money and they should work first and foremost for money because that's, you know, they're providing for themselves and their families and those people that matter to them. And like, I feel like sometimes I've kind of forgotten that because I'm kind of more intrinsically excited about the work, but that's why 99% of people work is because they need to drive an income and we should Always, if you're not thinking about the world that way, you should always keep that in mind and you should respect that. You know, that, that's why people are doing it. They're trading time that they'd rather not trade to work. They'd rather spend it with their kids or go fishing or whatever. And so there's a responsibility to help them be really effective in that.

Dude, money is a great motivator. I hate people who say that you shouldn't be motivated by money. And I'm like, the only people who say that are people with lots of it and they should just shut up and go back to their corner. You know, like it's a fine motivator, especially at the beginning when you were like new, go for it. Like chase the money, you know, get to the whatever financial freedom number you need right away. That's a great motivator.

Yeah. Okay. So there's a scene in The Wedding Singer, that old Adam Sandler movie. He goes to like the bank trying to get a job. He's like, I like money. I have some of it. I would like more of it. Yeah.

That's one of my favorite. I have a jar. There's a little money in it. I'd like to put more money in it. That's where you come in. If you ever hear me say Billy Idol gets it, why doesn't she? I'm referencing Wedding Singer, which is an all-timer. But yeah, for sure. And I think what it is, Matt, is that when people say like, oh, it's bad when people are motivated by money, I think that probably the implication is that those people love money, but it's like everybody is motivated by resources and how they can impact the world around them. Like, You'd kind of be stupid if you weren't. Like, I would kind of question somebody who was like, yeah, I don't, I don't get excited at all about being able to earn resources to, to be able to provide better for my kids or to be able to make the lives of people around me better. Like, okay, are you the, you're the sociopath, you know? So like, it totally makes sense. And I think that this is one of the reasons why I was talking about the effectiveness thing and the focus thing is at this point, I've got enough money. So to tie all these themes in here, I've got enough money. So why do I keep going to work every day? Why am I adding extra brands? And because there's a lot of nonsense that comes with running any one company, much less many companies. And I do think it starts to be more motivating, like the story I was telling with my son of like, hey, when I go to work, I can make the lives of many people better. And so like, okay, that is motivating, which isn't to say money doesn't play any role, but it's maybe just not as strong role or the dominant role or whatever. But okay, if I'm going to do that, if I'm going to go to work because I want to make people's lives better, then regardless of whether I'm feeling super passionate about water bottles today, I need to make the best water bottle that I can. And I need to be thinking about the way that I lead people to help them accomplish their goals and that they're able to earn what they want to earn. So I do think in one way, all these different things we're talking about do tie together.

Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D2C and e-commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally, and most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. And the second your 3PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true landed costs. You don't know your real margin. You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11:00 PM trying to figure out where $40,000 went. I know because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement, it's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for D2C, and it's not some live-coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of 'em. Go check out Fulfill. Tell 'em Sean sent you. And you know, going back towards your thing, how do you make sure people stay locked in, focused on things that matter. I'll give you just one example inside of Ridge. Ridge has a multimillion-dollar pen business. We sell pens to people. I hate it. I've always hated it. I think the margins are horrible. I don't think people buy pens. I don't think it's ever going to get bigger. So this year I made the decision to shut it down in front of everybody. So on standup explaining, yeah, You know how we sell pens? We're not doing that anymore. We're gonna sell this other stuff that's way working. And I think—

We're gonna sell pencils. Yeah.

Erasers. That's what we're gonna do.

Make all the jokes, guys. Uh, but no, but, but it's because like, why, why did I delete this? It's millions of dollars revenue that's gonna come off the top line. And it's because the same amount of work that goes into to launch a a new wallet or a luggage piece or whatever goes into the pen. You have to make a SKU, you have to make a render, you have to do product dev, you have to place POs, you have to store it. All that type of stuff. Now it's harder— it's easier than luggage, it's not as big, but it's like all those same steps go into it for a business that is never going to be big or meaningful and has horrible margins. So I'm like, we just need to shut this down, right? And then you have a bunch of people screeching being like, no, but we're gonna lose the revenue, or what are we gonna do with the kits, or X, Y, or Z. Like, because we have web infrastructure built for it, we have all this stuff built for it. And as executive, you have to just be like, I don't care, it's deleted now, right? Um, and that just shows, I think, the whole organization what's actually important, right? It's like, I never want to hear about pens again. Pens are dead to me. They are not important anymore. And the people get— they just move on. They're like, okay, that— we're doing something else now. Um, so that's a tip for everybody. Do something drastic in your organization. Delete something, add something new. Tell everyone how important Easier to do on standups.

Sean, I think this is really, you know, like, I don't even know what I would title this episode, by the way, if you're still listening, but I actually think this is a great discussion that deletion and editing is actually a superpower. And in a world where AI and just the sprawl of doing things is going to be, you know, I mean, it's like, do I even go on social media anymore? Like what percentage of this was even human generated, right? And so like, I really think the ability to edit is probably how you're successful in the world ahead. It's not by doing more, but it's about having more focus. And that's, and editing is just another way of saying focus, right? There's a great line in Ocean's Eleven where he says something like, never use 7 words when 2 will do. You know, and it's like that same kind of idea of like, in our businesses, it's like never sell 7 products when 2 will do because you'll just do those 2 better and it'll be more enjoyable.

And you'll make more money. You know, like you said earlier, AI can spit you out 10 pages, but like brevity's a skill. You know what I mean? It's like, I want to know the, like, it doesn't help me to read the 10 pages of random AI notes that like have way too many adjectives in there, right? It's like, just tell me the 4, bullet points I need to see to make a decision in my life. Then I'll feed that into my AI and talk to my AI about it.

So, by the way, you, I don't know if this is a pro tip on AI, you can control, uh, and people should do this, you can control the output of your favorite tool like Claude Code, Claude Codex, whatever it is. Like you should absolutely, if you're an entrepreneur, tell it to be brief, right? Like give it instruction. There was actually a really good post on X, if I could find the link, I'll send it to you.

Yeah, about Dresslers. Uh, is that the one you're talking about?

Yeah, it's like you, I don't want, like, 'cause they've actually gotten more, uh, verbose in their responses. I don't know, you guys, this has like been a thing with, uh, Fable or Opus. It's like, why the fuck are you writing 4 paragraphs? Like, I just want an answer. And you actually have to, you can do this. You can actually go give it instruction to say like, nope, just give me point form. I don't need all the crap.

Mike, you feeling better about this? 'Cause throughout the episode, you look like you've gotten worse and worse, dude.

Wow. I, I don't know what vibe I'm giving off, but it must be—

This is you halfway through the app. Uh, yeah.

I guess I just, I just need you to give me a wellness check, uh, call tonight. And, uh, no, I'm good. I'm good. Early morning. But I do think the stuff we're talking about, like, is just challenging. Maybe that's some of what you're picking up on is like, this stuff is just hard. I don't know the right answers to this. And, you know, a lot of times when you run a company for a while, you start to get to where you like, you feel like, you know, how you want to handle a thing or you have a pretty clear kind of set of principles. And I do feel more and more like we're in this kind of uncharted world where we've got to relearn the way that we think about some of these things. And so helpful therapy session. Thank you both.