How to Build a Tech-First Manufacturing Strategy

[00:00:00] We had a customer come to us and they said, listen, we've got leftover marketing spend. It's a couple million dollars. We want to give it to you. And we want to run full direct mail campaigns with it. But we're unwilling to increase our subscription revenue to you, right? We have tiers for subscriptions based on the amount of mail volume that you send. We're not going to pay any more ASR. But we want you to do the direct mail campaigns. And we said no.

[00:00:26] I'm Felicia Shakiba, and this is Leaderbook AI, where we solve a business challenge in every episode. Brent Hagen, thank you so much for joining us. You are the chief supply chain officer at a company called Lobb.

[00:00:46] You guys said no to a $3 million deal because the company was changing and it really led you to actually become a supply chain operations. And so I'd love to kind of just kick off and start with how that initiative began. Like what was your role coming into the company? And we can start there. Well, I really appreciate you having me, Felicia. I'm excited to be here today.

[00:01:15] So the background on Lobb is Lobb is the original API in the direct mail industry. So we had two founders that were college roommates, worked in investment banking, and they recognized a gap in the space where it wasn't easy for businesses who have direct mail needs to easily integrate into means of manufacturing. So they created a really great API in the early 2000 teens, and the business scaled really quickly.

[00:01:44] Now, eventually, I think based on where the company's at today, you would say that at some point we kind of lost our way. And we really started leaning in on being a performance marketing company. But in order to fulfill the needs of the businesses that were coming to Lobb, we had to build this really robust manufacturing network. So we ingest all the work that a business has in terms of direct mail needs.

[00:02:12] And then what we would do is we would send all of this work downstream to third-party manufacturers. And we would say, print all the work, handle all the complexity, do all the experiment, get it on a truck to the USPS, send us a bill when you're done. And that was kind of it. It's pretty common. There's a lot of performance marketing APIs out there now that do it that way. When I joined Lobb, I didn't care for that very much. And they were hiring me to run the operation.

[00:02:42] And the piece that I began to talk to our CEO about, whose name is Ryan, is like, hey, whether it was accidental or on purpose, we built a really cool supply chain to service all this work. And we should really lean in on that. And the way in which we even measured our company financials at the time wasn't really that of a supply chain or manufacturing or a usage-based company. It was that of a technology company, right? Like, we highly prioritized ASR.

[00:03:11] I mean, who doesn't love annual subscription revenue, right? Like, it's annual. It's always coming in. It's highly predictable. You know, people want to scale that. The multiples that are tied to it from an investment perspective are really beneficial as well. But when you looked at our core economics for the performance of our business, you know, 80% of our revenue was coming as a result of print manufacturing, right? Based on that physical product that some end user is physically holding and receiving in their mailbox. And we never really talked about the 80%.

[00:03:41] The 20%, which was ASR, like we really focused on with a microscope every single day, every single week, and every cadence that we were in. And so the way in which I presented it to our CEO, our executive team at the time, as well as our board was like, Hey, so you've got a business. They're paying us ASR and they're paying a usage-based model for the manufacturing that we're doing for them.

[00:04:08] 20% of it's ASR, 80% of it is on manufacturing. So if you have $100 million that someone's spending with us, they're spending $80 million on a physical good, 20% on technology. Where do you think their priority is? It's going to be on the 80%, right? Like very naturally, like 80% of my money is going here. This needs to be perfect and needs to be perfect every time. And we were not perfect every time.

[00:04:35] You know, we, from a quality perspective, consistency perspective, on time perspective, we were not where we would need to be to continually make sure that we're protecting that customer. And so what I wanted to begin to do was say, like basic principles. Why do we not want to be a manufacturing company? And why do we use a third-party manufacturing network? Which is fine. Lots of people do it.

[00:04:59] And the idea was we don't want the burden of the fixed cost and the high, high capital cost of managing that manufacturing network. Okay, great. So let's take over every activity that does not have to do with buying that piece of equipment. Let's leverage our technology to build national scale because we're a large purchaser within the industry. We'll continue to use our print network for what they're really good at printing.

[00:05:29] And so over the course of this three-year journey, we've really moved away from subscription revenue as our priority. We still have it. It's just way less of a priority for us. And said, we are going to be the best supply chain in the direct mail space, period. When you had that conversation with Ryan, your CEO, I mean, how did you have that change management experience? For example, did you go to your peers first? Did you go to Ryan first?

[00:05:57] Was there convincing that you had to do? Like, how long did that change take? Walk me through that experience. Yeah, it took about two years, almost two years to completely change it. We started, actually, the first time, so I brought it up and it was very clear that, so I was the newest executive in the room when I had brought this up.

[00:06:19] And it was very clear that I had just put myself in the corner in terms of my thought process and that others weren't aligned to it. I'm kind of like, listen, I'm the new guy. You know, I'm new to the industry, too. That was my thought. But, you know, let's keep iterating on this and just see what happens. Then, this would have been October of my first year. So I was about six months into the job, something like that, five months into the job.

[00:06:47] We had a customer come to us and they said, listen, we've got leftover marketing spend. It was a couple million dollars. We want to give it to you and we want to run full direct mail campaigns with it. But we're unwilling to increase our subscription revenue to you, right? We have tiers for subscriptions based on the amount of mail volume that you send. We're not going to pay any more ASR. But we want you to do the direct mail campaigns. And we said no.

[00:07:14] And it was at that point that, you know, I pulled Ryan aside. In fact, him and I were in a meeting in Denver when this happened. And I was presenting to him the first couple of things that I wanted to do with our operations that were, you know, kind of like holistically decisions between him and I, right? It wasn't highly material to anyone else. And I said, hey, look, I was like, this is how I look at this. And you tell me if I'm off base. We have a customer that wants to give us two million dollars that we would not have

[00:07:43] if they don't give it to us. In terms of our financials, we've already achieved the ASR goal with them. That we thought that we would achieve, right? Like we don't expect them to sell any more this year. So we've already generated all the money that we plan to generate off of them. Now we've told them no. They're going to take that two million dollars that could have been ours that we never planned for.

[00:08:10] And we're going to go give it, tell them to take it to a competitor and go spend that two million dollars with a competitor. Does that feel good to you? And he was like, I've never really looked at it that way. He's like, no, that doesn't feel good at all. We should take the two million dollars. I was like, I agree. We absolutely should take the two million dollars. So then we conceptualized like, you know, and this is an iterative process. We said, okay.

[00:08:36] With our existing customers that are paying ASR, when this subject comes along of it's the last three months of the year, it's the last five months of the year, whatever. They've already hit their targets and they say, hey, we want to send more. Do we want to upsell them and raise their entire unit economics, which in a usage base, it doesn't matter if it's direct mail, what it doesn't matter what widget you're making and usage based models.

[00:09:03] As my volumes go up, my unit economics go down, right? It's what everyone expects. I get more efficient as my scale increases. We should take their usage dollars and support them and their incremental needs without increasing the value of our subscription revenue. So that was the first thing that we trialed. And that went really, really well for us.

[00:09:29] And so we ended up getting alignment pretty fast on that's what we were going to try and go do. But I absolutely backed myself in a corner in those first couple of conversations. I think a lot of people who try to change things when they first come into an executive role, first of all, it's natural because people are finally coming in from the outside and can get a fresh look at things. But it does ruffle feathers.

[00:09:59] And, you know, you either sink or swim, I think, in that type of position. What would you say is your two cents or your advice? And coming into a new role and wanting to change, like, do you make this a marathon? Is it a sprint? Is it getting closer to your peers? Is it having a stronger relationship with the CEO? Or is it unique to each different company? I think it's unique to each different company.

[00:10:26] The piece that's always very consistent to me is when I join a new team, I want to jump in and understand the pain points of that team, as well as the business and as well as the customer. And I want to understand where those pieces align and where those pieces don't align. And as a result of that, I want to generate some quick wins as early in the process as I can.

[00:10:50] I think that easing the burden of your team or the business or of the customer or hopefully something that contributes to all three as quickly as possible begins to build trust in terms of your capability as an executive. And that builds credibility.

[00:11:08] You know, and once you establish that and you say like, hey, like I have a vested interest in driving the health of this business overall, that gives you the ability to start influencing decisions. You know, and so what I want to sprint on is that quick win. I want to sprint as quickly as I can to make an influence somewhere. It doesn't have to be a holistic change.

[00:11:31] But I also want to realize that building relationships and driving the successful strategy that a business is going to have is absolutely a marathon. And along that way, as I kind of already indicated with some of my former peers, some people are going to get off the bus when you're doing that. And some people are going to stay on the bus. Yeah. And you kind of call this good attrition, right? Those who are who are leaving or exiting. I believe you said your CEO exited.

[00:11:59] Most of your executive team exited. What's the difference between good attrition and kind of spiraling out of control? What is what is the difference? Like, how do we recognize when the executive teams are leaving if this is a good thing or not a great thing? I think it starts with vision casting.

[00:12:20] I think explaining why without having to even talk about like the executive that's leaving necessarily of this is the vision that we have of where we're going. And we've got strong conviction and what this vision is and making sure teams understand how they contribute to that. Make them comfortable that while hey, like this person that left, I may have really liked. I firmly believe in where the business is trying to go. You know, and this was this was a fundamental problem for us.

[00:12:50] At lob like kind of for a while. You know, the idea was like, we have such a tremendous culture here. Our chief people officer, Victoria, is one of the best I've been around as it relates to her business function and her understanding of how to drive a company forward, period. Not just from like a people perspective.

[00:13:12] And so how can we begin to cast that vision with people and get them excited about what we want to do, you know, because the the piece where we started at like lob is this phenomenal place to work. We have phenomenal people. And we would get into like even performance reviews and we would say like, they're just so nice. This person is so nice. And Victoria and I are talking about this and Ryan as well.

[00:13:39] You know, we're kind of the three OGs left on the leadership team from when I originally started. And I'm like, yeah, but but what if we held them accountable to the results that that we want as a business and they were nice people? Right. Like that that really becomes the virtuous cycle. Right. Everyone's tied into the same vision. Everyone understands what their expectations are. And they come to work enthusiastic about solving those problems with each other. We've already solved that one.

[00:14:08] Like building the culture is is the hardest part for sure. A culture that wants to excel together and wants to be around each other, like especially in a virtual environment that we live in is very challenging. Having conviction around a vision and the problems that we want to solve, like that's that's probably the easiest piece. Like let's start getting people excited about that. And so we we really leaned in on that.

[00:14:30] Yeah. And I would argue that it's not just the initiative or, you know, being able to share your vision is not a one and done type of thing. It's how do we create consistency and ensure that people are coming along for the ride, even when there are some doubts? I mean, vision telling is not a straight line. It's not linear. Not at all. Up and to the right. It's, you know, it's a lot of waves.

[00:14:57] So I feel like we are talking generally and theoretically we kind of already know that happens. But in this instance, it sounds like you were participating in changing the vision of the business. And so how do you make that change? How long does it take? What is the first step?

[00:15:45] Yeah. And the organization's ability to manage them. So like when I begin to think about this, I think about we have to establish ownership across every business function. We have to understand where data and decisions compete with one another. We have to understand like where the most inconsistent processes are.

[00:16:10] And we have to put a Microsoft on those decisions and honestly, those business functions that are that are leading to those those inconsistencies. And then the decisions depend on, in some cases, who happens to be in the room, right? Like as you're changing over executives, not everyone is going to be in the room. This person's offboarding. We haven't brought on the new person yet. What's that new person look like? Is it are they going to be fractional, you know, so that we have the head there. So we have to make those decisions.

[00:16:39] So like there's been times in my role here where I ran business operations. I don't own biz ops anymore, right? That that belongs with our CFO, COO. I've had product and elements of engineering underneath me for periods of time. I don't have either one of those teams. Engineering with our chief technology officer, products with our chief product officer, right? Which is how a matrix organization should be. I used to handle all of the deals.

[00:17:06] We call it deal desk for all of our pricing models that we're taking to customers. Well, that should live with finance who manages business operations, right? Like they have the best understanding of existing costs and future costs. And so there's a certain amount of humbleness that you have to have as like a member that's helping with this transition to say like, yeah, I'll be stretched and pulled and I'll go do stuff that I'm not used to doing.

[00:17:33] Once I've helped the company move along and we have the right people on the bus, I'm also willing to give those things away for the betterment of the organization, right? And so having leaders that have that sort of humility, having leaders and individuals in the company that are willing to recognize like where efficiencies lie and say like, hey, we're going to go sprint on improving this.

[00:17:57] Those really for me are the first couple of steps, which for me decide how fast can you start driving improvements? There's a lot of different pieces of driving improvement, right? I mean, we talked about vision. We talked about how do we, I guess the executive team is somewhat being baked out since you've been there and a lot of changes as changes need to happen in order to stay aligned with

[00:18:26] the new vision, right? Yeah. Now, you said you cut your manufacturing partner network from 20 down to 12 and that was probably what a first big change. Who took the new deal? Who walked? What did you say to the eight that you stopped working with? Like how do you continue as someone in the industry with a good reputation when you're cutting your network like that? Yeah.

[00:18:55] We actually got like customer feedback about that. They're like, hey, we heard that you're cutting your network. You know, is that a sign of bad things to come? You know, and my answer was, oh, that's that signs of good things to come. And I started explaining to them, you know, how I felt about the unit economic model and the economies of scale that would be generated from having more robust partnerships. You know, and so the way in which I looked at the business at the time that I started,

[00:19:25] we were about like two to eight percent of the revenue of any one of our third party manufacturers. Not insignificant volume, but if that volume, if that revenue, if 2% of your revenue disappears overnight, you're going to say like, like, that's a shame. But we'll replace them in the next six months, right? And they're going to move on from you. What I really wanted to be was like 12 to 20 percent of their revenue.

[00:19:55] Maybe a little bit more, but I also don't want to go too high. And when you look at customer concentration risk, if you're 12 to 20 percent of a customer's revenue, pretty high likelihood that you're in the top three customers for them and maybe even the top, probably assuming steady state customer concentration, you're probably one of the you're probably their top customer. Sure. And so what does that allow us to do?

[00:20:21] Well, that allows us to have significant influence over the decisions that they're making, how they think about working capital, how they think about investments into the business, their willingness to work with us, which is, you know, a very obviously tech forward business. So like integrations can be complicated. We're constantly iterating on our on our own. That's going to influence how they think about it. And so we wanted to really start there. Additionally, I'd said this previously.

[00:20:49] I wanted to begin to untie them from anything that really didn't have to do with actual manufacturing, because that's what they are excellent at. And when you look at a lob's overall scale versus any of the individual third party manufacturers on our network, our aggregate scale in most cases is greater than theirs. Meaning when you go negotiate deals with paper providers, envelope providers, logistics companies,

[00:21:16] middle mile sortation companies, our ability to negotiate those deals is probably better than their ability. And so I wanted to start taking over all that activity. Additionally, just because we have a third party manufacturing network doesn't mean that all of them shouldn't be adhering to the same quality control standards in terms of how do they think about points of failure? How do they reconcile those points of failure? And in what iterative nature are they? Are they doing those reviews and saying, hey, this is what went right? This is what went wrong.

[00:21:46] This is what we're doing to get better as as a business. And so we began developing those processes as well. And so we put all of that on the table. Hey, we're going to take over all procurement activities. We're going to take over all middle mile logistics activities. We want you to print and we want you to print a lot. And here is the minimum volume that we expect you to print. Like we would have companies that would, you know, on average, we might do, let's call it

[00:22:16] five to 15 million pieces they would manufacture for us a month. Well, at the time we would have companies that were doing 250,000 for us. We would have companies that did 50,000 for us. In some cases, we might have a partner that did 3 million one month. And then this month they would say, like, we're too busy. You can only have 300,000 of our capacity. And we would say, the business. It's limiting the business, right? Yeah, that's changing our entire economic profile.

[00:22:45] When you think about it from a procurement perspective, how can I house paper and envelope inventory if I've had across this diversified manufacturing network, if my capacities within each one of those individual players is constantly changing, right? Like it's highly unpredictable. So now you see our own working capital have to scale. So I put all this in front of that network. And I said, this is what we're going to do. Who wants to be on the bus?

[00:23:12] And we had some that were like, yeah, like, you're not gonna, we're not gonna do that. We're like, yeah, that's okay. That's unfortunate. Like, we'll see you around. Some of that was on the procurement side. They didn't like that idea. Some of that was on the quality side of, hey, we're not going to adopt those standards. That's okay. Like, when you change your mind, like, let us know. We'll, we're happy to talk again. And then there were others where we just said like, hey, like you're our bottom tier in terms of performance. That's going to need to get better.

[00:23:41] Or you're just not going to be here. And so we took them off. And so the first, we actually 90% of our volume comes from eight manufacturers now. Seven. And so we've gotten rid of really like a 12 or 13. The first eight were pretty easy. The last four was really like, hey, let's align on each one of these points. Like, do you agree with these points or do you not agree? And that's, you know, that took, we did that in about a year.

[00:24:10] And it completely changed the unit economics for Lobb. It completely changed the performance for Lobb in terms of quality as well as on-time delivery. And so as a result of that, like, I feel like a strong sense of partnership with the remaining manufacturers that are in our network. And in fact, I was just with all of them last week. And I said, hey, like, Lobb is looking to grow 2x over, over the next three years.

[00:24:39] Here's why we think that we're capable of doing that. And their first question, which is a reasonable question, well, are you going to 2x the size of the network, you know, in order to service that? And I said, not if I don't have to, right? Like, what I want from you is I want at least 80% of our growth to be with your businesses. Like, I do think that introducing that sort of scale, we should add a couple of more, two, three, four more. But I want you to grow with us.

[00:25:07] You've earned right of first refusal for that growth as a result of working through all these changes with us. And it gives them a chance to prepare for the growth with that type of communication that you have with them, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we're working with them on our plans for 27, 28, and 29 in terms of our total overall scale and where we think that they contribute to that scale. They're first coming to us and they're saying, hey, this is where we're already investing in the business.

[00:25:37] So we're going to take that as baseline growth. And then we're going to look and we're going to say, okay, what's the delta between your baseline growth and what lob needs? And at that point, they have a decision. Like, do you want to have incremental investment and have this as your piece or do you not want to? And then I have to go solve for that delta. And that's a really fun problem to solve. Like, it's a way different problem to solve than the one that I first solved when I got here.

[00:26:08] I think most operators are really trying to use AI to replace decision making. I'm not sure that would be my choice. I have my own thoughts, but you're using it to orchestrate one. So routing, saturation. Why is that the right frame? And what breaks when people skip that step? Yeah, I think a lot of people look at AI as like a cost reduction tool.

[00:26:35] And I think that there's reasons for that. And I would absolutely agree with the premise of that AI has the ability to lower both your fixed and your variable costs. Also to think that it's a function of where you are within your life cycle as a business that decides like, do I actually need AI to drive significant cost? What we want to leverage AI for is to drive significant scale, right?

[00:27:06] Cost reduction is usually the easiest part of the business case. But I don't think that it's the most valuable part at all. So like, the real value of automation is that it creates capacity, consistency, speed. It allows for your best people to spend less time managing repetitive work and more time solving problems, like serving your customer and improving your business. And so that's the way that we look at it, right?

[00:27:36] Like, how can we embed AI in our decision making so that we make the same great decision all the time and allow our people to focus on decision making that AI just really isn't going to solve for us today, as well as move our roadmap forward faster. AI is embedded in all of our engineering workflows, you know, and we're using Claude and a number of other tools to like drive the velocity of us pushing code faster.

[00:28:04] But we haven't gotten rid of any engineers as a result of it. In fact, we're building our engineering team. But it's greatly improved the velocity and the consistency of the quality of work in which they're pushing out in every cycle. Well, is there a specific example that you can share about a time where you said, here's how we normally make decisions. And then here was the change. And then here was the benefit or the return on investment for this type of decision making process.

[00:28:32] Yeah, so we've moved from a rules-based materials routing system. So how our work is routed every single day. It followed a series. It started off as like 165 rules. We got it down to like 90. But every day it would go through this common workflow and then it would send this work out. I would send our demand out. We've moved that into an AI-based system.

[00:28:56] And we've been able to introduce new qualifiers that say, we really want the same outcome that we always generated. But one of the pieces that we're looking at is the density of mail, which drives your postage unit economics, right? The more dense my mail is, the fewer areas that it's targeting, the more efficient you are from a postage unit economics.

[00:29:21] And so we've introduced that, which is an ever-changing equation, right? Every day we have new demand coming from new customers that change where the mail is going. And one human can't do that. It's impossible. But AI can do that. And AI does it, you know, in less than an hour for us every single day while still making sure that the partners that we love, that have grown with us, are continuing to get steady state volume that they always, that we told them that they would be getting.

[00:29:52] So that's been phenomenal for us. It's driven significant efficiencies through our business. Something interesting that you had shared, given all the work that you've done with Lobb, is that your wife asked you for a year off. And between Deliver, which was, I guess, your previous work, and Lobb. So you gave her three months. She wrote you a letter that you still keep on your desk. What did that letter say?

[00:30:21] And what did it change about how you are in leadership role now? It's right here. I love it. I love that you have it in front of you. Yeah. She said, I mean, this is going to be, you know, I haven't read this. And I talk about this letter pretty frequently. But I haven't read it in a long time. And it says, hi, babe. Yay for your first day of work. I want you to know how proud of I am of you.

[00:30:50] I know the last few months have been tough. But I truly believe it made our family stronger. We have loved having you around more, even if it screwed up our Applebee's trips. And the context between that. So when I travel, my daughters love Applebee's. And anytime I travel, they get Applebee's for dinner like one night. Oh, almost always. And so anytime I travel, they're kind of like, yay, we get Applebee's.

[00:31:19] Because I'm not going to go eat at Applebee's. There's too many other choices. No offense to Applebee's fans out there. But anyway, so that's what that means. You're a great dad, husband, and most importantly, my best friend. You excel at everything you set out to accomplish. And I know this new job will be no exception. Us and the girls love you with all of our heart. Jen XOXO.

[00:31:40] And so that time away just completely changed the way in which I think about myself as a person and the value of the work that I do. So I spent my whole career going all the way back to college when I did internships, moving away from friends and family for the sake of the betterment of my career, including when my kids were born and stuff.

[00:32:10] And the idea was that I was like, well, all of this will be worth it when I make it. Right? They'll see how hard I worked and they'll have a better place in the world as a result of that work. And with my time after the Deliver acquisition, I had really made it. And I was making more money than I really ever thought that I would probably make, you know, like being like a realist. And I was absolutely miserable.

[00:32:39] I hated the people that I worked around. I hated the decisions I was making every day. Culturally, it wasn't a good fit anymore. And I was just miserable. And I was like, well, I'd always just kind of assumed like once I had gotten to a certain level, it was like, well, you can ignore all of that for the sake of making money. And maybe that's true for some people. That 100% wasn't for me. And so when I took that time off, like I was like really a shell of myself.

[00:33:05] Because it was like, I gave like all of this, like I gave all this stuff up, friends, family time, all of this. And now I'm like more miserable than I've ever been. Like, what am I? Who am I? What am I as a person? If that's the case. Because I put all of my self-worth, you know, into my work. And that time off really said like, told me, I was like, no, like that's a means to an end, right?

[00:33:32] Like these people are the ones that are still around me. Like those are the ones that matter. Like your job is an outcome. And I still want to be really good at my job. And I put as much effort into my job as anyone. But it doesn't mean what it meant to me before, right? Like my kids and my family, my friendships, my own health. I mean, you should have, I would have taken up this entire screen if I was sitting in front of you four years ago.

[00:34:00] You know, my own health and how I prioritize that. Like those are the priorities. And what that allows me to do is it allows me to give all of my effort into work, which is actually even more. Because I come here like ready to work every day, not drained by another set of activities. I think what you are saying is so important, especially for the executives listening.

[00:34:24] I feel like I've spoken to, well, technically more than 100 investors, executives. I mean, many more than that. But that's just on the show. But I do feel like after speaking to so many of people in this type of role, that their happiness is like a bell curve when it comes to money and happiness.

[00:34:46] I think that you need to make a little bit, you know, of money to fulfill your basic needs and have a roof over your head and things like that. But at a certain point, and I think everybody's top of the bell curve is a little bit different.

[00:35:00] But at a certain point, that happiness, I think, starts to drop the more money you make only because there is this constant pressure that you feel like you have to compete against yourself, you know, over the years or, you know, be more successful than you were the year before. And I think that your story kind of signifies what that looks like and feels like.

[00:35:27] Because I think after a certain point, like I said, your happiness level just starts to deteriorate. And everybody, like, find that sweet spot for them. Yeah. No doubt about it. There's there's an actor by the name of Alan Richen, I think is how you said it. And he plays Reacher, which is a great show. I recommend for me.

[00:35:52] And, you know, his last five, six, eight years is when his like popularity and fame and stuff has really gone up. And he was on a podcast. He was talking about this exact same thing, you know, and Reacher was taking off. And so as a result, he was getting more movie deals. He was starting to write scripts, which is actually the kind of where like he started his career and people were buying those. And he was like, that's it. Like, I've made it. He's like, I'm at the top.

[00:36:20] And in his mind, his mental state, and I completely understand exactly how he was framing it. You look around and you feel like you're at the top, right? Like, this is what I was working for. And you kind of look up and you look up and you look around. Around you is no one. And above you is just black space. It's just more. And it's more. And you can go get the more if you really want it. But it is this very empty, shallow feeling. And he tried to hurt himself over it. He was like, this is it.

[00:36:50] Like, I made it to the top. And all there is is more. I can work hard. I can be even more miserable than I am now. And then I'll get further up there where there still isn't anyone. It's that I've never found, like, I've read, like, all the development books and stuff out there, you know. And no one had so, like, eloquently said something like that that resonated with me more than how he explained it.

[00:37:41] Yeah. What's the first question that she or he should ask himself tomorrow morning? And what's the first question they should ask their CEO? Yeah. The first one that I would ask is how you're measuring the business. Is that what your customers care about the most? Or is that what you care about the most? And what are we doing to deliver that value back to the customers?

[00:38:05] If those pieces aren't aligned, that ASR number or whatever it is that you're measuring, like, it might be good today. It's probably not good tomorrow. If how you're measuring the business doesn't align with your customers' success factors. They're going to leave and you're going to have to replace them. And I heard that. I heard that when you were sharing that in the beginning. I heard that you first thought about what is it that the customers truly care about?

[00:38:35] What is important to them? And I think that's perfect insight. And there's so many things to think about in a business and growing a business. But sometimes that's just a really great reminder. So, Brent, thank you so much for being here. This was awesome. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you having me. Visit us at leaderbook.ai. Your support as a subscriber means the world to us. So thank you for tuning in. I'm Felicia Shakiba. Let's connect on LinkedIn.