The Executive Code - Marriage of Business and Technology - Podcast Appearance with Paul Edwards
Late last year, I was interviewed by Paul Edwards for his Influencer Networking Secrets podcast.
We talked about a wide range of leadership topics, but primarily about the journey from a technical background, and more of a business leadership background. I think some of the best parts of the interview were related to talking about the benefits of being a technical expert and a great business leader at the same time.
Everyone knows the benefits of specialization - it’s obvious.
More knowledge, more experience in a domain.
What isn’t talked about quite as much are the benefits of being a generalist. Being really good at a few different things allows you to short-circuit getting a team of people involved to have a judgment about a problem. It also allows you to see parallels and opportunities in an unrelated field that perhaps others might miss.
I enjoyed the experience and it was great to spend some time with Paul.
I’ve attached a full transcript of the podcast here below
Season #2: 6 - The Executive Code with Rick Watson
Announcer:
Welcome to the Influencer Networking Secrets podcast, where you learn the software code of the world's most advanced, diverse, and non-artificial intelligence: human personalities. Your host is Paul Edwards, international bestselling author, mastermind leader, and creator of the five qualities of the radically generous entrepreneur.
Welcome to the Influencer Networking Secrets podcast, where you learn the software code of the world's most advanced, diverse, and non-artificial intelligence: human personalities. Your host is Paul Edwards, international bestselling author, mastermind leader, and creator of the five qualities of the radically generous entrepreneur.
By listening to our episodes, you'll become magnetic to your market, you'll create and receive profitable publicity, you will profit by not working for profit, you'll persuade through print, and you'll learn to curate your own unpaid sales force. This episode is sponsored by the book Business Beyond Business.
Get your free copy today by going to thepaulsedwards.com and signing up for our mailing list. Now, please welcome your host, Paul Edwards.
Paul:
It's a privilege to serve you on Influencer Networking Secrets with another high level profile of how technology is improving life for humanity. Our guest for this episode is Rick Watson, coming to us from a succession of executive roles in technology with notable names like Pitney Bowes, Merchantry, where he's served as CEO, Barnes & Noble, and Channel Advisor, and Rick now runs his own consulting firm.
Paul:
It's RMW Commerce Consulting, in the big apple, New York City. Rick, welcome to the show.
Rick:
Thanks so much. Great to be on with you, Paul.
Paul:
Great to have you, and I always like to start out this way, Rick. I mean, you've got quite the resume there, and you're busy building up clients there, now, independently, in the tech and commerce sectors, but maybe if you could just start with a little bit of background as to how you got into this world, and how you quickly ended up in executive roles, and how that all transpired?
Rick:
Yeah. I guess I've always been attracted to tech fields. Originally, coming out of, finished undergrad and master's in electrical engineering, and it just so happened that one of the first companies I joined out of school was related to e-commerce, and that was Channel Advisor, so started there as a software engineer, and was at that company for 10 years, and over the years I moved from software engineer, into software product management, which is really about getting to talk to customers more, and understanding customer needs, and building road maps so that you can improve the software that you're working on.
Rick:
And so, really enjoyed that, and as I progressed in that company, I rose a couple of times to director of product management and engineering there, so started to get some management experience for the first time. This is all when I was in North Carolina, and then moved to New York City, became general manager of third party marketplace at barnes&noble.com, so this was my first job at a retailer.
Rick:
Kind of leading high level business strategy for a major initiative, so kind of progressed from there, and then Merchantry, originally when I joined the role I was not the CEO. I was actually VP of operations, kind of running a lot of the back office stuff that was not sales and marketing, sort of product and technology, kind of customer management, and then within eight months I was actually promoted to CEO by the board, so this began probably one of the most stressful two and a half years of my life, as you might imagine, being a first time CEO with a company that was not yours, with someone else's money.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
That was certainly interesting, and then despite the fact that it was somewhat of a turnaround situation, we managed to get a successful outcome selling the company to a larger company based in Silicon Valley, and from there joined Pitney Bowes in the product management organization leading up a team of product managers responsible for cross-border e-commerce, so helping retailers sell into international markets. Primarily US retailers, and then kind of exiting that organization, February, the beginning of this year, really is trying to figure out, "What do I want to do next?"
Rick:
And having just some executive and entrepreneurial experience, but never started my own company from scratch, I felt like it was a good time for me to make that leap, so that was really the impetus for me starting my own e-commerce consulting firm.
Paul:
My brain got hung up on when you said, about Barnes & Noble, third party platform. I think I know what you mean there, but can you just extrapolate on that just a little bit?
Rick:
Yeah. No problem at all. One of the areas, you know, it's sort of a niche of e-commerce that is starting to get more and more sort of trending higher, it's what's called a third party marketplace. Traditionally, in retail, you manufacture or buy inventory. You hold it in a warehouse waiting around for someone to buy it, and then you ship it out. Now, as you might imagine, the capital cost of buying lots of inventory that may or may not sell is quite high, and so companies, I would say early in the 2000s, very late '90s, early 2000s, and Amazon has really sort of taken it over.
Rick:
Ebay and Amazon have really pioneered this model of what's called a third party marketplace, and the whole idea is you don't have to hold the inventory yourself. Third parties, often it could be mom and pop's, it could be very large businesses, list their items on your marketplace, and they ship on your behalf as well, so you essentially take none of the risk of the inventory, but you represent to the buyer that you have this product and you can ship it quickly, and then you hold the sellers to those standards.
Paul:
Okay. Yeah. I was thinking that. It always makes me hearken back to the old, probably 19th century version. The peddler, right? The person who wants to buy the product, and they found someone who has the product, and they meet in the middle, and they keep a commission.
Rick:
Yeah, I think that matches a marketplace well. It's really a middleman in between buyers and sellers, and they take varying degrees of commissions based on the services they're providing.
Paul:
You know, and I see the world going that way. I mean, affiliate marketing, in my sphere, in the influencer world, same thing. Right? You basically, you have a product, you leverage someone else's credibility with someone else's audience, and basically it's a great mechanism for getting a quality product into the hands of a bunch of pre-qualified, if you will, interested buyers.
Rick:
Absolutely, and I think in affiliate marketing it's usually some kind of web based lead, right? Driving someone to a website. In a marketplace, it is that, but it also is fulfilling a transaction where a payment is transacted, and then whoever accepts that payment needs to then ship that product to a physical buyer.
Paul:
Yes, yes. Yeah, taking out the back end side of that with deliver of the product is definitely an ease. Definitely eases the expense ratio that you're going to incur there, but yeah. Okay, good. That cleared that up. Sometimes, these terms are, I'm like, I'm looking at it, I'm like, "I think I know what they mean."
Rick:
Right, right.
Paul:
Here's just a little bit of inside baseball for the audience listening, and that is that a few weeks ago, Rick, you and I had a great conversation, and as I was listening to you talk, of all the back and forth we had, I think the thing that stuck out to me most was, I'm calling this the executive code, and the reason is we're starting to build an audience here, build a tribe, if you will, of people with a good sort of tech coding software background, and I want them to understand the human code.
Paul:
Because it's not quite the same as computer. You can't program a specific outcome in every situation, but you can program an overarching trend, an upward trend, if you will, I find, provided you execute certain things as a matter of habit and routine. Anyway, all of that to say you mentioned that at certain stages of your career the ability to move fluidly between technology and then over to the human side, which is more business, and entrepreneurship, and negotiations, and all of that, served you really well.
Paul:
It actually ended up making you, by default, one of the most sought out people in the room, if you were in a room full of business executives, but I'm piecing this together now. Am I telling the story accurately here? Is this how it went for you?
Rick:
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, obviously, not in every situation, but I think based on my background I've always had a very technical background, even relatively early age, and then through college, and early career, and arguably I'm still in a technical field, but moving over as my career progresses more into the business and entrepreneurship side. What I've found is that there are a lot of people who are very good at one thing, but it's very hard to be good at multiple things.
Rick:
And even if I wasn't the very best in the world at one single thing, if I was pretty close to 80 percent of as good as they were in two things, then the opportunities multiplied for me.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is hard. I mean, I was having this conversation the other day with some friends. It's difficult enough to start out in life as a generalist, to know an appropriate degree about a lot of things. Then you want to specialize, but then, although a lot of people can specialize in one thing, the person who can actually almost specialize in two things to a sufficient degree of competence really has a strong advantage.
Rick:
Yeah, I think that's right, and definitely from the beginning of my career, for sure, I was a specialist. I spent most of my time coding from a software point of view, ascending relatively high, as I was in a robotics lab, and electrical engineering, and out of grad school, and then wrote software for a long time, and then kind of progressed from there, but more recently leading teams of people, thinking about things like culture, human resources, fundraising.
Rick:
I probably never would have imagined I would be doing those things as well.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, you know, as I was thinking that through, I was saying to myself in our audience there are entrepreneurs who aren't particularly good at tech, and then we have tech people who maybe they're employees and they're not entrepreneurs, or they want to be entrepreneurs, independent contractors, or start a business, or something like that, but I really wanted them to get the sense of the power of that mixture.
Paul:
Now, do you find this, Rick, this is something I thought about as I reflected on that, then I said to myself, "You know, I don't think our culture has yet caught on to the importance of teaching both of those." Right? If you look at the traditional education system, it's either you're going to get a business degree, or you're going to get a computer science degree.
Paul:
Would you say ... ? Or I don't know if this is how your, if your mind thinks the same way mine does, would you say they're sort of still hanging onto an attempt to keep one separate from the other?
Rick:
I think by and large the answer is yes. I mean, you know, getting essentially a computer science engineering degree, I didn't have to take an English class in school, in college, which sort of perfectly answers your point, I believe, and you know, I do think there are some elements of change, but the world, and almost the world is becoming more and more specialized, in that to reach the top of a specific field, it's very hard if you aren't hyper focused on one specific thing, which tends to, in my experience, pigeon hole people, and makes it harder to be an executive.
Rick:
Because to be an executive, you have to be able to ... I mean, one of the things that matters to an executive is that you have to be able to manage people who aren't like you.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. You're right. This actually provokes a spinoff question which I didn't have written down. When you were doing this role, chief executive or leading an executive department, you mention people who aren't like you. Any quick stories come to mind? Like, "This person was very much unlike me, and thus managing them was a challenge."
Rick:
I mean, I think the classic former engineer trying to manage a sales team is probably the best example I could come up with.
Paul:
Right.
Rick:
As I had been a technology leader, a product leader, and a general manager for a short time, and I was VP of operations for less than a year, and then I became a CEO, responsible for sales and marketing, and so from there I had no idea how to hire a sales person, and how to judge the character and the results of sales people, particularly during the interview process, because they were all really good at interviewing.
Paul:
Of course, yeah.
Rick:
And so it was quite challenging for me, during that process, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, and I think as a result it tends to get into a little bit of analysis paralysis. You don't want to make a mistake. You're trying to involve others in the process, but you know, it's hard to know what's happening, and having those mistakes is super valuable, as you know.
Paul:
Well, sure, yeah. That's interesting, because, see now, this is the funny thing. You've got the traditional engineer perspective, here, and these sales people, you mentioned, it was a challenge to know which ones to pick and which ones not to, and that makes me curious, because here's the thing, right? I have to sell to an engineer every day of my life because I married one. Right?
Rick:
Right, right.
Paul:
Just, again, with respect to time and all that, but what's an example, maybe, if any come to mind, of where they came across really good to you and you were kind of in a deer in the headlights? "Do I say yes or do I say no?"
Rick:
Yeah, I mean, I think, really, it comes down to there isn't one specific conversation that stands out to me, but ultimately just interviewing marketing people over, and over, and over, and over, and coming down to, at one point, really, I just had to fall back on, "Do I think I can trust this person, and is this the kind of person I can do business with?" And I was just, it was actually interesting, I was watching a video on Simon Sinek's new book, The Infinite Game, and how the Seals select their next member, of like Seals Team Six, and things like that.
Rick:
And there's sort of a two by two quadrant of high trust and high skill, right? But I think the thing that's super insightful about that process is that they would much, much rather find someone high trust even if they're medium skill.
Paul:
Yeah. That's interesting.
Rick:
And I think that's something that business tends not to do, in a lot of situations.
Paul:
Oh, horribly so, yeah. I mean, that's the perirenal problem of every entrepreneur I've known is they say, you know, "I hired this person. At first, they seemed terrific, and it turned out to be a dud." You know? And mean time, you're thinking, "I wonder if there was anybody else in that pool who maybe didn't have all the flash in the pan thing when they first showed up," but if you would've taken them on, if you would've been able to look past that, you know, if you would've had the presence of mind to say it's not all about the bling when they show up at the interview.
Rick:
Yeah, and the thing, I think, at that time, the thing I had the most trouble with was discerning between the solid but trustworthy but not flashy, versus the flashy and pretty good and unsure of how trustworthy they are.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's such a game. It really is. You said The Infinite Game. Is that a book, or a documentary, or ... ?
Rick:
No, yeah, I think he just released this book just in the last month or so.
Paul:
Okay. Yeah, I made a note of that. I'm going to pick that up.
Rick:
Yeah, yeah. I actually haven't read it yet, I just watched a video on it, so it's on my want to read list in Amazon, which is about 100 books long now.
Paul:
Yeah, I know. That's the life of an entrepreneur. Always reading. You've got to always be reading. Okay, so let's, you know, maybe these conversations just sort of bleed together after a while, Rick, but I'm curious. You know, I could look at a line of computer code with my wife sitting next to me telling me what it means, and I still wouldn't understand what it means.
Rick:
Right, right.
Paul:
When these ... let's look at this, maybe we can even look at it from both directions, but when executives and business leaders, the people who are strong on the human side, are gathered around you, trying to understand the tech world, what are some of the issues, or questions, or solutions that they kept coming to you for? Did you notice any patterns?
Rick:
It's a good question. I think one of the things that I noticed that, if you weren't schooled in tech, is that you have a hard time understanding the art of the possible, and so it either seems like magic, or it seems ... I had a funny statement someone told me the other day, is that to be a good consultant, you need to make the hard things seem easy and the easy things seem hard.
Rick:
And so I think for someone natively in technology, you could do something in five minutes, sometimes, that, to a business person, would seem ... you would wonder if it was even possible. Like, for instance, how can Facebook track you all over the web? It seems impossible, but they can do it, versus some things that they feel should be simple like, "Just build a website for me. Don't worry what's on there. I'm sure it'll be simple."
Rick:
And that's a six to nine month project, depending on what, involving, sometimes dozens of people, depending on what that person means when they say website, and so I think getting a common language for that, I think that's one thing. Second is I think anyone who's in technology long enough learns not to show prototypes to business people, because they think it will work at consumer scale.
Rick:
By consumer scale means like, if you showed it to a million people, would the website crash? Versus, "This is a toy that I have shown you for demonstration purposes."
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
It's kind of like the prototype conundrum for an engineer. People want to see something quickly, but then as soon as you show it to them, it needs to be in production the next day.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. That's funny. I like what you said there, though, about the possible, because I definitely relate to that. I'm mentoring some younger men through the church that I go to, and one of them was trying to describe to me this process called jail breaking yesterday, and I know what a jailbreak is at Alcatraz, but he's telling me, "Well, you can hack into this actual physical component of a smartphone, and you can tell it to ... " and I'm like, "What does that even mean?"
Rick:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't understand, like, what language are you using?
Paul:
Yeah, and it's funny, because actually what I see in that is the tech world is trying to apply a term that loosely has a corresponding, a parallel, to the physical world, but it's almost like when Jesus speaks in parables and he's saying the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that fell into the ground and grew up into this giant tree, and you're like, "Okay, I can picture a giant tree."
Paul:
But what he's actually talking about, we have no concept of it whatsoever. We're just like, "I think I can picture that." But that's not actually what it looks like.
Rick:
Right. Yeah, jail breaking, I'm not sure if I can picture that either, so we're in the same boat there.
Paul:
Well, I'm relieved to hear that.
Rick:
Although I've learned what the term means, but not because of the metaphor for it.
Paul:
Well, and that's the thing is this is ... it has, in the time since the late '90s, when this really started to take off, and a lot of new things began to become possible, there was sort of a lagging stage. If I were to look at my memory, I would say there was a lagging stage between the late '90s and 2006 or so where it just seemed like things were going along at a normal pace, but then in about 2007 and onward they started to really accelerate, in terms of the development, and the sophistication, and all of the things that are now possible.
Paul:
Here we are, 12 years later, and it's just each time I find out what is actually being made possible by technology these days, I'm just dumbfounded.
Rick:
Yeah, what did you peg? Like, the smart phone or something? That's almost that time.
Paul:
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah. It was, I mean, you know, you went along for a little while, and there was this MySpace, and everybody got on it, but you couldn't really do anything with it, and then Facebook comes along, and they might've been a little bit primitive at the start but they quickly started to metastasize, I guess, is maybe the right word to say it, and they became very, very sophisticated and very, very good, and very, very useful to the business world, certainly, as an advertising vehicle.
Rick:
Right. Definitely, and you know, everybody was and/or is still today spending all of their time there.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
Whether it's Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp or any of these platforms.
Paul:
Yes. Now, let's transpose that, though. I'm just finishing, if you haven't, I wouldn't be surprised to learn you've read it, The Bezos Letters by Steve Anderson. Have you read that book?
Rick:
I've not read that book in particular, but I have read most of what Jeff Bezos publishes to his investors, so maybe not the book, but probably the content.
Paul:
Okay. Yeah, now that, I don't know. You know, it's starting to become specialized, so I don't know if it's the same kind of e-commerce, you know, or if there's just things that are universal in each part of e-commerce, but you watch what they've done there with how they've transformed the world of shipping, and home delivery next day, and all this stuff. That's been astounding, just in the last few years, too.
Rick:
No, Jeff Bezos is kind of in a class by its own. I think it's hard to believe, to me, that the richest person in the world can be an underrated business leader, but I still think he is because I'm not sure if he is yet put in the popular culture at the same level as Steve Jobs, or like Bill Gates was, but from my point of view he's right there with people like that and what he's done, just because he's created multiple billion dollar businesses from a book store.
Rick:
I mean, that's what he created, so with someone else's books, I mean, for crying out loud. He didn't even own that many books. Most of them shipped from a distributor nearby, when he started out.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. It's remarkable. One other question I had, Rick. You described this at the outset, this moving into the chief executive role, and not so long ago I was talking with a family member of mine who, a friend of his found himself a similar type of thing. He was brought on as the COO or as CTO, and next thing you knew the existing chief executive is basically being removed by the board, and they're saying to this fairly new person in the leadership role on the operations side, "You're the man."
Paul:
I guess, you know, maybe one or two things if you could think of, that, at the time that this happened to you with Merchantry, what would you really liked to have known or understood before it happened?
Rick:
I think a couple of things. I did have the foresight enough to know that the people who were asking me to do this, they knew I had never done this before, so that was somewhat comforting to me, in some strange way, and that gave me a little more confidence to take the role. It didn't reduce the stress at all. It maybe seems like it should have, but I think knowing that even if you fail at something, the knowledge you've acquired through all the challenges that you have never dealt with before in your life, those are things that very, very few people in the world get to do.
Rick:
And so as a result you become 10 times more valuable than the next person who hasn't had those experiences, regardless of the outcome. Now, if you can get a new outcome, then you become a even more rarefied heir, but even just having been through it you become part of this, I don't know what the best word for this is, like this cult of people called entrepreneurs that like pain in a certain way, that enjoy the pain and the trials of building something every day, and they understand what that means, and don't get depressed by it.
Rick:
Or maybe they do get depressed by it, and often, but they still understand that they want to do it.
Paul:
Yeah. Glutton for punishment. Yeah.
Rick:
That's right. I think that's definitely, I think, something that's interesting. I think another thing that I didn't necessarily know back then was Silicon Valley has this term that, in Silicon Valley, you only fail up. You don't fall down after you fail, and what it means is you could have the most spectacular, billion dollar waste of money, and then that person two years from now will be at another billion dollar company leading it.
Rick:
And the reason is because there aren't many people in California that have ever run a billion dollar company, ever, so the fact that this one lost money, you hope they learned something from it, more than the person who's never had the temerity to try it at all, so.
Paul:
Yeah, I like that. That is a much more circumspect mentality, isn't it? Because if that resource pool is that minute to begin with, then the only, you know, most of the time the only selection you can get is somebody who at least has sat in the chair, whether they've been able to guide the ship whether it's supposed to go is an entirely different matter.
Rick:
Right, and I think most people understand that any kind of success in business is part luck, it's part timing, it's part market, it's part product, it's part talent, and as an entrepreneur you have control over some of these some of the time. Right? And so I think the really smart boards understand that. I'm pretty sure. Not all of them do, but it's a guessing game at best to figure out, as you know, "Is this person the right type of leader for this opportunity?"
Rick:
You know, and front of the company. It's fascinating.
Paul:
Not so long ago, a couple of men who I admire in the influencer space were doing a joint interview, and they sort of got into this conversation about what do you understand differently about business now that you've been in it for 10, 15, 20 years, however long the two of them had been in, and the one said to the other, "When I was starting out, I thought my business was 98 percent as a consequence of my hustle, and two percent luck." Right?
Paul:
And he said, "Now, I actually attribute it only to 30 percent my hustle, 30 percent my team that I build around me, and 30 percent luck." In other words-
Rick:
That's fascinating.
Paul:
Yeah. In other words, he was like, "You know," I mean, if you put it out, the rule of thirds there, right? 66 percent of the success of his business, he's like, "It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with either who I hire or what day it happens to be."
Rick:
No, for sure, and a lot of ... you know, some of the luck can be influenced. For instance, some of your luck is made by who you know, and who knows you.
Paul:
Yes.
Rick:
But it's still luck. There's still a big component of luck there, because that person doesn't have to call you. The person doesn't have to have an opportunity. You know, I just recently got called to present to the board of a retailer, and it's because of a relationship that I started 15 years ago.
Paul:
Yeah, no, that's so true.
Rick:
And I have nurtured, and we've stayed in touch, but not every singe year.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
You know? And he happened to think of me to call in, but he could have easily thought of anyone else.
Paul:
Yeah. Well, I'm literally going through that right at the moment, Rick. I've started as a content creator with Aaron Walker who runs the Iron Sharpens Iron Mastermind, and he's been on my show twice, so I've interviewed him about his business, and the first time I interviewed him was six or seven months ago, and then I knew he was coming out with a new product so I welcomed him back on the show, and that was when the opportunities, when the stars aligned, so to speak.
Paul:
But all that time, I was nurturing it. I was doing what I teach people to do in my book, and I was doing what we've called here the executive code, right? I was basically going out there and giving out value without asking for anything in return and just sowing seed.
Rick:
Yeah, and you know, I think that's one of the things that I set out to do when I founded my own business this year is when I started my business, one of the reason I felt I could start it and be successful was that I already had 2,500 contacts on LinkedIn that either knew me, or knew of me, or some degree. Since then, this was in February of this year, now, as we sit here in November, I'm already up to 6,500 contacts.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
And part of that is every single day I've made it a practice to publish on LinkedIn, and I tell you, at least two thirds of the people I meet with make a comment to me about the profile. Literally two days ago, someone wrote on my LinkedIn, "Rick, you should be charging for this content."
Paul:
Yeah. Those are actually very thought provoking posts, now that you mention that. I've read a few of them myself, and you know, it's interesting to observe trends and activities and transactions and changes in leadership and all of that, and then hear the perspective on it from somebody who has actually played at that level, and can make a meaningful and valuable observation about what's going on, because for the average observer, you know, you're just like, "Oh, so and so's stepping down as chairman of this."
Paul:
Or, "This person suddenly landed this major deal, and they've inked it, and now there's a strategic partnership happening there." And you know, you're like, "Oh, that's cool, I'm happy for them, but I don't understand the details or where they're headed with this."
Rick:
Yeah, in some of these companies, I feel like I've been watching them long enough that I feel like I'm inside the head of these companies, and you can tell what they do, why they do things, based on what you know about the culture, because maybe you've seen the people who worked there that moved on, and particularly for bigger companies, culture is a slow thing to change, so if you watch them for even a couple of years you can figure out how and why they make decisions.
Rick:
Which, if you've not been involved with them, you assume it's by accident, or it must be random, or something.
Paul:
Or that's just what they were planning to do, and they just pulled it out like a bunny out of a hat type of thing.
Rick:
Yeah, so I mean, the content that I enjoy most is analysis related. It is, "Why is this happening> What are the impacts?" And more like deport us five forces type thing, where you have something happening, "Who does it effect? What are the implications of this, positive and negative? What's the new white space created by this?"
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
"Why didn't they do something else?" And a lot of people just read an article and then share the link, and I would say that's probably what 80 percent of people are doing on social media, and content creation channels, but I use my cache of links and bookmarks as the jumping off point for my analysis pieces, so I won't just share the link. I'll read the article and then I'll think about it for a couple of minutes, and then I'll write something, then not looking at the article.
Paul:
Right, right. Yeah. No, that's the way to do it. I mean, in that sense, I just see a parallel there, with sort of like almost an opinion journalism type of thing. Not necessarily to be a provocateur, but to make clear some degree of polarity, because you want to come down on the side of something one way or the other. You want to say, "This is how I think about this."
Paul:
And then the people who disagree with you will either stamp their feet in protest, or they'll just go away, but the people who say, "Yeah, me too," then you start getting people raising their hands out of that.
Rick:
No, for sure, and I never worry so much about disagreements. I've always been of the mind that reasonable people can disagree on plenty of things. Not everything thinks that, but I've always thought that, and so I try to understand, if I get people who comment on anything I write and saying, "I think you're all wet here. Here's why." I first try to get on, "Why do they think this," is usually the first question I try to ask, because they have a different perspective.
Rick:
Sometimes I've had, like, sometimes I write about FedEx and I have people comment on things I wrote that maybe don't currently work for FedEx but worked for them for 15 years, so I'm like, "This person has a lot of credibility." And I'll get a direct message saying, "Nope, your analysis is off here."
Rick:
I'm like, "Okay, tell me more."
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, yeah, there's always that being on the inside. I have the same thing from my time with the military. You know, there's the way the press portrayed it. There's the way everybody thinks it is, and I will even say that, you know, I lived neck deep in it for five and a half years, but I lived neck deep in it in the units I served in, doing the job I did, so you could just as easily run into somebody who was in the service who would tell you, "No, the TV narrative is pretty accurate, or the popular narrative is pretty accurate," as you would me who would say, "no, that's kind of sunshine and lollipops, if you ask me."
Rick:
Right, and as you pointed out, the role that you did, whatever it was, it may have been different than a general, who has to deal more with politics than some day to day things, or the person who's running the mess hall, or the person who's on the front lines.
Paul:
Yes, yeah. No, they were very different, and a little while ago I had a retired major general that I met through a mastermind. He's a published author now. Craig Weldon is his name, and listening to him talk about military leadership, the thought process that he applied to it, is a perfect example of just the point you're making there.
Rick:
Interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating.
Paul:
Well, so I have run out of questions here, Rick, but I wanted to see if you had anything else you'd want to insert here for the good of the order.
Rick:
Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of entrepreneurship and things that I think your audience will hopefully take away, the biggest thing that's hard to do, particularly before you start to do something, is just getting over the fear. I mean, the fear is everything, in terms of, "What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What happens if I don't do this? What's the worst that could happen?"
Rick:
And it's very easy to get wrapped up in that fear, and it's mostly the fear, not necessarily of losing a little bit of money, although that is usually a big fear as well, but it's a fear of expectations of others, and it's also the fear of seeing yourself as a failure if it doesn't go well.
Paul:
Yes.
Rick:
You know, I can personally attest to feeling that way before I started this business now, and you know, it's quite powerful.
Paul:
Yeah it is. I seldom have a guest on the show where we don't touch on that in some way, because I think what entrepreneurs fail to realize, one of my coaches, Vince Delmonty, pointed this out to me a long time ago. He said, "Your competitors are all struggling with same issues that you are." You know, their own versions of them, but that's what people tend to forget.
Paul:
They tend to think, "Well, I'm the only person struggling with this, and so and so down the street has got the same business I do, and he's just having a grand old time going gang busters." You know?
Rick:
Right.
Paul:
And, no, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
Rick:
No, for sure, and I think employees that leave one company and hop to the next one kind of suffer from the same thing at times, sort of grass is greener syndrome. No, the grass is green and brown everywhere.
Paul:
Yeah. No, that's true. You can go work for the best employers in the world, the ones that are rated the highest by all the cool magazines and stuff like that, and you will find something to be unhappy about.
Rick:
Yeah.
Paul:
That kind of goes with our condition.
Rick:
Yeah, particularly if it involves your manager that oversees everything you've done.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, never worked for a company where I didn't eventually ... I mean, I've worked for some that were better than others, right? Overall, on balance, but I never worked for one where I didn't find something that just totally rubbed me the wrong way, especially because I come from that sales side, right?
Rick:
Right.
Paul:
The other side of the equation, where they're trying to make everything balance out, and they're trying to make the numbers line up, and they're trying to make all of that. I would butt heads with people on that side of the aisle, more often than I should have, but I did.
Rick:
Right, right. I'm sure, and whatever number you achieved last year is not good enough.
Paul:
No.
Rick:
This next year.
Paul:
No, it's always, "What have you done for me lately?" No, well, Rick, it's been fantastic having you on the show. This has been a great conversation, and if people want to know more about you online, what would be the best place to send them?
Rick:
Yeah, I think my website is a good place to start. It is at rickwatson.io, or you can find me on LinkedIn at Rick Watson as well.
Paul:
Excellent. One more quick, silly question here, since I've got you, Rick. What is .io? Where did that come from, anyways?
Rick:
It's another one of those techy things. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly ones that are trying to be venture backed, they saw that they were running out of .com names that were cool enough, and so a number of, particularly venture backed startups and things, started using .io, particularly if they were very tech focused, like tools for develops or tools for those sorts of things, and so there are a number of, I don't know if there are millions of them, but there are certainly several companies that have built websites with .io, and I couldn't get the .com either, so it was good.
Paul:
Maybe I better change my domain name. All right, well, Rick, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been great. We'd love to have you back again, soon, my friend. Thanks for your time.
Rick:
All right. I would love to come back. Thanks a lot, Paul.
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 1:
Get your free copy today by going to thepaulsedwards.com and signing up for our mailing list. Now, please welcome your host, Paul Edwards.
Paul:
It's a privilege to serve you on Influencer Networking Secrets with another high level profile of how technology is improving life for humanity. Our guest for this episode is Rick Watson, coming to us from a succession of executive roles in technology with notable names like Pitney Bowes, Merchantry, where he's served as CEO, Barnes & Noble, and Channel Advisor, and Rick now runs his own consulting firm.
Paul:
It's RMW Commerce Consulting, in the big apple, New York City. Rick, welcome to the show.
Rick:
Thanks so much. Great to be on with you, Paul.
Paul:
Great to have you, and I always like to start out this way, Rick. I mean, you've got quite the resume there, and you're busy building up clients there, now, independently, in the tech and commerce sectors, but maybe if you could just start with a little bit of background as to how you got into this world, and how you quickly ended up in executive roles, and how that all transpired?
Rick:
Yeah. I guess I've always been attracted to tech fields. Originally, coming out of, finished undergrad and master's in electrical engineering, and it just so happened that one of the first companies I joined out of school was related to e-commerce, and that was Channel Advisor, so started there as a software engineer, and was at that company for 10 years, and over the years I moved from software engineer, into software product management, which is really about getting to talk to customers more, and understanding customer needs, and building road maps so that you can improve the software that you're working on.
Rick:
And so, really enjoyed that, and as I progressed in that company, I rose a couple of times to director of product management and engineering there, so started to get some management experience for the first time. This is all when I was in North Carolina, and then moved to New York City, became general manager of third party marketplace at barnes&noble.com, so this was my first job at a retailer.
Rick:
Kind of leading high level business strategy for a major initiative, so kind of progressed from there, and then Merchantry, originally when I joined the role I was not the CEO. I was actually VP of operations, kind of running a lot of the back office stuff that was not sales and marketing, sort of product and technology, kind of customer management, and then within eight months I was actually promoted to CEO by the board, so this began probably one of the most stressful two and a half years of my life, as you might imagine, being a first time CEO with a company that was not yours, with someone else's money.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
That was certainly interesting, and then despite the fact that it was somewhat of a turnaround situation, we managed to get a successful outcome selling the company to a larger company based in Silicon Valley, and from there joined Pitney Bowes in the product management organization leading up a team of product managers responsible for cross-border e-commerce, so helping retailers sell into international markets. Primarily US retailers, and then kind of exiting that organization, February, the beginning of this year, really is trying to figure out, "What do I want to do next?"
Rick:
And having just some executive and entrepreneurial experience, but never started my own company from scratch, I felt like it was a good time for me to make that leap, so that was really the impetus for me starting my own e-commerce consulting firm.
Paul:
My brain got hung up on when you said, about Barnes & Noble, third party platform. I think I know what you mean there, but can you just extrapolate on that just a little bit?
Rick:
Yeah. No problem at all. One of the areas, you know, it's sort of a niche of e-commerce that is starting to get more and more sort of trending higher, it's what's called a third party marketplace. Traditionally, in retail, you manufacture or buy inventory. You hold it in a warehouse waiting around for someone to buy it, and then you ship it out. Now, as you might imagine, the capital cost of buying lots of inventory that may or may not sell is quite high, and so companies, I would say early in the 2000s, very late '90s, early 2000s, and Amazon has really sort of taken it over.
Rick:
Ebay and Amazon have really pioneered this model of what's called a third party marketplace, and the whole idea is you don't have to hold the inventory yourself. Third parties, often it could be mom and pop's, it could be very large businesses, list their items on your marketplace, and they ship on your behalf as well, so you essentially take none of the risk of the inventory, but you represent to the buyer that you have this product and you can ship it quickly, and then you hold the sellers to those standards.
Paul:
Okay. Yeah. I was thinking that. It always makes me hearken back to the old, probably 19th century version. The peddler, right? The person who wants to buy the product, and they found someone who has the product, and they meet in the middle, and they keep a commission.
Rick:
Yeah, I think that matches a marketplace well. It's really a middleman in between buyers and sellers, and they take varying degrees of commissions based on the services they're providing.
Paul:
You know, and I see the world going that way. I mean, affiliate marketing, in my sphere, in the influencer world, same thing. Right? You basically, you have a product, you leverage someone else's credibility with someone else's audience, and basically it's a great mechanism for getting a quality product into the hands of a bunch of pre-qualified, if you will, interested buyers.
Rick:
Absolutely, and I think in affiliate marketing it's usually some kind of web based lead, right? Driving someone to a website. In a marketplace, it is that, but it also is fulfilling a transaction where a payment is transacted, and then whoever accepts that payment needs to then ship that product to a physical buyer.
Paul:
Yes, yes. Yeah, taking out the back end side of that with deliver of the product is definitely an ease. Definitely eases the expense ratio that you're going to incur there, but yeah. Okay, good. That cleared that up. Sometimes, these terms are, I'm like, I'm looking at it, I'm like, "I think I know what they mean."
Rick:
Right, right.
Paul:
Here's just a little bit of inside baseball for the audience listening, and that is that a few weeks ago, Rick, you and I had a great conversation, and as I was listening to you talk, of all the back and forth we had, I think the thing that stuck out to me most was, I'm calling this the executive code, and the reason is we're starting to build an audience here, build a tribe, if you will, of people with a good sort of tech coding software background, and I want them to understand the human code.
Paul:
Because it's not quite the same as computer. You can't program a specific outcome in every situation, but you can program an overarching trend, an upward trend, if you will, I find, provided you execute certain things as a matter of habit and routine. Anyway, all of that to say you mentioned that at certain stages of your career the ability to move fluidly between technology and then over to the human side, which is more business, and entrepreneurship, and negotiations, and all of that, served you really well.
Paul:
It actually ended up making you, by default, one of the most sought out people in the room, if you were in a room full of business executives, but I'm piecing this together now. Am I telling the story accurately here? Is this how it went for you?
Rick:
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, obviously, not in every situation, but I think based on my background I've always had a very technical background, even relatively early age, and then through college, and early career, and arguably I'm still in a technical field, but moving over as my career progresses more into the business and entrepreneurship side. What I've found is that there are a lot of people who are very good at one thing, but it's very hard to be good at multiple things.
Rick:
And even if I wasn't the very best in the world at one single thing, if I was pretty close to 80 percent of as good as they were in two things, then the opportunities multiplied for me.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is hard. I mean, I was having this conversation the other day with some friends. It's difficult enough to start out in life as a generalist, to know an appropriate degree about a lot of things. Then you want to specialize, but then, although a lot of people can specialize in one thing, the person who can actually almost specialize in two things to a sufficient degree of competence really has a strong advantage.
Rick:
Yeah, I think that's right, and definitely from the beginning of my career, for sure, I was a specialist. I spent most of my time coding from a software point of view, ascending relatively high, as I was in a robotics lab, and electrical engineering, and out of grad school, and then wrote software for a long time, and then kind of progressed from there, but more recently leading teams of people, thinking about things like culture, human resources, fundraising.
Rick:
I probably never would have imagined I would be doing those things as well.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, you know, as I was thinking that through, I was saying to myself in our audience there are entrepreneurs who aren't particularly good at tech, and then we have tech people who maybe they're employees and they're not entrepreneurs, or they want to be entrepreneurs, independent contractors, or start a business, or something like that, but I really wanted them to get the sense of the power of that mixture.
Paul:
Now, do you find this, Rick, this is something I thought about as I reflected on that, then I said to myself, "You know, I don't think our culture has yet caught on to the importance of teaching both of those." Right? If you look at the traditional education system, it's either you're going to get a business degree, or you're going to get a computer science degree.
Paul:
Would you say ... ? Or I don't know if this is how your, if your mind thinks the same way mine does, would you say they're sort of still hanging onto an attempt to keep one separate from the other?
Rick:
I think by and large the answer is yes. I mean, you know, getting essentially a computer science engineering degree, I didn't have to take an English class in school, in college, which sort of perfectly answers your point, I believe, and you know, I do think there are some elements of change, but the world, and almost the world is becoming more and more specialized, in that to reach the top of a specific field, it's very hard if you aren't hyper focused on one specific thing, which tends to, in my experience, pigeon hole people, and makes it harder to be an executive.
Rick:
Because to be an executive, you have to be able to ... I mean, one of the things that matters to an executive is that you have to be able to manage people who aren't like you.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, you're right. You're right. This actually provokes a spinoff question which I didn't have written down. When you were doing this role, chief executive or leading an executive department, you mention people who aren't like you. Any quick stories come to mind? Like, "This person was very much unlike me, and thus managing them was a challenge."
Rick:
I mean, I think the classic former engineer trying to manage a sales team is probably the best example I could come up with.
Paul:
Right.
Rick:
As I had been a technology leader, a product leader, and a general manager for a short time, and I was VP of operations for less than a year, and then I became a CEO, responsible for sales and marketing, and so from there I had no idea how to hire a sales person, and how to judge the character and the results of sales people, particularly during the interview process, because they were all really good at interviewing.
Paul:
Of course, yeah.
Rick:
And so it was quite challenging for me, during that process, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, and I think as a result it tends to get into a little bit of analysis paralysis. You don't want to make a mistake. You're trying to involve others in the process, but you know, it's hard to know what's happening, and having those mistakes is super valuable, as you know.
Paul:
Well, sure, yeah. That's interesting, because, see now, this is the funny thing. You've got the traditional engineer perspective, here, and these sales people, you mentioned, it was a challenge to know which ones to pick and which ones not to, and that makes me curious, because here's the thing, right? I have to sell to an engineer every day of my life because I married one. Right?
Rick:
Right, right.
Paul:
Just, again, with respect to time and all that, but what's an example, maybe, if any come to mind, of where they came across really good to you and you were kind of in a deer in the headlights? "Do I say yes or do I say no?"
Rick:
Yeah, I mean, I think, really, it comes down to there isn't one specific conversation that stands out to me, but ultimately just interviewing marketing people over, and over, and over, and over, and coming down to, at one point, really, I just had to fall back on, "Do I think I can trust this person, and is this the kind of person I can do business with?" And I was just, it was actually interesting, I was watching a video on Simon Sinek's new book, The Infinite Game, and how the Seals select their next member, of like Seals Team Six, and things like that.
Rick:
And there's sort of a two by two quadrant of high trust and high skill, right? But I think the thing that's super insightful about that process is that they would much, much rather find someone high trust even if they're medium skill.
Paul:
Yeah. That's interesting.
Rick:
And I think that's something that business tends not to do, in a lot of situations.
Paul:
Oh, horribly so, yeah. I mean, that's the perirenal problem of every entrepreneur I've known is they say, you know, "I hired this person. At first, they seemed terrific, and it turned out to be a dud." You know? And mean time, you're thinking, "I wonder if there was anybody else in that pool who maybe didn't have all the flash in the pan thing when they first showed up," but if you would've taken them on, if you would've been able to look past that, you know, if you would've had the presence of mind to say it's not all about the bling when they show up at the interview.
Rick:
Yeah, and the thing, I think, at that time, the thing I had the most trouble with was discerning between the solid but trustworthy but not flashy, versus the flashy and pretty good and unsure of how trustworthy they are.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's such a game. It really is. You said The Infinite Game. Is that a book, or a documentary, or ... ?
Rick:
No, yeah, I think he just released this book just in the last month or so.
Paul:
Okay. Yeah, I made a note of that. I'm going to pick that up.
Rick:
Yeah, yeah. I actually haven't read it yet, I just watched a video on it, so it's on my want to read list in Amazon, which is about 100 books long now.
Paul:
Yeah, I know. That's the life of an entrepreneur. Always reading. You've got to always be reading. Okay, so let's, you know, maybe these conversations just sort of bleed together after a while, Rick, but I'm curious. You know, I could look at a line of computer code with my wife sitting next to me telling me what it means, and I still wouldn't understand what it means.
Rick:
Right, right.
Paul:
When these ... let's look at this, maybe we can even look at it from both directions, but when executives and business leaders, the people who are strong on the human side, are gathered around you, trying to understand the tech world, what are some of the issues, or questions, or solutions that they kept coming to you for? Did you notice any patterns?
Rick:
It's a good question. I think one of the things that I noticed that, if you weren't schooled in tech, is that you have a hard time understanding the art of the possible, and so it either seems like magic, or it seems ... I had a funny statement someone told me the other day, is that to be a good consultant, you need to make the hard things seem easy and the easy things seem hard.
Rick:
And so I think for someone natively in technology, you could do something in five minutes, sometimes, that, to a business person, would seem ... you would wonder if it was even possible. Like, for instance, how can Facebook track you all over the web? It seems impossible, but they can do it, versus some things that they feel should be simple like, "Just build a website for me. Don't worry what's on there. I'm sure it'll be simple."
Rick:
And that's a six to nine month project, depending on what, involving, sometimes dozens of people, depending on what that person means when they say website, and so I think getting a common language for that, I think that's one thing. Second is I think anyone who's in technology long enough learns not to show prototypes to business people, because they think it will work at consumer scale.
Rick:
By consumer scale means like, if you showed it to a million people, would the website crash? Versus, "This is a toy that I have shown you for demonstration purposes."
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
It's kind of like the prototype conundrum for an engineer. People want to see something quickly, but then as soon as you show it to them, it needs to be in production the next day.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. That's funny. I like what you said there, though, about the possible, because I definitely relate to that. I'm mentoring some younger men through the church that I go to, and one of them was trying to describe to me this process called jail breaking yesterday, and I know what a jailbreak is at Alcatraz, but he's telling me, "Well, you can hack into this actual physical component of a smartphone, and you can tell it to ... " and I'm like, "What does that even mean?"
Rick:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't understand, like, what language are you using?
Paul:
Yeah, and it's funny, because actually what I see in that is the tech world is trying to apply a term that loosely has a corresponding, a parallel, to the physical world, but it's almost like when Jesus speaks in parables and he's saying the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that fell into the ground and grew up into this giant tree, and you're like, "Okay, I can picture a giant tree."
Paul:
But what he's actually talking about, we have no concept of it whatsoever. We're just like, "I think I can picture that." But that's not actually what it looks like.
Rick:
Right. Yeah, jail breaking, I'm not sure if I can picture that either, so we're in the same boat there.
Paul:
Well, I'm relieved to hear that.
Rick:
Although I've learned what the term means, but not because of the metaphor for it.
Paul:
Well, and that's the thing is this is ... it has, in the time since the late '90s, when this really started to take off, and a lot of new things began to become possible, there was sort of a lagging stage. If I were to look at my memory, I would say there was a lagging stage between the late '90s and 2006 or so where it just seemed like things were going along at a normal pace, but then in about 2007 and onward they started to really accelerate, in terms of the development, and the sophistication, and all of the things that are now possible.
Paul:
Here we are, 12 years later, and it's just each time I find out what is actually being made possible by technology these days, I'm just dumbfounded.
Rick:
Yeah, what did you peg? Like, the smart phone or something? That's almost that time.
Paul:
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah. It was, I mean, you know, you went along for a little while, and there was this MySpace, and everybody got on it, but you couldn't really do anything with it, and then Facebook comes along, and they might've been a little bit primitive at the start but they quickly started to metastasize, I guess, is maybe the right word to say it, and they became very, very sophisticated and very, very good, and very, very useful to the business world, certainly, as an advertising vehicle.
Rick:
Right. Definitely, and you know, everybody was and/or is still today spending all of their time there.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
Whether it's Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp or any of these platforms.
Paul:
Yes. Now, let's transpose that, though. I'm just finishing, if you haven't, I wouldn't be surprised to learn you've read it, The Bezos Letters by Steve Anderson. Have you read that book?
Rick:
I've not read that book in particular, but I have read most of what Jeff Bezos publishes to his investors, so maybe not the book, but probably the content.
Paul:
Okay. Yeah, now that, I don't know. You know, it's starting to become specialized, so I don't know if it's the same kind of e-commerce, you know, or if there's just things that are universal in each part of e-commerce, but you watch what they've done there with how they've transformed the world of shipping, and home delivery next day, and all this stuff. That's been astounding, just in the last few years, too.
Rick:
No, Jeff Bezos is kind of in a class by its own. I think it's hard to believe, to me, that the richest person in the world can be an underrated business leader, but I still think he is because I'm not sure if he is yet put in the popular culture at the same level as Steve Jobs, or like Bill Gates was, but from my point of view he's right there with people like that and what he's done, just because he's created multiple billion dollar businesses from a book store.
Rick:
I mean, that's what he created, so with someone else's books, I mean, for crying out loud. He didn't even own that many books. Most of them shipped from a distributor nearby, when he started out.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. It's remarkable. One other question I had, Rick. You described this at the outset, this moving into the chief executive role, and not so long ago I was talking with a family member of mine who, a friend of his found himself a similar type of thing. He was brought on as the COO or as CTO, and next thing you knew the existing chief executive is basically being removed by the board, and they're saying to this fairly new person in the leadership role on the operations side, "You're the man."
Paul:
I guess, you know, maybe one or two things if you could think of, that, at the time that this happened to you with Merchantry, what would you really liked to have known or understood before it happened?
Rick:
I think a couple of things. I did have the foresight enough to know that the people who were asking me to do this, they knew I had never done this before, so that was somewhat comforting to me, in some strange way, and that gave me a little more confidence to take the role. It didn't reduce the stress at all. It maybe seems like it should have, but I think knowing that even if you fail at something, the knowledge you've acquired through all the challenges that you have never dealt with before in your life, those are things that very, very few people in the world get to do.
Rick:
And so as a result you become 10 times more valuable than the next person who hasn't had those experiences, regardless of the outcome. Now, if you can get a new outcome, then you become a even more rarefied heir, but even just having been through it you become part of this, I don't know what the best word for this is, like this cult of people called entrepreneurs that like pain in a certain way, that enjoy the pain and the trials of building something every day, and they understand what that means, and don't get depressed by it.
Rick:
Or maybe they do get depressed by it, and often, but they still understand that they want to do it.
Paul:
Yeah. Glutton for punishment. Yeah.
Rick:
That's right. I think that's definitely, I think, something that's interesting. I think another thing that I didn't necessarily know back then was Silicon Valley has this term that, in Silicon Valley, you only fail up. You don't fall down after you fail, and what it means is you could have the most spectacular, billion dollar waste of money, and then that person two years from now will be at another billion dollar company leading it.
Rick:
And the reason is because there aren't many people in California that have ever run a billion dollar company, ever, so the fact that this one lost money, you hope they learned something from it, more than the person who's never had the temerity to try it at all, so.
Paul:
Yeah, I like that. That is a much more circumspect mentality, isn't it? Because if that resource pool is that minute to begin with, then the only, you know, most of the time the only selection you can get is somebody who at least has sat in the chair, whether they've been able to guide the ship whether it's supposed to go is an entirely different matter.
Rick:
Right, and I think most people understand that any kind of success in business is part luck, it's part timing, it's part market, it's part product, it's part talent, and as an entrepreneur you have control over some of these some of the time. Right? And so I think the really smart boards understand that. I'm pretty sure. Not all of them do, but it's a guessing game at best to figure out, as you know, "Is this person the right type of leader for this opportunity?"
Rick:
You know, and front of the company. It's fascinating.
Paul:
Not so long ago, a couple of men who I admire in the influencer space were doing a joint interview, and they sort of got into this conversation about what do you understand differently about business now that you've been in it for 10, 15, 20 years, however long the two of them had been in, and the one said to the other, "When I was starting out, I thought my business was 98 percent as a consequence of my hustle, and two percent luck." Right?
Paul:
And he said, "Now, I actually attribute it only to 30 percent my hustle, 30 percent my team that I build around me, and 30 percent luck." In other words-
Rick:
That's fascinating.
Paul:
Yeah. In other words, he was like, "You know," I mean, if you put it out, the rule of thirds there, right? 66 percent of the success of his business, he's like, "It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with either who I hire or what day it happens to be."
Rick:
No, for sure, and a lot of ... you know, some of the luck can be influenced. For instance, some of your luck is made by who you know, and who knows you.
Paul:
Yes.
Rick:
But it's still luck. There's still a big component of luck there, because that person doesn't have to call you. The person doesn't have to have an opportunity. You know, I just recently got called to present to the board of a retailer, and it's because of a relationship that I started 15 years ago.
Paul:
Yeah, no, that's so true.
Rick:
And I have nurtured, and we've stayed in touch, but not every singe year.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
You know? And he happened to think of me to call in, but he could have easily thought of anyone else.
Paul:
Yeah. Well, I'm literally going through that right at the moment, Rick. I've started as a content creator with Aaron Walker who runs the Iron Sharpens Iron Mastermind, and he's been on my show twice, so I've interviewed him about his business, and the first time I interviewed him was six or seven months ago, and then I knew he was coming out with a new product so I welcomed him back on the show, and that was when the opportunities, when the stars aligned, so to speak.
Paul:
But all that time, I was nurturing it. I was doing what I teach people to do in my book, and I was doing what we've called here the executive code, right? I was basically going out there and giving out value without asking for anything in return and just sowing seed.
Rick:
Yeah, and you know, I think that's one of the things that I set out to do when I founded my own business this year is when I started my business, one of the reason I felt I could start it and be successful was that I already had 2,500 contacts on LinkedIn that either knew me, or knew of me, or some degree. Since then, this was in February of this year, now, as we sit here in November, I'm already up to 6,500 contacts.
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
And part of that is every single day I've made it a practice to publish on LinkedIn, and I tell you, at least two thirds of the people I meet with make a comment to me about the profile. Literally two days ago, someone wrote on my LinkedIn, "Rick, you should be charging for this content."
Paul:
Yeah. Those are actually very thought provoking posts, now that you mention that. I've read a few of them myself, and you know, it's interesting to observe trends and activities and transactions and changes in leadership and all of that, and then hear the perspective on it from somebody who has actually played at that level, and can make a meaningful and valuable observation about what's going on, because for the average observer, you know, you're just like, "Oh, so and so's stepping down as chairman of this."
Paul:
Or, "This person suddenly landed this major deal, and they've inked it, and now there's a strategic partnership happening there." And you know, you're like, "Oh, that's cool, I'm happy for them, but I don't understand the details or where they're headed with this."
Rick:
Yeah, in some of these companies, I feel like I've been watching them long enough that I feel like I'm inside the head of these companies, and you can tell what they do, why they do things, based on what you know about the culture, because maybe you've seen the people who worked there that moved on, and particularly for bigger companies, culture is a slow thing to change, so if you watch them for even a couple of years you can figure out how and why they make decisions.
Rick:
Which, if you've not been involved with them, you assume it's by accident, or it must be random, or something.
Paul:
Or that's just what they were planning to do, and they just pulled it out like a bunny out of a hat type of thing.
Rick:
Yeah, so I mean, the content that I enjoy most is analysis related. It is, "Why is this happening> What are the impacts?" And more like deport us five forces type thing, where you have something happening, "Who does it effect? What are the implications of this, positive and negative? What's the new white space created by this?"
Paul:
Yeah.
Rick:
"Why didn't they do something else?" And a lot of people just read an article and then share the link, and I would say that's probably what 80 percent of people are doing on social media, and content creation channels, but I use my cache of links and bookmarks as the jumping off point for my analysis pieces, so I won't just share the link. I'll read the article and then I'll think about it for a couple of minutes, and then I'll write something, then not looking at the article.
Paul:
Right, right. Yeah. No, that's the way to do it. I mean, in that sense, I just see a parallel there, with sort of like almost an opinion journalism type of thing. Not necessarily to be a provocateur, but to make clear some degree of polarity, because you want to come down on the side of something one way or the other. You want to say, "This is how I think about this."
Paul:
And then the people who disagree with you will either stamp their feet in protest, or they'll just go away, but the people who say, "Yeah, me too," then you start getting people raising their hands out of that.
Rick:
No, for sure, and I never worry so much about disagreements. I've always been of the mind that reasonable people can disagree on plenty of things. Not everything thinks that, but I've always thought that, and so I try to understand, if I get people who comment on anything I write and saying, "I think you're all wet here. Here's why." I first try to get on, "Why do they think this," is usually the first question I try to ask, because they have a different perspective.
Rick:
Sometimes I've had, like, sometimes I write about FedEx and I have people comment on things I wrote that maybe don't currently work for FedEx but worked for them for 15 years, so I'm like, "This person has a lot of credibility." And I'll get a direct message saying, "Nope, your analysis is off here."
Rick:
I'm like, "Okay, tell me more."
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, yeah, there's always that being on the inside. I have the same thing from my time with the military. You know, there's the way the press portrayed it. There's the way everybody thinks it is, and I will even say that, you know, I lived neck deep in it for five and a half years, but I lived neck deep in it in the units I served in, doing the job I did, so you could just as easily run into somebody who was in the service who would tell you, "No, the TV narrative is pretty accurate, or the popular narrative is pretty accurate," as you would me who would say, "no, that's kind of sunshine and lollipops, if you ask me."
Rick:
Right, and as you pointed out, the role that you did, whatever it was, it may have been different than a general, who has to deal more with politics than some day to day things, or the person who's running the mess hall, or the person who's on the front lines.
Paul:
Yes, yeah. No, they were very different, and a little while ago I had a retired major general that I met through a mastermind. He's a published author now. Craig Weldon is his name, and listening to him talk about military leadership, the thought process that he applied to it, is a perfect example of just the point you're making there.
Rick:
Interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating.
Paul:
Well, so I have run out of questions here, Rick, but I wanted to see if you had anything else you'd want to insert here for the good of the order.
Rick:
Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of entrepreneurship and things that I think your audience will hopefully take away, the biggest thing that's hard to do, particularly before you start to do something, is just getting over the fear. I mean, the fear is everything, in terms of, "What am I doing? Why am I doing it? What happens if I don't do this? What's the worst that could happen?"
Rick:
And it's very easy to get wrapped up in that fear, and it's mostly the fear, not necessarily of losing a little bit of money, although that is usually a big fear as well, but it's a fear of expectations of others, and it's also the fear of seeing yourself as a failure if it doesn't go well.
Paul:
Yes.
Rick:
You know, I can personally attest to feeling that way before I started this business now, and you know, it's quite powerful.
Paul:
Yeah it is. I seldom have a guest on the show where we don't touch on that in some way, because I think what entrepreneurs fail to realize, one of my coaches, Vince Delmonty, pointed this out to me a long time ago. He said, "Your competitors are all struggling with same issues that you are." You know, their own versions of them, but that's what people tend to forget.
Paul:
They tend to think, "Well, I'm the only person struggling with this, and so and so down the street has got the same business I do, and he's just having a grand old time going gang busters." You know?
Rick:
Right.
Paul:
And, no, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
Rick:
No, for sure, and I think employees that leave one company and hop to the next one kind of suffer from the same thing at times, sort of grass is greener syndrome. No, the grass is green and brown everywhere.
Paul:
Yeah. No, that's true. You can go work for the best employers in the world, the ones that are rated the highest by all the cool magazines and stuff like that, and you will find something to be unhappy about.
Rick:
Yeah.
Paul:
That kind of goes with our condition.
Rick:
Yeah, particularly if it involves your manager that oversees everything you've done.
Paul:
Yeah, yeah. No, never worked for a company where I didn't eventually ... I mean, I've worked for some that were better than others, right? Overall, on balance, but I never worked for one where I didn't find something that just totally rubbed me the wrong way, especially because I come from that sales side, right?
Rick:
Right.
Paul:
The other side of the equation, where they're trying to make everything balance out, and they're trying to make the numbers line up, and they're trying to make all of that. I would butt heads with people on that side of the aisle, more often than I should have, but I did.
Rick:
Right, right. I'm sure, and whatever number you achieved last year is not good enough.
Paul:
No.
Rick:
This next year.
Paul:
No, it's always, "What have you done for me lately?" No, well, Rick, it's been fantastic having you on the show. This has been a great conversation, and if people want to know more about you online, what would be the best place to send them?
Rick:
Yeah, I think my website is a good place to start. It is at rickwatson.io, or you can find me on LinkedIn at Rick Watson as well.
Paul:
Excellent. One more quick, silly question here, since I've got you, Rick. What is .io? Where did that come from, anyways?
Rick:
It's another one of those techy things. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly ones that are trying to be venture backed, they saw that they were running out of .com names that were cool enough, and so a number of, particularly venture backed startups and things, started using .io, particularly if they were very tech focused, like tools for develops or tools for those sorts of things, and so there are a number of, I don't know if there are millions of them, but there are certainly several companies that have built websites with .io, and I couldn't get the .com either, so it was good.
Paul:
Maybe I better change my domain name. All right, well, Rick, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been great. We'd love to have you back again, soon, my friend. Thanks for your time.
Rick:
All right. I would love to come back. Thanks a lot, Paul.
Speaker 1:
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