Exploring 10X Goals, Navigating Creativity, Content Optimization, and Delegation Strategies

Callan Harrington 00:00
Putting yourself where everybody else isn't comes with a pretty significant advantage. Everyone's on social for sure, which means you've got to be really consistent and have pretty high-quality content in order to stand out, or you just have to say some stuff that is very controversial. But the flip side is, because everybody's over there and they're not thinking about this, and they think it's all dying, there is an opportunity to hit a certain market at a pretty cost-effective rate. You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn’t be more excited that you're here. Alright, Sullivan, we're back. We're back with another very random show. We're back—the most random of shows. Thank you to those who have listened and are listening, excited to do another one. Alright, let's hop in. I'll kick it off with hot off the press. Now, I’m going to preface this with what I said last time, which is that I don’t know if this is hot off the press, but it’s hot off the press to me. So, are you familiar with direct primary care providers?

Sullivan Finlay 01:05
Only loosely. Tell me more.

Callan Harrington 01:07
Okay, so essentially, it’s a primary care provider where you don’t use insurance, and you pay a flat monthly amount. I’ve heard of these before, but I’ve only really heard of these from the perspective of, you know, like Peter Attia is a good example of this. He’s a concierge doctor, and I know people pay a ton of money, like six figures to see him on an annual basis. But I found this company, I was referred to by another podcast guest. They do something similar—like they do the DEXA scans, they do the VO2 maxes. You get access to a dietitian, you get access to an exercise physiologist, and they do all the things that you think of that are pretty popular right now, and it’s only $200 a month. But I’ve told, like, my other friends who would be interested in something like this, and they’re like, “This sounds way too good to be true.” And I was like, “That is exactly what I thought.” Because I have my primary care physician, who I love, and I won’t switch the actual primary care physicians because I really, really like mine. But when he ordered a DEXA scan, I couldn’t get it for four months, so I reached out to this place. I’m like, “Hey, can I use you for all this other stuff and continue to use my primary care physician?” And they said, “That’s totally doable.” So, I’m testing this now. I’m not here to necessarily talk about, like, should you or should you not do all these tests and all that. I’m way too into all this stuff. What’s interesting is, I was trying to break this down—like, how is this possible? My guess is, once you get the membership to a certain amount, it’s going to be 80/20, because that’s a lot of times what it is in SaaS, where you’ve got 20% of people using the majority of the services, and the rest of the 80% may use it a little bit, but they get enough value, so they’re not very costly, but that 20% is more costly. But at any rate, I’m super excited to try it. They were able to get a DEXA scan. They could have literally gotten it today. I signed up yesterday, and they could have gotten it today, which is nuts. So, they’ve got me on the books for next Thursday. And then as a follow-up to that, in the same email, they responded back and said, “Yeah, let’s also get you on the books with the dietitian right after that.” Like, that’s insane. I couldn’t believe this. So, we’ll see. I don’t know, but I thought it was a really, really, really cool model.

Sullivan Finlay 03:25
Wow.

Callan Harrington 03:26
I feel like, especially at that price point, like, as people who either have or are, like, self-employed and knowing what private insurance costs, like, it’s crazy that they offer all of that for $200 a month.

Sullivan Finlay 03:43
That’s what I’m saying.

Callan Harrington 03:44
And the only reason I’m not saying the actual name is because I just don’t want to recommend something one way or the other until I’ve experienced it a little bit. But I will—for our listeners that are in the Columbus area—I will mention who it is once I try it a few times, but we’ll see. Because with that, I also get a gym membership and access to the saunas, the cold tubs, all that different stuff, which I’m not even planning on using because I have a gym that I really like. I just couldn’t believe they had all these other services for that price.

Sullivan Finlay 04:15
That’s crazy to me, right?

Callan Harrington 04:17
Yeah. Is your primary care physician, or his office, like, alerted to that? Or do they work together?

Sullivan Finlay 04:23
Great question. My guess is, no, I don’t know that though, because that’s something I was also wondering, right? It’s like the blood tests and such that I’ve had with my primary care physician—can I send that over to them? Do I have to do new blood work over there? I don’t know, but I figured at the very least, if that speeds up the DEXA scan by a few months, and I could talk to an exercise physiologist and a dietitian, that alone is totally worth it.

Callan Harrington 04:44
That’s fair. This does feel like we should wrap up this conversation by saying the name of the product, and then like a phone number or something to call.

Sullivan Finlay 04:54
Hey, maybe they’ll be a sponsor, and we’ll put them as an ad. So anyway, that’s mine. I thought it was super interesting.

Callan Harrington 05:00
What you got?

Sullivan Finlay 05:01
So I, once again, kind of got on like a random internet rabbit hole. This time it was on local news and wondering where technology could take it. So, I was reading this article—for those who don’t know, I’m in Chicago. I have been for a few years—and so I was reading specifically about Chicago news and Illinois news but found some really interesting statistics about just local news in general and its role now. As we know, especially newspapers are dying with the rise of the internet and just how traditional media has changed. But the statistics around it were really fascinating. For example, the rise of the internet and the collapse of traditional advertising has wiped out nearly one-third of US newspapers since 2005. So, 20 years. Residents in more than half of US counties have no or very limited access to reliable local news. Four counties in Illinois specifically have no local news source. Thirty-four rely on a single source. And it’s not just that, like, the business model is outdated, right? The internet has come in and wiped everything out. It’s also that people are searching differently. We’re looking for news differently, and quite literally, it’s often in, like, search engine behavior. So we’re looking up where to eat, we’re looking up what the weather is going to be. We’re looking up different things like that, even more than the news. And then, as it pertains to the news, this article also had a table breaking out where Chicago area residents specifically get their news. And they break it out by searching for news multiple times a day, once a day, different categories. But for people, when they look at news multiple times a day, 28% of people find the news via search engine. Twenty-one percent still use local TV, so that still has some stronghold there. Twenty-one percent get it from social media, so the same as TV. Thirteen percent get it from friends and family—so word of mouth. Eleven percent get it from local radio stations or local news podcasts, and 7% get it from local newspapers. Which, it’s sad, but I honestly thought that was higher than I was expecting. But it’s interesting to think, especially with newspapers, where that’s going. This article posits that, like, potentially philanthropists almost bail these companies out, and that’s how, like, people who are concerned enough about certain newspapers will keep them going. But I’m wondering, where does this industry go in the future? And is there room for it to be disrupted in terms of technology? Especially, you know, 28% of people getting their news from search engines, 21% from social media. Especially as someone in the social media space, people are searching social media now the way they search search engines. Like, they’re looking up different things. So, what role does technology have in, like, local news? Growing up, you know, every day we would watch the news while eating dinner as a family, or we’d read the newspaper, or things like that. So it’s interesting to think, like, does this industry stay alive where there’s, like, a centralized, reliable news source, or is it kind of scattered the way it is now, and people are getting information from all over?

Callan Harrington 08:01
It’s an interesting question. I mean, I think one of the things that I’d be super curious about is, what is the age breakdown of those?

Sullivan Finlay 08:08
Yes.

Callan Harrington 08:09
Because I remember, like, doing advertising and such for, like, the senior market, where those were still super valuable—whereas newspaper ads or local news spots, things like that. TV, I should say, outside of sports—not to say that wouldn’t be effective, but, like, everybody knows, sports are still effective, because that’s the only time people watch live TV. Or one of the only times, I should say, people watch live TV. But that is really interesting. One of the things I’m curious about is, I wonder, are people still drawn to these news outlets just because of the journalists that are there?

Sullivan Finlay 08:44
Yeah.

Callan Harrington 08:45
Maybe from some of the main sites? Not to say they don’t have excellent journalists at main sites, but it feels like even if you look at people who write for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and you talked about philanthropy—it makes sense. You know, Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post, pretty good example of that. Will something like that continue to happen, just to keep it up? It really is fascinating.

Sullivan Finlay 09:08
I think that’s a great point as far as age and demographic breakdowns, because it’s like, yeah, newspapers or TV are both higher than I would have expected. But it’s like, people in my age range, probably social media would be higher amongst us, or even search engine stuff. So I think it also depends on who you’re advertising to. I’ll give you an example. There was a pretty successful, independent, registered investment advisor, which is essentially a financial advisor on their own, and they had a radio show locally. And that’s where they got the majority of their business. AM radio, by the way. And people would call in, they’d answer the questions and things like that. So in my eyes, I kind of look at it two ways. One, it’s—could this eventually die? I think that’s probably a very fair question to be asking. Likely, yes. But in the meantime...

Callan Harrington 10:00
...putting yourself where everybody else isn't comes with a pretty significant advantage. Everyone’s on social for sure, which means you’ve got to be really consistent and have pretty high-quality content in order to stand out, or you just have to say some stuff that’s very controversial. But the flip side is, because everybody's over there and they're not thinking about this, and they think it’s all dying, there’s an opportunity there to hit a certain market at a pretty cost-effective rate.

Sullivan Finlay 10:22
Yeah, I think just especially, like, is there a way to make it pretty centralized so it's not scattered across different media types, and that it’s something that’s reliable—people trust—where it’s like, I don’t have to search something, even though I am going to a search engine and then clicking on a few different pages. You know, it’s just one source. I’m curious to see what role technology plays in all that.

Callan Harrington 10:45
Yeah, totally agree. Alright, off to work in progress. I’ll kick it off. So I’ve been on this kick, and if you’ve listened to any of these episodes, you could pretty much tell whatever book I’m reading because I reference it like 20 times in guest episodes. But I’m reading the book 10X Is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. They’ve written a couple of really, really good books. Who Not How was one of my favorites. Another one a lot of people like is called The Gap and the Gain. But this one, 10X Is Easier Than 2X, is really geared towards entrepreneurs, but the thought process, I think, applies to anybody. Essentially, it’s if you set a goal that’s 10 times bigger than your current goals, it feels like something that’s almost impossible. It’s a great thought exercise to go through because there’s only one or two ways that you can hit that 10X goal. You know, examples would be: You need to get a lot bigger clients, you need to create different types of partnerships that can lead to bigger engagements, or you have to have a product—maybe it’s a smaller per-seat license, but it’s got to be able to expand to a larger number, or whatever that might be. They even use the example of Mr. Beast, where Mr. Beast said, "I did fewer videos, but I made those as high quality as I possibly can." And if you look at any of Mr. Beast’s videos, I mean, they look like a TV show. And as a result of that, you stand out, and you're more likely to get that. Now, what I thought was most interesting about this and why they say it’s easier than 2X is because to double, you’re really just doing more of what you’re doing today, so that actually ends up adding more effort, whereas to 10X, you have to cut a lot of the things that you’re doing today in order to hit a much larger goal because only one or two things can get you there. Lots of things can get you to 2X. So it’s been on my mind. And what I found interesting is when I’m talking to a lot of the guests—sometimes some of these things only apply to like a bootstrapped company or something like that—but when I’m talking to a lot of these guests in the venture community, they’re saying, "No, I’m thinking about it very similarly. I’m thinking of this huge goal, which makes what we need to do today and prep in order to get there that much simpler, because we just can’t do all these other things. We’ll never be able to hit this big goal in the next 2, 3, 4 years."

Sullivan Finlay 12:57
I’m curious to hear, are there examples of ways that you’ve implemented that in your life, whether personally or professionally?

Callan Harrington 13:05
Yeah, a pretty decent amount, actually. The gift and the curse is, when I read a book, I’ll start implementing it all immediately.

Sullivan Finlay 13:12
[Laughs] Yeah.

Callan Harrington 13:13
And it’s a gift because, yeah, you can make some good progress pretty quickly. The curse—because you’re just changing everything. But at any rate, yes, I passed off more things to the assistant faster because a big part of it is, like, you really need to focus your time on the 20% of activities that can get you towards that 10X and delegate the 80% that’s not your unique ability that’s going to get you there. So, with the assistant, I’ve just passed off more and more things, one of which being email, which is something that I was super nervous to pass off. But I’m looking at my email so much less. I’m clearing up more time in my calendar. And then, for example, things like with the podcast—like, with the show notes and things like that. I’ve brought on a ghostwriter that I’ve used in the past, and she’s excellent. And it’s funny, I was going through and I was writing a post and all this, and I thought, “Why am I spending hours on this still?” Me doing those things is not what’s going to get me to the 10X result. So I’ve made a number of investments like that, and I’ve really started to focus on engagements where I’ve got the team that’s doing the majority of the delivery. It’s made a big impact already, and I’ll be super excited to see where this goes in the next six months to a year. But it’s already really moving quickly in the right direction.

Sullivan Finlay 14:34
Those are really good examples. I definitely relate to, like, when reading any sort of, like, productivity-type book, I start implementing things in, like, very small ways. I feel like, especially for a “less is more” type of book, I’ll start just, like, purging things from my closet or things like that.

Callan Harrington 14:51
[Laughs]

Sullivan Finlay 14:52
It’s always like a very quick win kind of thing that also, like, at the end feels good, but you’re also kind of like, “Well, could’ve done something else that’s more impactful.” But I definitely fall into that camp as well.

Callan Harrington 15:01
I would tell you, I do that, and I use that as a lot—as just constant motivation. I read every single morning, and that’s probably one of the biggest reasons. It almost keeps me accountable and on my mind. So, it kind of trickles down throughout the day.

Sullivan Finlay 15:17
Yeah.

Callan Harrington 15:18
But anyway, what are you working on?

Sullivan Finlay 15:20
So, in past episodes, I’ve talked about how this season, especially in terms of comedy, in terms of content, the summer has been almost a season of survival and just, like, keeping the business going and working on a few key brand partnerships. This kind of relates to “less is more,” almost, like, just the few pillars of content that I need to have and I need to do to keep things going. And now, post all the things this summer—moving, just got married, just honeymooned—all of that has now passed. It was all amazing, but business-wise, it also means that now it’s kind of turning into, like, a growth stage, which is really exciting.

Callan Harrington 16:02
Mm-hmm.

Sullivan Finlay 16:03
So for me, I’ve started to really think about tools I want to use in kind of going through this growth stage to really help me better grow and accelerate in multiple areas. Because before, it was kind of like I was just keeping content alive so that later down the road, I could be doing the other things in comedy I want to do, whether that’s stage or film, TV, voiceovers, stuff like that. So, now it’s started to just, like, very practically be tools where I organize myself. And again, none of these sponsor either my social media or Callan and myself here on the podcast, but, uh, if you want to, go for it!

Callan Harrington 16:47
[Laughs] Hard pitch, hard pitch!

Sullivan Finlay 16:49
Yeah, one of us was in sales. I’ll let you guess who.

Callan Harrington 16:57
So, like, literally for me, where it starts—and this is the only one I feel biased on—is Slack, because I did work for Salesforce for a while. I did work there when they acquired Slack. I did work in M&A.

Sullivan Finlay 17:12
Did you work on the deal?

Callan Harrington 17:13
I didn’t work on the deal, no. I worked on an acquisition right before Slack. But Slack, for me, I am biased towards. I do love it, but literally, that’s where I house kind of all of my life. Like, if I were looking at my channels in Slack right now, I have: content, CPA, dog, financial, apartment, wedding—like, I’m probably gonna have one for friends eventually.

Sullivan Finlay 17:36
[Laughs]

Callan Harrington 17:37
But it’s like, I literally stay organized for all areas of my life in there. And then it’s starting to think about—and actually, this started to come from us talking about podcast stuff for you the other day too—just ways to organize my content schedule, especially thinking about it in terms of the pillars: what I have upcoming, what I just did, things like that. But then also, like, the key areas of comedy—content, stage, film, TV, sketch—so just thinking through different things like that, and a way I can visualize different areas of this whole, like, comedy side of things.

Sullivan Finlay 18:15
What’s your process for managing that in Slack? What does that look like? Obviously, you’re communicating back and forth with your dog on there, but like, what else?

Callan Harrington 18:26
Yeah, so all of my dog training is through Slack. I’m doing that while I’m cold plunging and thinking about my 10X goals. But, it’s just like a kind of central hub for all key information pertaining to different things. So, for example, when we moved to a new apartment, I have in there things like: installing the internet, getting new bedding, so it was like, “the best comforters,” or “the best sheets,” or things like that. You know, different furniture ideas will all stay in that channel, so I don’t have to go and find it later, you know?

Sullivan Finlay 19:12
Oh, you’re using it as a feed.

Callan Harrington 19:13
Yeah, I never thought—it’s like, “That can’t be that organized,” meaning, like...

Sullivan Finlay 19:19
Well, I’m just thinking of because you mentioned, like, production calendar, right? And I use Asana for that, and I’ve got the different columns and such for the different stages of that. Plus, of course, the calendar for actually planning that. But there’s not a great feed.

Callan Harrington 19:33
No, there are some tools that have been out there. Pocket, for example, was one that was pretty popular. Chatter tried to do this within Salesforce for years, and then obviously, that’s why they purchased Slack. But I never thought about using Slack as just a feed where... Yeah, truly, when I was working at Salesforce and was on Slack all the time, for me, it was like I would Slack myself—just in my personal channel—all reminders or feed-type stuff that I would need. And now, it’s just broken out by my own personal channels.

Sullivan Finlay 20:00
But yeah, Asana is one I have started to look into as far as the actual content management and kind of breaking it up by, like, what’s upcoming. But I’m definitely one of those types—maybe it’s similar to reading a book and immediately implementing something—where it’s like, “Ooh, this feels like a new hack.”

Callan Harrington 20:17
I love that. That’s a really interesting idea to use it for a feed. I may try that for some of these things, especially when you’re in that brainstorming research phase.

Sullivan Finlay 20:28
Yeah, that’s a huge part of it. Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Callan Harrington 20:32
Alright, let’s transition—one win, one loss. My win, I’ve already talked about it, is the assistant. She’s phenomenal, and I would probably go as far to say she’s really—I don’t know—the person leading operations, project management. She’s doing so much more than you know, I think, what people think of as an assistant: checking email and things like that. That’s been a big bonus, don’t get me wrong, but I would say probably one of the biggest values is she’s really, really, really good, and has operationalized and created different SOPs for different things like the podcast editing and all of that. Not only has it freed up time for my side, but just the whole overall process has gone 100 times smoother. So, I couldn’t be happier with that. Danette, if you’re listening, you deserve all the credit on this, so I love it.

Sullivan Finlay 21:25
That’s great. What’s yours? What’s your win?

Callan Harrington 21:27
I think for me, it’s been efficiencies I’ve started to find in editing content, which has been amazing. Again, a lot of my videos use a good amount of text, and the TikTok app definitely prioritizes videos that use native text within the platform. But a lot of the tools within it weren’t that good for a while, and they’ve started to get better—just very practically, like text box structure and things like that, have gotten better, where I can edit a video in probably half the time I was before, which has been a huge time saver, especially as I start to think about, “Okay, what different areas of comedy do I want to focus more time and energy on as I continue to grow this?” So that’s just been a huge win for me, as far as time-saving.

Sullivan Finlay 22:01
I bet. I tried one time to edit videos. I gave up and hired somebody for it.

Callan Harrington 22:09
 There is a big learning curve, especially upfront, but thankfully, it starts to kind of tail off pretty quickly. But upfront, it’s brutal.

Sullivan Finlay 22:22
I did not make it to that tail-off stage.

Callan Harrington 22:25
Well, actually, and I’ll give this shoutout—this is two shoutouts—Eliza Chun, she’s the person who is helping me with the ghostwriting and the content, and she also does the video editing, so makes my life 100 times easier. That’s shoutout number two. Actually, we’ve had a few shoutouts in this episode.

Sullivan Finlay 22:42
The grander individual. This episode is filled with shoutouts.

Callan Harrington 22:46
We are fishing hard for sponsors. Eliza, if you’d like to sponsor...

Sullivan Finlay 22:53
...and work on it, yeah. Very well-rounded.

Callan Harrington 22:55
So, loss—I’ve talked a lot about the time that I’ve freed up, but just before that, it was the exact opposite. Past couple weeks, and this is the last week of this where my schedule is—one, I hate back-to-back meetings with a passion. I’m very much against them. This week, it’s almost a solid wall. I think in the past, if I’m being totally honest, I looked at that as validation that I was working hard. I don’t want that anymore, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I think creating space for yourself in your life is so much better for so many different reasons. That’s all obvious, but a big piece of that too is you give yourself time for creativity and things like that, and that leads to pretty significant gains. So at any rate, my loss is—I just can’t stand it when my calendar looks like that, and it’s looked like that for the past few weeks. This week’s the worst, but it’s also the last, so I’ll be excited to get out of it.

Sullivan Finlay 23:53
For me, it’s been—I’ve kind of been reflecting on how a loss sometimes will just, like, creep up on you, and you’re like, “Oh, this sucks.” But sometimes a loss, like, you’re anticipating, and it’s still a loss, you know? And so for me, kind of still keeping on this content theme, it was like, you know, moving, getting married, going on a honeymoon, being gone a lot, and consistency being so key in social media. Knowing in advance, like, okay, performance of videos is going to be down. And with that, then there’s usually a little bit of a lag for brand involvement, so then brand involvement kind of tailing that will be down a little bit. And so, it’s knowing that that would be the case and still coming back and being like, “Okay, yeah, video performance is definitely down.” And that’s kind of the nature of it. As a business, overall, it goes up, but it’s up and down along the way. So yeah, it’s just one of those that does create opportunities for experimenting. It does create opportunities for sticking to what you’re good at and starting to build performance back up. But it is just always frustrating at the start of it. Once you climb back up, it feels amazing, but that’s my loss as far as social media.

Callan Harrington 25:05
I’d love to chat about something here. You mentioned the brands’ trail. Here’s one of the things that I’m curious about. So, I’ll give you a lot of credit—you’ve had some huge brands, Delta, Salesforce, to name a couple that have sponsored you in videos. Salesforce, I thought, is awesome in particular because you worked at Salesforce. Do those brands continue to buy again? Do you create a relationship with them? Because I know so much of this is handled by the actual agency. What does that look like?

Sullivan Finlay 25:32
So much of it—and once again, another shoutout to my team at Odyssey, who does all of this for me, and they’re so great—but as far as brand outreach and inbound receipts, they handle a lot of the relationships that are ongoing with different brands or different agencies. On the brand side, however, I do try to form really positive relationships and just simple stuff, like being easy to work with and just kind of walking the line of brand messaging and actual creative content so that, like, we have that relationship down the road. They do tend to buy again, frankly, as performance increases. But I haven’t discerned a certain specific behavior or any frequency with which that occurs, but it’s just kind of—simply put—performance is down, there’s less outreach. Performance is up, it kind of goes back up again.

Callan Harrington 26:25
How do you forecast? Is there any predictability to this whatsoever?

Sullivan Finlay 26:29
There’s some predictability. This is where I am thankful to have the CPA background and just figuring out how to forecast revenue and how to account for it. To me, it’s important for income to be ahead or cash received to be ahead of at least a few months’ actual inbound brand deals that are coming in. And so, it’s kind of saying, like, right now, we’re at the end of August. Basically saying, “Okay, if I don’t receive a brand deal this week, that’s not like the worst thing in the world.” You know, that’s not even concerning, because I’ve accounted for that a few months prior to this.

Callan Harrington 27:08
What I’m hearing is that you can only forecast about a couple of months ahead, so it’s important to have cash on hand because sometimes it’s unpredictable.

Sullivan Finlay 27:14
Yeah, that’s generally right. There are elements of it now too, where it’s like, what political risk is there to social media apps being shut down? There are different risk factors, but it’s just trying to be a few months ahead of what is actually coming in.

Callan Harrington 27:33
Yep, that makes sense.

Sullivan Finlay 27:34
Alright, so this is a new segment called the Spicy Hot Take. We debated doing this because we figured it’s probably not a good idea to get canceled in our third episode.

Callan Harrington 27:46
They hate each other. After debating, they hate each other.

Sullivan Finlay 27:49
So, what we’re doing for this—and if you don’t like the take, blame ChatGPT—we’re putting in the prompt of “give me one contrarian business take” as a prompt for a discussion, and I just did it. The one that came back is: outsourcing core business functions to third-party vendors can lead to more innovation and agility than maintaining those functions in-house. Ooh, this is interesting.

Callan Harrington 28:17
I think this dovetails with what we were talking about earlier, as far as 10X and 2X. It’s saying, “Sure, core business functions are the hardest to give up for a reason, because they are core to the business,” but I think having a willingness to almost tend towards giving more away than withholding—I think that’s generally good. Like, I think it’s good to have a bent toward delegation rather than holding on to things, even if it is core to the business.

Sullivan Finlay 28:44
Interesting. I have a potentially opposite take. What’s also interesting about this is we are a consulting firm, so it’s in my best interest to answer this in the way of, “Yes, third-party vendors, for sure. Always go with them at all times.” So, here’s my thought on this, and I’ve really thought about this a lot, especially from a sales perspective, right? Because that’s just a function that I know the best. There’s a big rise in fractional Chief Revenue Officers, fractional VPs of Sales, things like that. And we did that for a long time. In my opinion, if you are a growth company or a large company, that needs to be in-house. I know there are a lot of people, and I’ll probably get burned for this, who are like, “The fractional is a great position to have indefinitely.” I disagree with that. I think it’s very much a stopgap, and for that function specifically—and I’m not saying this doesn’t work with other functions—I’m speaking purely from the sales perspective. I think that it’s good to fill a gap, but you really need to have that in-house because it’s just such a demanding position. And you need to be very tied to the product team. You need to be tied to the marketing team. Not that you can’t do that on a fractional basis—I think it’s just very challenging. Especially if you’ve got people reporting to you in that position. I think it works best at the highest level where it’s kind of like they’re in a fractional position, but they’re really advising on the strategy and things like that and how to structure for scale, where you have a lot of the main people reporting to managers that are full-time. And then there are certain areas that I think are really specialized. I’ll use accounting, for example, and auditing and things like that, where having an outside firm is definitely good. If nothing else, getting that third-party viewpoint into that, I think, is super important.

Callan Harrington 30:33
Yeah, I think your point is sound, especially at a larger company, because I was kind of thinking of the stage anywhere from sole proprietor to early-stage startup. But especially for a larger company—I’ve been in a company before where they started to outsource pretty core accounting processes, and what I seemed to find, and some of our team members seemed to find, was we increased efficiency, and we lost effectiveness. Sure, we increased speed, and we were able to do more things as a team, but the things that we did before—it was easier to communicate as a team centrally, versus just outsourcing that to somebody else. And especially something like accounting that’s so important to the business. And yeah, you mentioned auditing—most companies, whether through debt covenants or through being a public entity, have to have auditors. You know, it’s that important. So, there are definitely certain business stages that I would agree with that on.

Sullivan Finlay 31:29
I think the key word is core, right? I think a lot of things that are non-core, there are going to be a lot of companies you can outsource to that are going to be a lot better. But I think those core functions, for many things, it’s good to have a really, really, really strong team in-house. And a lot of those positions, like the fractional positions and things like that, can work well, but they’re temporary. I really see that as helping them to get to a point where they can operate on their own. At least that’s my personal take on it. They have a role, and they have a valuable role when in the right spot.

Callan Harrington 32:05
Sure, good thing we kept it business-related, because if it was like outsourcing core processes of your relationship or something...

Sullivan Finlay 32:11
Yeah.

Callan Harrington 32:12
...“I’ll have someone else do communication. I don’t think I need to be here for that part.”

Sullivan Finlay 32:15
Yeah, like, “I’m doing it for the innovation. I just want to be able to iterate and improve, and I’m stuck in my ways.”

Callan Harrington 32:24
Look, I’ve got this 10X goal, and I just—somebody else is saying all this for me. I just can’t be the one to do this.

Sullivan Finlay 32:32
Thank you, you phrased that really well this time. Something changed.

Callan Harrington 32:35
Alright, that is our show. And as always, let us know your feedback on the episode.

Sullivan Finlay 32:43
Yeah, definitely let us know your takes on this issue as well. We’d love to see debate in the comments or chat.

Callan Harrington 32:52
That would be good. That would be spicy. Friendly spicy.