Tim Metzner - Founder & CEO at Fireroad: Nurturing Your Culture, Retaining Top Talent, and Leaps of Faith

Tim Metzner 00:00
These are lives that we get to impact through employment, right? So if we can create great jobs in these companies and in these regions, there's a massive potential for impact. But to do that, you've got to really intentionally focus on culture.

Callan Harrington 00:13
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. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of That Worked. This week, I'm joined by Tim Metzner. Tim is the founder and CEO of FireRoad. FireRoad is a new kind of holding company that launches, invests in, and grows companies. They partner with mission-driven entrepreneurs and investors focused on long-term impact. Prior to FireRoad, Tim was a founder of Ocean Accelerator, Differential, and Coterie Insurance. He's also an active angel investor in 56+ deals.

This was a really fun conversation. Tim is an entrepreneur through and through. We talked about the impact of early mentorship and how that can take you to some unexpected places. A big theme of this episode was leaps of faith, and I loved hearing the different times that this came up throughout Tim's life. We also talked about what makes a great co-founder—more specifically, how to vet a co-founder that you don't know. This is one of those things you hear about all the time. Some people can make this work, some people don't. I loved how Tim was both able to do this in the past and also shared his process for vetting someone now.

The part of the conversation I loved the most was talking about how Tim builds and nurtures a great culture. He gave a ton of good examples, and he really dove into the tactics he specifically used on how to do this. Anybody who's been through a scaling company knows this gets harder and harder the bigger and bigger you get, and it is so important to the success of the business. I loved hearing Tim's playbook for this. So with that, let's get to the show.

Callan Harrington 02:29
Tell me about that first leap of faith in becoming an entrepreneur.

Tim Metzner 02:32
That's a good one. I guess the quick backstory before I made the leap of faith is, in college, I was in a scholarship program built for the future corporate leaders of Cincinnati. So I'm in Cincinnati, Ohio, with some awesome Fortune 500s like Procter & Gamble and Kroger around us. There was this really great undergrad program built to create the future Corporate Leaders of America. So I got a scholarship, I was in that program, and almost everyone else in that program went to one of those companies. But I met a startup founder who hired me as a co-op. So as a 19-year-old kid, my first co-op experience was with a startup, and I was completely ruined from ever having a "real" job. Fast forward, I worked for that startup throughout college. After I graduated, I did a few other things during school, but predominantly I was at that same startup called SparkPeople. About five years post-graduation, I really felt like I knew I wanted to start a company. I was trying to soak up as much as I could from this founder and anyone around me. I'm a person of faith, so I was even praying about it, literally like, "God, put me in, put me in, Coach. I'm ready." Like, you point the way, and I'm gonna go charge it. And it was like...crickets. I had this crazy experience where, you know, I was praying one time, and I felt like God was like, "Just go, man, it's time to leap." And I thought, "I don't really know the company I'm going to start, like that doesn't seem like a very wise decision," but I did it. I had a sort of awkward conversation with my wife that same day and put in my two weeks the next day. Man, it was kind of off to the races.

Callan Harrington 04:02
One thing I'm actually super curious about is going even further back. It sounds like you grew up in an area similar to where I did. I'm from Toledo. I went to Toledo Public Schools. I didn't have a lot of these entrepreneurial mentors; the ones I had were the restaurant owner, the small business owner, the home services type of entrepreneurs. Did you know that you always wanted to be an entrepreneur, or was it when you came to SparkPeople that you thought, "Oh, this is what I want to do?"

Tim Metzner 04:29
I struggle to put my finger on exactly when it happened, but I didn’t grow up in or around entrepreneurship. I didn’t know anyone who was an entrepreneur. I probably couldn’t have even really told you what that was. There were no classes around it, at least that I was aware of when I was in school, so it wasn’t like I got exposed to the idea. I don’t have some crazy story of like, at eight years old, I started a landscaping company, and I always knew that was the path for me—like, that didn’t happen for me. It was somewhere in college, for sure, where it got more clear that I wanted to be on that journey. I had this idea, and I called it Dream Savers. I just had this thought that the entrepreneurial journey is so hard and oftentimes requires folks to literally go all in and kind of risk it all. And so often, it seems like it doesn’t work out, or it stalls out, or we face this thing. So, like, I knew nothing about private equity, I knew nothing about investing, I knew very little about entrepreneurship, but I wrote this document in my early college years that basically said, "What if you could build an amazing team of people, like a SWAT team of people with the right experiences that could come alongside a business owner and take it to the next level?" And what if you could do that in exchange for ownership in their business instead of charging them a service fee? So it was kind of quasi-PE, quasi-studio, almost in a lot of ways. Again, it’s crazy that I had this sort of early Dream Savers vision, and then fast forward to what I’m doing today with FireRoad. It kind of looks and feels a lot like that in many ways.

Callan Harrington 06:05
Fast forwarding a little bit, so you start this company. This ended up being a pretty big success. Is that correct?

Tim Metzner 06:11
Yeah, Differential, the first company. There are a number of different layers to the onion there, but overall, yes—a company that's still around today and still has multiple companies sort of operating that started within this sphere.

Callan Harrington 06:24
So with Differential, as I understand it, this was almost a startup studio in addition to having a services business where you're custom building all this out, right? How did you get to that final point of finding that— I don't want to say product-market fit or go-to-market fit, but really finding the path that can actually scale this business? What did that look like?

Tim Metzner 06:45
Yeah, it’s a cool story of meeting what would become my co-founder. My career has been dual track, where I’ve been the "man in the arena," actually building and starting things as an entrepreneur, but also equal parts ecosystem builder, startup community builder. So in the early 2000s, there was almost nothing happening in Cincinnati around startups and entrepreneurship. One of the things I started early on, or helped bring to Cincinnati, was an event called Startup Weekend. And if you've been around the startup world, you've seen this. But essentially, it's this immersive experience for anyone in or interested in being part of a startup. It goes from Friday to Sunday, and you get to learn about the startup experience. It’s just really fun. Even more cool is that it brings the community together. So everyone comes into a physical building for this event. I went to one of these in Columbus, Ohio, with a friend of mine. I was like, "Holy cow, there are investors, successful entrepreneurs, people who want to start companies, people who work in startups—all together, hanging out for a weekend." I thought, "This is amazing, we have to have this." At the very first Startup Weekend we had in Cincinnati, I met a guy named Ry Walker. Fast forward, he and I would end up starting Differential together, but we became fast friends because he similarly had quit his job and was like, "I'm going to start something. It’s time, I want to go." He started doing some consulting around technology, so he was building MVPs as a contractor for folks. Eventually, over beers one night, we thought, "Let’s use services as a backstop." We tried to raise capital, and everyone was like, "You’re crazy. I don’t want to invest in a startup studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. That sounds stupid. Why don’t you guys just go prove yourselves?" Okay, fair enough. So, yeah, we started doing services work. We brought our services work in, brought some other people around that, and started scaling that. We used the profits not to be a profitable service company, but to start building some of our own stuff or taking equity in startups as we built. So we started doing some of that, and eventually had some pretty good momentum, raised a little bit of angel funding, and then started building some of our own products internally—one of which would become a company called Astronomer. Fast forward, Astronomer would be one of Cincinnati’s first unicorns with a $1.1 billion valuation on a $300 million raise, which is amazing. Astronomer has not exited yet; it’s still a private company, still building, still venture-backed. We did sell our equity in a secondary offering at that valuation, so we were able to return a bunch of capital to our investors. Great outcome. What’s really cool is, when we did raise capital, we basically went to our investors and said, "Look, we’ve got a service business. I can’t promise you what’s going to happen on the startup side. Maybe it all goes to zero. We've got a pipeline of cool stuff, cool opportunities, but if it all goes to zero, I’m going to get your money back through the service company." So we had this barbell strategy of taking some moonshots, but backstopping it with a service business that ought to be able to be profitable and keep scaling. It’s not going to be a moonshot billion-dollar company, but it could throw off cash flows consistently. We brought some people in to run the service business and scale that. Astronomer came out of that, another company called MetaRouter basically incubated inside of Astronomer. So Astronomer was a two-headed product monster. They spun one of the products out. It’s now independent, probably on its path to being a unicorn itself—all with around half a million dollars in total raised capital from angels. We built a profitable service company, a unicorn, and have another one that looks really good. And that service company, by the way, has now gone on to spawn a couple more SaaS products internally that are doing several million dollars in ARR and could be really interesting things as well.

Callan Harrington 10:22
In the Midwest, you have to prove it before you can get real dollars in the door. You mentioned yourself and Ry Walker came together on this and merged your consulting businesses. Did you just say, "Okay, our revenues are similar, so we’ll just do a 50/50 split on this?" Did you consider who was bringing what to the table?

Tim Metzner 10:43
It was definitely messy. But I think—this is one of the reasons Ry and I still work together on stuff to this day and are still great friends—we’re both really transparent and pretty selfless individuals in a lot of ways. So honestly, Ry and I had a conversation, and it was like, "What are your expenses? What do you need to cover so your wife and kids aren’t stressed out about finances at home? What’s the monthly nut for you? What’s the monthly nut for me?" We threw it all into the pot. Early on, it was a lot easier for Ry to get development work than it was for me to get consulting work for growth hacking. So Ry was making more money than I was, but to his credit, he just threw it in the pot and said, "Take what you need. I’m going to take what I need, and we’re going to make this thing work."

Callan Harrington 11:28
Did you guys have very complementary skill sets when you came to this? Can you walk us through that? I’m much more of the "Here’s the vision of what I want to build, I’m the person that brings in a lot of the deals, but I can do delivery. I don’t love doing delivery." Was that the scenario with you guys, or what did that look like?

Tim Metzner 11:47
It was a little bit of overlap and some complementary stuff. I think we’re both fairly visionary and both pretty good at closing, pitching, fundraising, casting vision, and recruiting. So in some ways, we basically acted as co-CEOs. In fact, neither of us took the CEO title for that reason, because we both knew how complementary we were to one another. I think we were both okay on the delivery side—we would do what we needed to do to get stuff done—but we knew we needed to augment ourselves. Some of the first early hires and partners we brought into Differential were folks who were much more operationally focused. I will tell you, I learned pretty clearly during that journey that I’m never going to start a company without having someone who looks and sounds like a COO type around me, because left to my own devices, even though I can do it, it makes me cranky. I get grumpy when I have to do some of these tasks that other people might love, right? I can do it, I’m not the best at it, and I, for sure, don’t enjoy it. So I think finding those people early on, when you can split them up and go, "Neither of us loves this, but you take this thing and I’ll take this thing," makes it a little bit easier. Then the quicker we can build momentum, the quicker we can hire to augment some of those things we’re not great at.

Callan Harrington 13:06
This company has been a huge success. Candidly, this is one of the challenges I had in researching and prepping for this interview. You’ve had a number of these successes; this isn’t just a one-off. One of the things I’m interested in is that I love that you went into insurance because there was a high barrier of entry. There are a lot of challenges in insurance, but also a lot of opportunities because it’s extremely regulated. But what I’m really curious about is you met David McFarland, co-founder of Coterie. You guys didn’t know each other previously. Is that correct?

Tim Metzner 14:11
Correct.

Callan Harrington 14:11
How did you meet, and how did you get comfortable enough to co-found a company—a company that’s very capital intensive, so you're going to have a lot of pressure, and you had to go big really quick because that’s just what you have to do when you start InsurTech, like the one you did. So how did you meet, and how did you get comfortable enough with him that you were willing to go down that path? Because you already knew what it was like to start a business, so you knew the pressures that came with this, and this would be amplified because it was venture-backed.

Tim Metzner 14:41
David had moved to Cincinnati. He and his wife had picked Cincinnati as the place they wanted to start a company. This will sound arrogant, but it doesn’t take long to get to me if you're a new founder in town looking to get connected and plugged in. People say, "Go talk to Tim. He’ll help connect you. He’ll make intros. He’ll probably beat up your pitch and give you some advice and feedback and whatever, but you should just go." So pretty quickly, we got introduced when he moved to town—just a casual coffee. I’ve done hundreds of those kinds of meetings throughout my career. I almost always say yes to a founder who just wants to hang out and meet. That’s how we met. Unbeknownst to David, I had felt that call away from Differential. Astronomer had spun out, I was scaling the service business at the time, and we didn’t have the resources to build another startup within the walls of Differential. We really needed to focus on scaling the service business. But I had a conversation with my partners where I said, "I feel like it’s time for me to go take a bigger swing. Startup Cincy needs a success. We need to see that you can build a great startup that’s venture-backed right here in Cincinnati, Ohio." There were just very few examples of that. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but in my mind, I soft-circled insurance and healthcare as two categories that I knew a little bit about, and I knew Cincinnati had a right to win. We’ve got talent, we’ve got expertise—these are categories where, if you built a startup, you might build some momentum in fairly quickly because of where we are and who’s around us. So David and I met, had a great coffee—we didn’t talk about working together. It was just like, "Here’s what I’m trying to do." I gave him some thoughts on his deck, made some introductions for him. But I texted my wife after that meeting, "I think I found the thing I’m going to go do." His vision was compelling. I had said to myself, if I’m going to start something in one of these categories, I have to pair up with a domain expert. And he had been an actuary in insurance his entire career. He was that visionary in the category who knew the problems to solve and how to work around the regulation. It was really clear to me in our first meeting, this guy’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever interacted with. He’s got a brain that works very differently than mine but would be a great complement to me.

Callan Harrington 16:18
How did you get comfortable with co-founding a company with somebody you didn’t know?

Tim Metzner 16:22
Again, it is a little bit of a leap of faith. I went in, asked him for a list of, like, "Give me three people who’ve reported to you and several people you’ve reported to." He had worked at another startup where he was the first hire of an InsurTech out of Chicago called Clearcover. Through that process, plus a bunch of interactions one-on-one, I started to feel pretty comfortable. David and I also share a faith. In our first meeting, we talked about our faith stories and our background, and that was part of why he moved to Cincinnati. He fell in love with a church community here. The other proof point for me was Kevin Mackey, another Startup Cincy guy. He had been around the community, and I knew him fairly well from previous startup stuff. He had already agreed to join David as his COO. It was like, "Okay, strong operator, domain expert," and Kevin had already vetted David and was in the trenches. So I had some good conversations with Kevin about that as well. But the three of us honestly jumped in not thinking we were going to raise a ton of venture capital. Our thought was, "Man, you ought to be able to build insurance as a profitable business, right?" If you do this thing right, you should be able to be profitable relatively quickly. Just getting to market alone was harder than I ever expected. It took more than 18 months before I think we wrote our first policy. There are so many boxes you’ve got to check, so many partnerships you’ve got to figure out. We initially felt like, yes, we’re going to have to raise capital because we’re going to have to hire experts early on. But we thought maybe we’d raise a couple of rounds. I don’t remember what point it was, but sometime during my first year at Coterie—probably within the first six months—the InsurTech category was really starting to heat up. This was 2019. It just became really clear, "Man, someone’s going to raise a boatload of money around this idea. It would really be a bummer if we got our butts kicked just because we were too conservative to go raise capital. So let’s be aggressive and not passive in this." I don’t think every company ought to raise venture capital, even if you're a software business, but I think if it’s really clear that there is going to be an arms race coming, you better have a war chest.

Callan Harrington 18:32
You guys did raise capital, but on top of that, you were in a really competitive market because Next Insurance was raising tons. Next, Pie, Attune—there were many in this space. But you guys, in my opinion, felt like, almost overnight, it was like, "Whoa, these guys became a big deal fast." How did you stand out in that space with other companies that were all raising $100 million rounds? At that point in InsurTech, everybody was raising what felt like a nine-figure round.

Tim Metzner 19:02
I give credit to David and his original vision and his background as an actuary. I remember very distinctly in our first coffee meetings, one of the things that really stood out to me was when he said, "Look, the playbook in insurance is actually really simple. If you get a data advantage over other insurers and you know how to use that data, you will win." So the thought of underwriting using data that no one else is going to use, and doing it in a way that creates a better experience than anyone else has had, and doing it profitably. David’s an actuary. He’s a fellow in the Casualty Actuarial Society. He’s an underwriter at heart. He wants to build a great insurance book, not just a great mousetrap. We’re going to have to grow, right? We need a growth engine. But our vision was that we’re not just going to go buy business; we’re going to build a great insurance company. We were really focused on building and winning by underwriting better than anyone else and creating a better user experience for both people buying and selling insurance.

Callan Harrington 20:03
For our listeners who may not realize, that’s a huge deal, especially in a market like we have today, because insurance is just getting hammered, right? You’ve got catastrophic risks out there, so many things that are out of your control. So to have profitability, especially for InsurTechs right now, that is a rare thing. So kudos to you guys on what you’ve built there.

Okay, I’m super excited to talk about FireRoad, but before we get there, I’d be remiss not to talk about— as I understand it, you were the real culture builder at a number of these startups. How did you harness that culture? What was your recruiting process to bring in these great people that you brought in?

Tim Metzner 20:44
At some point in Differential, that first company I built, I kind of looked up one day and looked around, and I was like, "Holy cow, we’ve got, still to this day, some of the best developers I’ve ever worked with, and they’ve been around here for years, and I know they’re getting recruited heavily." In fact, one of the guys I talked to there, because I was coaching him—we did one-on-one coaching with him monthly—he said, "I literally get a call every single week from a recruiter who wants to pay me a lot more money to come work at Facebook or Google or something like that. And I have to stiff-arm them and turn them down, but I’m getting offers for way more money all the time." I was digging into that, and I thought, "What’s behind that? Why are we able, in a services firm, to retain people?" And it was because we cared about them. This engineer I’m talking about in particular—we did this thing called coaching, and it was a monthly one-on-one where it was just like, "I just want to hear from you. Tell me, Callan, about where you want to go in your career. What are you trying to accomplish? What’s important to you outside of work? What are the things you’re doing great at your job? We can talk about that if you want to, but we can do that in our weekly stand-up, right? That’s where we talk shop. But let’s talk about your goals, aspirations, and dreams," and you get to know people and things about their family. I would say it’s rare today—it’s sad, but it’s rare—that there’s really a human-centered culture of "you’re a human being," and work is not the most important thing in your life. I just acknowledge that as an employer and as a leader and a boss. I do things like tell you to go spend time away from work, right? I’ve had this vision, like every entrepreneur, to go change the world and have an impact and solve big problems and do cool stuff. I still believe firmly in that, I still want to do that, but at some point, you just start to realize, "Man, actually the most obvious way you get to do that is just through your employees, through the people that you provide a job to." If I can help Callan come alive at work, use his God-given talents to do good work that’s meaningful to him, and I care about him as a human being, and I encourage him to spend time on creative pursuits and with family and friends outside of work, he becomes a better husband and father, a better community member. He’s more healthy mentally and physically. You come alive, and when you come alive, your family comes alive. I’m like, "Man, there’s just such a cool opportunity as entrepreneurs to create the kind of jobs and cultures that help people come alive at work so that they can go be better people and have more free, rich, awesome lives outside of work as well." These are lives that we get to impact through employment, right? So if we can create great jobs in these companies and in these regions, there’s a massive potential for impact. But to do that, you've got to really intentionally focus on culture.

Callan Harrington 23:21
Can you give some examples of that, of over-investing in culture in particular? And if you could, maybe a couple of examples at each stage. It doesn’t have to be anything in-depth; I’m just curious.

Tim Metzner 23:30
I think it all starts with mission, vision, and values. You have to start there. Most people have them somewhere in a document, in a handbook, or on the wall. Very few people use them in the way that is massively powerful, which is if you actually hire, fire, promote, and use these core values as your rules of engagement—like, this is how we operate—it’s a really great tool for attracting and retaining the right people into your environment. You almost want them to attract as much as they repel. That’s right; people will self-select out when they know what you care about. But if you’re not clear about who you are, where you’re going, and what you care about, they don’t even have the opportunity to do that. So I think getting really clear on mission, vision, and values and then revisiting those regularly is important. One way we invest in culture in all the companies I’ve been a part of is by doing a Friday wins celebration. We’re going to celebrate the cool stuff that happened this week, and we’re going to do it by calling each other out according to a core value. So I might go, "Man, Callan, you really showed humility this week in the way that you were willing to change your mind on this thing that you had your heels dug in on." If every week you’re celebrating people based on your core values, those get ingrained pretty well. People understand not just the words, but they get to see a picture of what that actually looks like in action at this company.

Callan Harrington 24:42
Let’s talk about FireRoad. I know you've had some experience on the investor side previously, and you've done a number of startups. Why FireRoad in particular, though? Was it just that it came up and you thought, "This is what I need to do"? Coterie was doing really well. It still is. So, I’d love to hear what was this transition like?

Tim Metzner 25:03
I led growth and go-to-market for Coterie. So, sales, marketing, distribution, customer success—all that stuff sort of fell under my purview in those first few years. I’m actually pretty good at the early stage, scrappy go-to-market—how do you find a customer? It’s hand-to-hand combat with those early customers. You just gotta get in the trenches and go.

Callan Harrington 26:05
It looks a lot like sales, right?

Tim Metzner 26:27
Exactly. It was basically just founder-led sales where I rolled up my sleeves and was able to build a cool team. But I’m not really a proper chief revenue officer or head of growth. I have an amazing network, but I'm not there, right? Me helping unlock doors at GEICO is just not going to happen on day one. When David, Kevin, and I formed the company, one of the things we said was, "If we’re successful in building the kind of company we want to build, it’s very possible any one of us, or every one of us, may be replaced at some point because the thing’s going to outgrow our capabilities. Let’s be open to that." So we had that conversation very early on. It got to the point where it became obvious to me that we probably needed to bring in that next-level leader—someone whose ceiling is going to be higher than mine in a role at a company like this. So Bobby Coles is the person we brought on, and she’s done an incredible job. If I’m not adding tremendous value, I’m going to go crazy. I have to feel like I’m adding significant value, really sinking my teeth in and using my talents and skills to charge hills. It just felt like that was going to be harder at this stage and in this environment. So I essentially said, "Hey, I think it’s time to step out of the day-to-day," again not really knowing, honestly, what I was going to do next. But it wasn’t long after I stepped out that God brought me back to this vision and even formed it in a way that I hadn’t necessarily seen coming together. A couple of the biggest problems I’ve been thinking about for more than a decade were early-stage investment in our region and how it sucks. There aren't amazing investors who have experience in the founder seat, who are willing to write a check at the pre-seed stage—like first early capital land. At that stage, it is not spray-and-pray, write a check and good luck. It’s roll-up-your-sleeves-and-spend-time-with-those-founders work, from everything to product, to go-to-market, to recruiting. It’s really active work. There just weren’t a whole lot of people in our region with the experience to actually be that investor. So I was like, "I want to be that investor. I want to create that fund that I really wish was here." So that’s FireRoad Ventures. The other vision I’ve been working on for a long time, and even Coterie made me more aware of, is this aging "silver tsunami," right? The aging demographic of small business owners who have no succession plan in place but collectively represent more than half the jobs in America. I thought, "There’s a pretty significant risk if a good portion of those owners of businesses at some point go, 'I don’t really know what to do next, let’s just turn off the lights and call it a day and say it’s been a good run.'" There are a ton of jobs at risk in that environment. So I’ve had this thought for a long time: we need to help small businesses have a better path to succession planning. What if you could come alongside these small businesses, especially the owners who care about culture and their customers and communities, and build a better path to succession where we can actually build a great engine for selling your business or some of your business, but do it with a really long-term Warren Buffett-style focus of holding these companies forever? Let’s not raise a private equity fund where we have to return capital in five years; therefore, we have to find a quick flip. Let’s focus on decades-long value creation in these businesses and build an engine where we can start to acquire other companies into it. What if you had a company that effectively looked like Differential, with this barbell of early-stage risk capital, taking some moonshot swings, but also cash-flowing steady small businesses that are not going to be billion-dollar companies but can throw off cash flow steadily over long periods of time? FireRoad Holdings Inc. could then become capital allocators, and we get to coach, mentor, and guide. Whether it’s proceeds from the cash flows of the holdco, or it’s returns from the fund, it all comes back into the holdco. We get to use that to invest in, buy, or maybe start more companies in the future. We get to bring the process, the scale mentality, the network that we have to bear, and a whole lot of battle wounds from being in the trenches.

Callan Harrington 29:16
So here’s a question. What I see looks like you’ve segmented and organized this around different groups, so you do have functional leaders over these different channels. How do you personally spend your time?

Tim Metzner 29:29
It’s all over the place, and it’s exhausting, and it’s a blast. So literally, you could look at my calendar, and it might go from meeting an owner of an HVAC company to a startup founder pitching me for capital, to me pitching an investor in my fund, to mentoring an early-stage founder. That could all be one day. To me, that sounds chaotic and crazy, but when I get asked, "Are you trying to do too much? Is this unfocused?" I think, maybe, but this has been my career, and the only way I’ve ever won is by building amazing teams.

Callan Harrington 30:06
Is that easier or harder for you? And I say this because your track record clearly shows that you’re a zero-to-one guy. I’m not trying to pigeonhole you, but you seem to be attracted to the zero-to-one phase, so this could perpetually keep you in that.

Tim Metzner 30:25
Exactly. That is it. I’m trying to design the company that I’ll get to steward for the rest of my career because it has all the elements of the stuff that my talents and interests align with. I get to spend time with founders in that phase all the time. And by the way, in small business land, you might go, "Well, that doesn’t sound at all like that." But that’s not true. Small business land is perpetual zero-to-one. When you're in that world, it’s always chaos. When you're running a small business, it’s a challenging, stressful, hard journey.

Callan Harrington 30:55
Are you more excited about this one than the other ones?

Tim Metzner 30:57:
This one being FireRoad, this company. I couldn’t do this without the body of experience across all these things. One of the things we didn’t even touch on was Ocean Accelerator. There’s a startup accelerator in Cincinnati I’ve been part-time hustling for 10 years as a founding board member, where we’ve worked with 70+ startup founders in that zero-to-one stage. I’ve gotten to have a front-row seat in helping many of those and seeing many of those. So all that stuff— that body of experience—is what prepared me to take this swing. I do feel like I have crazy energy for this. I’m very excited for the journey, and hopefully, this will be the last swing I take. But we get to keep taking swings within the walls of FireRoad.

Callan Harrington 31:39
Tim, last question I have for you. If you could have a conversation with your younger self, age totally up to you, what would that conversation be? What advice would you give?

Tim Metzner 31:46
Be long-term focused. I hustled so much in the early days, and I spent way too much time spinning wheels on stuff that didn’t matter. I was just grinding to grind. Play long-term games with long-term people. Think in decades, not in, "How do I make enough money to buy a nicer car?" Which, early in my career, I probably spent way too much time worrying about that stuff.

Callan Harrington 32:08
Long-term games with long-term people—I love that. I’ve never heard that before.

Tim Metzner 32:12
It’s not mine. It’s a quote from someone else. I can’t tell you who it is offhand, but if you search for it, you’ll find it from someone else smarter than me.

Callan Harrington 32:20
Consider it stolen by me, and I’m going to be giving you credit for it. Tim, thank you for coming on today. It’s been great.

Tim Metzner 32:26
Yeah, loved it.

Callan Harrington 32:30
I hope you enjoyed Tim and my conversation. I loved hearing how Tim built a career around his strengths and interests and how he optimized specifically for the area that he was happiest in. If you want to learn more about Tim, you can find him on LinkedIn in the show notes. Also, if you liked this episode, you can find me on LinkedIn to let me know. And if you really want to support the show, a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is very much appreciated. Thanks for listening, everybody, and I'll see you next week.