Authenticity, Always with Matt Harriman

0:00 Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Pod to himself, Matt Harriman, Joeings, the podcast. We're going with the podcast, your voice today. What's up, buddy? How you doing? I'm doing well. How are you?

0:14 I'm good. I'm good, man. Yeah. Well, I'm I'm really glad to have you back on. You cracked me up not too long ago, Matt, with I think you shared on LinkedIn. One of the reviews you recently

0:28 wrote a book, right? Yeah And there was I'm not even sure what the books about. I haven't read it. I don't even have time to list in my own podcast, little long read books. I got three kids. I

0:37 got multiple businesses. What am I doing with myself all the time? Not reading books, but you came up with a book on upstream planning or something like that and shared one of the reviews on on

0:49 LinkedIn. Can you can you tell me a little bit about, um, I guess what that review was was all about. Yeah. Are you talking about the one that I wrote?

0:60 So I figured out that, so I found out that Amazon has like a review period. So whenever somebody submits a review for a book, there's some, a number of days that go by and some like review process.

1:10 Um, and so of course I was going to go ahead and try to review my own book. And I didn't want to be like, I didn't want to try to hide it. So I just put, you know, this is an amazing book and,

1:21 you know, given that it's this and that and that and the fact that I wrote it, it's one of my favorites And the fact that I wrote it, that's where it was like everything looked like it was somebody

1:31 else. And then you're like, the conciseness, the insight and

1:35 the fact that I wrote it.

1:38 I'll make this to be a great book, but it just sort of sums you up in a nutshell. You know, that's part of what I enjoy about you, Matt. You don't take yourself too seriously. Um, while still

1:48 knowing when to turn on the, the serious side. So it also sums up Amazon's quality control Well,

1:56 that too, right? So I wanna go back in time a little bit. We were just rapping about this before I hit record. You came on tripping over the barrel in August of 2021. I was sitting on a bean bag

2:10 in Chuck Yates room. Tim was moving his daughter into college, I think. It was like a hectic time, summer nape. Things were finally starting to open back up post COVID. And you were just really

2:23 launching pod two. Why don't you tell the audience a little bit that hasn't heard you before? Like who's Matt Harriman? What's pod two and then we can get into all the good stuff - Yeah, let's do

2:36 it. For what it's worth, you know, my son who's now four won't be breaking in with a bag of goldfish that urgently needs opening - That'd be great - That'd be great. You could keep him the hell

2:49 out this time. Very unprofessional of you. I apologize sincerely - Talk to him. Yeah, so I'm Matt Harriman, founder of Pod 2, started Pod 2 in 2019,

3:03 to make work suck less. Like I didn't know what it was at the time. Really I was kind of running away from private equity backed company. I knew that I didn't want it to be like a typical

3:15 management consulting firm. I didn't really know what I wanted besides, some freedom and independence and control over making decisions and doing business the way that I want to.

3:28 So it kind of started there is, I know upstream planning, been in the business since 2011 with Chesapeake and then it was early days in her site when it was like eight people in the US and grew up

3:42 through that company as it got bought and bought and bought.

3:46 And it had a lot of fun, learned a lot of stuff, but then

3:50 the situation came together where I could go out on my own.

3:54 and decided that I wanted to be somebody that companies could trust to help them with process improvement, mostly around planning, but really around anything. So that was the start, was October of

4:07 2019, five months before the pandemic. So great, great time to launch a business - I had a really good first few months, which helped me last through the pandemic, but

4:19 that slowdown in work helped me kind of reflect and understand what I really wanted the business to be about, did a couple of projects around leadership development, built a course, started

4:30 realizing that the process improvement is a big part of it and still

4:36 is, but what's deeper to me is helping people do a better job, both in their productivity and effectiveness and in their happiness and fulfillment at work. And I think there's firms that only focus

4:52 on money, That's probably the majority. Then there's a bunch that only focus on woo woo bullshit. And money is a bad word. No, that's probably harsh for a lot of them. But I didn't hear enough

5:07 messages about people looking to find that harmony between what's good for people and what's good for the business. And that's what we're really after. So

5:19 that's the really high level of the consulting business March of 2021 is when Josh Groves joined me. So he's a software developer, absolute wizard, unreal. But he knows the oil and gas business

5:32 really, really well also. And so that's when he joined in March 21 to start PUD2 Tech. That's the software part of the business.

5:43 Yeah. And since then, we've done a lot of stuff. I wrote a book launched earlier this year got the planner, our field development planning software. It's out in the hands of some users now. It's

5:56 getting off the ground. So yeah, we're pretty pumped - So a lot of stuff to take through there. Some really good stuff - Some really good stuff - I would say one of the things I want to dive into

6:09 is happiness at work. So that is something that I almost always found elusive. Occasionally I would find a level of happiness after, you know, I'm a sales guy, right? After I close a big deal.

6:26 Like that would last for maybe 24 hours. And then there's always somebody to remind you quickly, like onto the next one, right? And I know that like mentally, it's the same thing with the loss,

6:37 right? You lose, you've got to bounce back, you've got to move on quickly.

6:43 And there's a lot more to be learned from a loss, which Chris Dinkler and Chase Nall came on and talked about here as well. A couple episodes back.

6:54 The, it's almost like an artificial dopamine hit. Like something happened that put the world into a position where now I feel like I'm doing well at work because I closed a business deal and

7:07 therefore I'm happy, therefore I'm a better husband. I'm a better dad, I sleep better at night, I eat better on the weekends, and I take deeper breaths and I look at the beautiful mountains here

7:17 in Colorado and I'm a happy guy. And then Tuesday comes around again and I'm on my pipeline call, my pipeline sucks because I put all my time into closing that one big deal. I'm starting that

7:29 anxiety starting to build and I'm losing that happiness that was tied into artificial work success, right? That's not what made me as a human and as a person. And one thing that helped, I mean two

7:45 things really, one, I started funk futures, which was really important to me. I wanted to take some level of control. of my path and my career after really being a full-time employee for 18 years

7:57 and having thoughts of, I don't just want to do one thing. I don't just want to do sales. I want to do some advisory. I want to sit on some boards. I want to help with growth. I want to do some

8:05 recruiting. I got all these thoughts that I can't execute on working as a W2 for good reason, right? Companies are designed to put people in certain hats and you wear those hats and my hat

8:17 sometimes goes on crooked. That's just part of the deal. That was one Funfung Futures opened my eyes up to the possibilities of what entrepreneurship could look like and tapping into some of the

8:29 creative cells in my body that had been dormant for a while. The second was only about two and a half months after you came on my podcast with Tim. I went to something called the Hoffman Institute

8:42 in California.

8:46 Hoffman was a great experience for me In fact, a kid that I went to summer camp with named Scooter Braun, he's like. pretty famous now. He's Justin Bieber's agent, Ariana Grande, some of these

8:57 other people. He talked about this a little bit on a podcast that I watched recently, where he sort of lost touch with who he was. And so much of his success was tied into winning, right? And

9:10 going to hell for him, similar to what it was for me, it was the first time in a very long time that you turn in your devices, right? So there's no computers, there's no cell phones, there's no

9:23 drugs, there's no alcohol, there's no sex, there's no masturbation, none of that. You're doing deep, deep reflection and really cleansing so much of this shit that you've had in your life. And

9:36 I remember coming to, like, you know, I left on a Friday, it went Friday to a Friday. I spent a few days in California, that really in silence, I came was calm. And I remember going to work on

9:51 that Monday and just seeing the people, you know, I'd changed, right? Just one week of being in this program had changed me. I was seeing things differently. But the stress associated with work

10:05 and whether it was unhappiness or not, just the cadence and pace that people work in in the working world was sort of like, Whoa, okay, like we all need to find ourselves, right? So that's long

10:18 winded, but it's something that has helped me reflect and be more appreciative kind of of the day to day and view myself as Jeremy, not just as funk, the worker, the W two, the podcast guy, like

10:32 the sales winner or loser, the guy who gets jobs, loses jobs, whatever, like there's a lot more to me than that. And that fabric has been built for a long period of time. I just said a lot. And

10:43 I'm curious, like you said two other things, right? One, you want to make work suck less. and you wanna bring a general sense of happiness to do that. Like how do you do that? Because I feel

10:54 like it's really hard just through work to do that, if you don't incorporate some personal self-development and improvement outside of work to make you happier at work, if that makes sense. So I'm

11:06 curious how you do that - So if it's okay, before I answer, I wanna ask you a question - Of course - So one of your pillars of funk is always be authentic Can you tell me more about that? Where did

11:20 that come from - Yeah, wow. And I think that's toward the top, right - Yep - The pillars.

11:29 I think that there's a lot of bullshit in the business world that I frankly never played in and I think it hurt me in my career, especially working for other people.

11:40 I like to say that I am a great consultant, but I was a terrible employee because I'll tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. And to me, that's authenticity. Authenticity in

11:51 business is not sandbagging a deal, right? Not withholding information that the company really needs to know and understand because it's a part of self-preservation. I don't play any political

12:03 games. I never will. It's being real and honest and truthful in interactions that will either make people love you or hate you. But what's important to me at the end of the day is that I was

12:17 authentic and real and not fraudulent to myself. Yeah.

12:23 I love that. And I think there's what you said at the end there, that not being fraudulent to yourself.

12:32 And there's this aspect of understanding yourself in order for you to actually be authentic. You've got to identify what are the biases, what are the fears, what are the problems that you have

12:42 going on in your head that cause you to behave in an authentic way, right? sales one, you know, pressure of a quarter, pressure of the quarter closing, all of that kind of stuff, that can cause

12:53 a lot of people to act in an inauthentic way to get a deal done, right? That pressure changes our behavior. And so I think happiness is a piss poor word for what we're trying to get out of work. I

13:08 think there's it's somewhere between happiness and fulfillment Because I think when you talk about those highs of having a big win or having a big loss, you know, and toward the end of 2020, I fell

13:21 into a deep dark depression because I had a big loss. Like I was trying to build up to something, trying to launch something and it flopped. And you know, for me, I had failed. I mean, I played

13:32 baseball. I failed, you know, 80 of the time, right? And so trying really hard and failing wasn't something that I, you know, was had a problem with like that was pretty normal. But what

13:43 happened in 2020 was I backed down. I knew what I needed to do and I didn't do it. So I stopped trying on this launch and I self-sabotaged. So I lost to myself and that was really hard. But what I

14:01 found to be really, really interesting is this idea of

14:07 suffering, having meaning. So if we're at work, things are gonna suck. We just got through tax season.

14:16 I had to file an extension So I'm not done with it. But taxes sucks. For most people, we hate accounting. We hate doing all of that kind of stuff. It sucks, but as a meaning to it, right? It's

14:30 a mandatory, in order for us to do business, we kind of have to do it. So there's a purpose to it. But if it work, we have meaningless suffering, that's the really like soul sucking stuff That's

14:45 the pain. I had to run away from because starting your own business, you lose stability. It's meant to sometimes, but financial stability. It's going to get volatile. You're running, you have

15:01 two months left of cash all the time forever. Maybe not forever, but I was talking

15:10 to Peter Tyler that ran the other side He was like, Yeah, even when we were at 10 million a year, we

15:17 had no idea if it was going to keep going.

15:24 I think what you see in especially in big companies and what I felt, and there's this corporate misery where everybody is doing stuff that they don't really believe in for the sake of the quarter,

15:39 for the sake of 3 growth this year, for the sake of what their bosses, bosses, boss wants.

15:46 the heart just gets squeezed out of everything. Like people have a really great idea, care about it, and then it just gets squashed by these barriers of whatever they are, maybe they're reasonable,

15:57 but whatever, that kind of stuff just gets squashed. And when something doesn't have heart, that to me is boring. And boring to me is the opposite of happiness - You know, man, I

16:12 wanna get into something And this isn't to toot my own horn as a manager because I have many, many flaws. But there's a lot that was missing from management throughout my career that would have just

16:26 been so simple to fire me up, right? So I've got a guy, Max, Max Gravener, who's a great guy. We're personal friends, but he's worked for funk futures for the last year and a half. I hired him

16:38 originally at Seven Lakes in 2014, the day he graduated college. And it always said a lot about him that we interviewed on a Thursday. And I'm like, when can you start? He's like, well, I

16:51 graduated on Saturday. I mean, I guess I could start on like Monday. I'm like, man, that's cool. Like I would have been like, man, I need like the whole summer to putts around. I don't want

17:00 to be serious yet, but he really kind of, kind of got it. So I just sent him a note on Monday night because he's been doing a lot of work for me going above and beyond. He came out to Denver for

17:11 energy tech night, which was a blast Did some networking at opening day. He's going to Dallas for the Doug conference for one of our clients. Like he's he's going above and beyond right now. And I

17:21 just said, Hey, dude, just wanted to say that I appreciate you. I've thrown a lot at you this year, especially. And you've done nothing but work hard and crush it with no complaints and

17:32 questions asked. I'm fortunate to have you on my team. And that was an authentic moment and a truthful moment. And I didn't ask for anything in return I didn't follow that up with it. Oh, and hey,

17:43 by the way, I need to just send 600 fucking emails tomorrow. Because you're falling behind and you've only gotten me two meetings this month, right? It was just like, you know what? Like I had a

17:54 moment of I feel like this guy could use a little bit of pat on the back and show like truly and authentically how I feel and felt about him. And hopefully when he thinks about work, when he comes

18:06 in on Tuesday, it's not this negative bullshit There's at least some meeting and you feel appreciated because I do appreciate him and I have to communicate that in some way that's not financial.

18:18 Yeah. And I'm glad that it wasn't part of a, you know, criticism sandwich also. You know, compliment and then the negative feedback that you're trying to give and then another compliment. If any

18:29 managers are listening, don't fucking do that. Like it's the most condescending thing where you're treating the person like a child. But that's awesome And I guess another question is. You know,

18:43 you talked about, you know, you'd only have one hat and there's only one thing that you could do. And sometimes it was crooked and whatnot. How are you preventing your employees from like running

18:52 into that -

18:55 You know, I think part of it is leading by example, right? Showing that in my communications, I'll be authentic and honest and not sugarcoat anything if things are going poorly. I wanna be the

19:08 first to address that and just sort of with the nature of having, you know, six or seven clients, which I think we have right now, they're probably not all going to be overwhelmingly happy and

19:20 some of them are just wired in a way where it's never gonna be enough anyway. So, peeling that back and me being the one to kind of level with my guys and saying, look, they're criticizing us

19:31 right now but doesn't matter what we do, it will never be enough. And that's not on us, right? We're fulfilling our contractual obligations. and you may even argue and then some - Yeah - But we

19:45 can't let their feelings about this affect us. If they don't want to continue on with us when this contract is up, that's okay, right? This is their business and those are decisions they can make.

19:55 We can't do anything else above and beyond what we're doing without burning ourselves out. And I'm just not gonna allow that to happen. So I think part of it's leading by example - That's

20:05 really cool. And I think that goes back to your earlier point about, you know, riding the winds really high and the loss is really low and some of that stuff. What you said about, you know, we

20:14 are who we are, we know who we are, we have confidence in what we do. And sometimes the external results won't, you know, necessarily match how good we are. 'Cause this is business, there's

20:25 chance, there's stuff out of our control, all of that stuff. And so like on an individual level, and on a company level, like developing that sense of comfort in your own skin is so huge for,

20:38 you know,

20:41 you know, happyfulfilled, I think, in what you do. Because there's always gonna be good stuff that happens, bad stuff that happens, and most of it is out of your control. Now, like one thing

20:51 that I think people get wrong with that is, like,

20:56 you don't wanna be a rock. Like, I think people take stoicism way too far and be like, okay, I need to be an emotionless robot forever. Like, I think there's something to be said for riding the

21:06 vibes, right? And like, when things are good, like, have fun, when things are bad Like, feel it, like, grieve, you know, 'cause sometimes you need to, and that stuff is healthy, but there

21:16 should be a core somewhere inside you that you're pretty comfortable with - Yeah, well, that takes time, an experience. Like, I can't say that me 10 years ago had that level of confidence even in

21:29 myself. I let external factors really affect myself, and I still do occasionally, but like, I have a responsibility to my family. Like, I know you've got young kids, you know, daughters who

21:41 are 13 and 11 and a son who's five. And whether they say anything or not, like they're watching everything. And they're learning, right? And they're seeing the behaviors and those are going to

21:53 transcend me raising them when they're under my roof and they're eventually going to be in their own work environments. And they're going to react to things probably similar to how my wife and I

22:03 react to certain situations. Yeah And the first thing I can do to set a positive tone around that aside from just working hard with this Puritan work ethic that I guess I got from growing up in the

22:14 cold in New England and be a tough at all cause, pull yourself up our boots or whatever. It's important that they see that there is a level of consistency because in a business like sales, it is

22:26 very inconsistent. There are a lot of ups and downs. And for too many years, I rode those highs and lows and took the dopamine hits up and the lows pretty hard. You know, one other thing too.

22:41 And I'm picking on Max in this example. What I used to do as a worker before I was kind of a leader is I would emulate the work ethic of my boss. So this was a guy who worked 6 am. to 9 pm. I

23:02 would generally do the same thing. If this was an eight to five, eight to four guy, I would generally do that So there would be this and I see other people do that as well. They have this burning

23:14 desire to make other people happy and to align with their management in a way that the management should in their perception appreciate. Some people don't care about that. They have their own work

23:26 ethic. They're comfortable with what they do. And I've seen people throughout my career that would come in an eight and leave it five and be incredibly productive and never think about it. Like man,

23:34 that is so awesome. I'll never be able to do that. If my boss is a workaholic, I'm gonna work too much and burn out. probably start to hate him.

23:43 With Max, he works as Asaath, and he always has. And he's developed, I think, a little bit more meaning around works, and he had a kid, which is a whole another story, right? I developed that

23:54 too, when I have my first many years ago, and then you sort of adjust back to how you are. But I realized when he came out here in early April, I said, I don't think you've taken any vacation

24:07 this year. And he goes, Well, you know, I took a day

24:13 in like January, so one day, what did you do? He's like, Well, I had to like move stuff around my house. I'm like, That doesn't sound like a really fun day off. I was like, Don't you, you

24:26 know, we're like four months into the year, and what I don't want to have happen is for you to start getting mad at me, because you're working the way that I work, right? Like, I run this com -

24:39 right? I'm fulfilling my dream, whatever that dream is or was. And I don't want you to burn out. So I'm going to tell you, even if it hurts my business a little bit, you need to take a few days

24:53 off. Like you got to take it, whether it's this month, whether it's next month, I don't care. Like you need to take a break, because I know how these things go, man, I've worked burning the

25:05 wicket both ends. It is not sustainable. So I really want you to seriously consider finding some time, or maybe a graduate anniversary, maybe for your birthday. I don't know. Like take a few

25:18 days off. There's a there's a really good.

25:24 Those are really good book that a friend of mine wrote. He lives in Japan. He's from Germany, though, Max Frinzel is his name. And he wrote a book called Time Off. And it talks about like, how

25:37 do you actually take time off? and like the history of it and there's a lot of really fascinating stuff in there. That's a good one. But I think like I hate the term work-life balance and I think

25:51 that like we post quite a bit about how much time we spend working because you know dollars per hour is probably you know the most important metric that we have you know beyond making enough to keep

26:03 going and I think the reason that we started this business and it drives a lot of the decisions that we make is around freedom and flexibility. Not just for us, like not just for the founders but

26:19 also for anybody that works with us and so we don't want to be you know maximizing profit while we're working 30 hours a week and everybody else is working 80 Like a lot of companies do. Couples do

26:33 that.

26:36 But I think we're people. You know, a misconception about that is that, you know, for one, we were really strict about the time that we track. So like most people, they'll say that they work 60

26:47 hours, but five of that was spent pooping and

26:52 I was a bunch of just waste and stuff in there. So like we track it to the minute. So like we get up and are doing something else. Like it's that doesn't count. Um, but I think what matters more

27:02 to me is giving people the flexibility to kind of

27:10 do what they need to do for themselves. So we're very like individualist run. So people come up with their own targets, their own goals, own objectives and all that stuff. And then we figure out

27:20 how it all plays together. Um, we've got joint projects, like obviously the software, um, the planner that we, that we've just launched, like we're collaborating on it. We're working together.

27:31 And so there's some shared, you know, expectations, shared timelines, ways that we have to work together on it. But like we came up with that together, right? We're not imposing deadlines on

27:42 each other and stuff like that. And you know, it's pretty common to see in our, like our collaboration tool, somebody will say, Hey, I'm

27:51 feeling burnt out. I'm gonna take the rest of the day. Right - Cool - Like I'm coming out of a pretty like,

28:00 I'd call it a slump 'cause like I was in a big bush, a bunch of consulting work for a few months of the year, the book launch and you know, I think that was like end of March, early April, at a

28:11 conference a couple of weeks ago. And you know, we just launched our podcast like a couple of days ago, like just started that - All right, yeah - So like all kinds of all this stuff, I've been

28:20 kind of like the vibe over the last few months has been pretty grindy. And you know, after we got past all this stuff, I was like, Lish it, I'm tired - All right - Like I need a little break. So

28:31 like this week and last week, taking a little bit easier and then, you know, gearing up for another steady push - Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's some gold in there. And I'm with you, you know,

28:45 the, I was in a slob earlier this year. And you know, this isn't stuff that I share often at least publicly, but, you know, I decided to get sober almost eight months ago, most exactly eight

28:57 months ago actually - Okay - Yeah, I went to rehab and really decided to take a, a lot of inventory on my life, something like 238 days, which is pretty cool. But that's not what I want to talk

29:09 about. What I want to talk about is - Well, I'm going to talk about that for a second. So that takes a hell of a amount of willpower. Like that's hard. And so I want to commend you on that.

29:18 That's awesome dude - Thank you. And there's been a lot of changes throughout that, that process. I think when you party as much as I was partying, you're used to riding those ups and downs of

29:32 dopamine hits a job that also takes you up and down with those dopamine hits. And let's be honest, like this is a little bit of a heavy boozing industry. Like, oh, yeah, that's my perspective on

29:45 it. Um, there's happy hours in Denver now that the weather is good. Like every night you go to nape in Houston, like it might as well be an all inclusive, you know, trip, right? Because

29:58 there's booze and different parties like at every level of the hotel that you're hanging out at, right? And then dinners and lunches and it can really get easy to go down that path. And whether I

30:10 had a problem or not is sort of irrelevant. I needed to make a wholesale change. Um, and I did. And what that does is it starts to really level your mind and your dopamine to just be a little more

30:21 consistent with everything around you. That is, um, for all intents and purposes, chaos. So what did I do? Right? I had to replace these sort of like ups and downs in these waves So like I

30:32 started gambling more on football. I started playing more faffings. I started using my smoker more. I was like really into smoking meats. I got really into like being a present dad, right? And

30:46 like, pause, these are all positive things. But then, right, football ends. It's January, February. The weather gets bad. I lose a couple of clients. I'm like, man, I don't want to get up

31:03 I'm sitting there and I'm still proud of myself because I decided to clean myself up. And I'm doing really well and I'm becoming really consistent. But I'm not finding the meaning in this right now.

31:15 And that's going to happen. So I took it upon myself, like, what can I do to make a change? And really simply, I just started following Andrew Huberman on Twitter and taking into account some of

31:30 the things that he suggests So I'd start to - get up and not look at my phone right away, which is we all do it, but you really shouldn't like it actually ruined the rest of your day. There's

31:41 science behind this. Like don't look at your phone for the first 30 to 45 minutes if you can hold off. Go outside and look at the sun. It's crazy. That's right. Don't drink outside

31:54 with the sunglasses off has some medical like real benefits for sure. Don't drink coffee right until you have to. He would suggest 90 minutes. I can't make it 90 minutes. I do about 45. Exercise

32:08 if you can't take a cold shower. Right. So these are just things where it's like and don't do all of these things at once.

32:16 Right. They added up like all of his daily routine recommendations and it and it was like 30 hours of things to do every day.

32:25 And then read right and journal for 25 minutes. Yeah. You're not going to do all this nor should you implement all of these things at once because But like I slowly started to incorporate all of

32:36 these things to the point where then they become your patterns. And then suddenly the slump starts to go away, right? I get back into podcasting, I find value and meaning in that. I started

32:47 writing more LinkedIn posts. I started using chat GPC a little bit more, right? I mean, just like really, really simple changes got me out of that slump. So for those who are listening to this,

32:58 like you will have those valleys, like that is very real, but you don't want to stay in that proverbial funk. You've got to find ways out. The only ways to do that is just make a change. Simple

33:11 as that - And what I've found is as I've gotten older, I'm getting better at predicting and like noticing the signs before they hit. So like usually for before I slip into a depression, I'm pretty

33:23 tense and I'm like quicker to get angry and stuff like that. So if I notice that then I can, you know. find a way to relieve some pressure or release some stress or like whatever it is. And it's

33:32 the things that you just talked about. It's, you know, sleeping right, eating right, getting off your phone and going outside. Like it's,

33:40 it's not a couple of drinking water and exercising. Like it's basic human shit that has a big impact on a lot of that stuff. And you know, sometimes it is chemical and you need medication and all

33:51 that. But a lot of times for, you know, non-clinical depression, it's, the answer is simple. But that doesn't make it any easier to do those things once you're in the slump. Because yeah, I

34:01 don't know about you, but some of those really dark ones, it's, it's everything that I can do to just get out of bed in the morning. Like the tiniest stuff just feels impossible. Oh, I mean,

34:13 yeah, that could be a topic for a whole nother podcast, maybe on yours sometimes. But I think it sees a little bit too. When you don't see the sun or when it's snowing a lot out here. It's really

34:26 tough. part of why I live in Colorado is because it's sunny all the time. Um, and the weather is great, but this year we had like an unseasonably cold winter. Right. And it's like, when will

34:38 this end? Like I'm relying on you, mother nature. Come on. Good weather going here. And it just wouldn't happen. Right. So instead of just waiting for that as like holding on to my sanity, I

34:51 took charge and made some, some changes myself. I want to talk a little bit about, um, like you said 30 hours. And I think that that is, it's very admirable. I congratulate you on that. Um, I

35:05 probably put in more than that now. I'm probably somewhere in the range of 50 to 55 real work hours a week, which, which I can sustain for a while. If I take a vacation, there was a point when I

35:18 first started funk futures and people love to throw big numbers around, but, but I was legitimately working 80 hours a week I've really only done that a few times in my career. I did that for about

35:27 three months. And I was so angry and over sensitive and bitter and I'm just mad at the world that I just realized pretty fast, like, okay, maybe in my mind, that's what I took to launch this

35:40 company, but this has to stop because I'm a horrible person. So I'm curious, have you had any of those streaks with your business where you've worked 60, 70 hours a week or have you really been

35:55 diligent about saying, nope, I'm actually going to keep this to 30 to 35 hours a week and that's corporate, that's culture, that's part of the pillars of pod two - So

36:07 let me go back to where some of this stuff came from. So when I was with us, Serna, let's say like 2015, as when my daughter was born, my first daughter, and from when that happened, I kind of

36:20 realized that a lot of the people around me that were really successful entrepreneurs. had a lot of regrets in their personal life. So maybe they exited for millions of bucks and all of this stuff,

36:31 but you know, there's one that I really look up to. He has regrets about how he was as a dad.

36:37 Another, a different guy missed the birth of one of his children - What - And multiple of them were divorced and all that stuff. So I was surrounded by some of those folks

36:50 and I did not want to be like that. Like maybe I'm naive or maybe I'm greedy, but I want to be both a great husband and father and like do well in my career. So when my daughter was born, that set

37:02 me off on, you know, full on research mode on productivity. Like experimenting with everything, trying everything, Chris Bailey, if you ever heard of him, amazing, amazing stuff. His latest

37:12 book, How to Calm Your Mind - Nice - It's really good. Yeah, so I went really deep down that, like productivity, you know, obsession And pretty quickly what I found was Buddhism. Actually - Ah,

37:26 nice - Yeah, so I didn't talk about it that much, but I practiced Zen Buddhism, which is not about reincarnation and all that stuff. It's more of a philosophy. Like how do you just be a

37:37 reasonable and happy human that helps other people be happy?

37:41 We could go deep on that one. But that's where it kind of started for me was, I have to limit work. I will give up success in my career for my family, like no matter what, I'm not gonna risk my

37:54 family Because at that point, I was in Columbia a week a month. I was in Calgary a week a month, and I was working a bunch in between. I don't know how many hours it was, but gone half the time,

38:06 plus working a lot when I'm not gone. It was just not cool. And so, I think since we started the business, there's been pushes. I usually average, I'm probably closer to like 40 hours on the

38:19 weeks that I work. But it's made me at us, you know, really, really intentional about what we do. And so, I mean, frankly, we're just efficient as fuck. Like, yeah. Well, like, we have,

38:34 you know, two meetings a week because we want to, um, like, there is some business stuff that we'll talk about. We'll talk about issues when we have them and things like that. But, um, as a

38:45 group, we don't meet very often. We, we preserve focus. Um, and, and there's a bunch of stuff that we don't do So we don't have meetings internal or external that we're not valuable for. So

38:58 like we'll give up billable hours for sure. If a client says, like, Hey, it would be nice to have you in this meeting. And we, we kind of test them. We're like, do we actually need to be there?

39:07 No, probably not. Um, yeah.

39:12 And the S, the answer is usually yes. Um, so we're really, really diligent about not doing stuff that that doesn't matter. Um, and the opportunity cost of stuff. So like I don't go to

39:25 conferences almost ever. Like I love all my love meeting people and the relationships and everything there, but the time cost is crazy for some of these - Interesting - Like I went to the Slaga

39:38 Wisdom Conference a couple of weeks ago, but that's the only one that I think I've gone to this year and last year - That looked super cool. They did it in Nashville, right - Yeah, it was fun -

39:50 Those guys, like they know how to do it right and I just kind of admire the way they go about business, right? Like it's unique and they do things their way and they're fairly unapologetic about it.

40:05 So that's cool and it doesn't surprise me that you went to that. I actually really value and prioritize conferences just because

40:15 FaceTime is more minimal now than it used to be, right? I think fundamentally sales and business has changed. If I am representing a company that's trying to do a high six or low seven figure

40:25 business deal, it's a lot harder to do it like this. Right. So that may be my opportunity to organically run into people or even plan to see somebody in an atmosphere where maybe people have become

40:39 a little bit more relaxed because they're not in the office. So like I really enjoy going to conferences. And I think like you said, you do too, but you know, you're trying to be billable, right?

40:49 And you're going to lose a lot of billable hours for the sake of being at that conference. You know, part of what I'm doing is awareness and lead generation. And those can sometimes it's some of

41:01 the best opportunities. But you're right. Like

41:04 oftentimes they're boondoggles and you can leave and say, did I do anything productive in the 35 hours I spent working? Yeah, no, no for sure. And like the billable hours aren't really the

41:17 opportunity cost because we try to of wait hourly as much as we can. And I'm not saying the conferences are bad or anything, but I think that there's I've met so many people and and I think

41:29 Investing in the relationships with people that I've already got in in a lot of ways is is where I'd rather spend my time both Like personally and and for the business so I do lots of coffees lots of

41:39 lunches Especially East River nine little nine hole golf course in Houston Perfect place for a meeting now because it takes an hour to like play the whole course and oh, it's wonderful

41:50 Yeah, it's a nine hole part three. Yeah, it's it's a good spot But and then and then the other side of it is I'm an introvert Right so if I go to a conference and I'm around people 12 16 hours a

42:03 day for a whole week Like I need a week to recover from that even if I don't drink

42:11 I love it. I love people. I love interacting and everything and I love especially like speaking at the conferences and and all of that stuff, but you know it it takes a lot out of me. And yeah -

42:22 No, that's in, I need about a day, but I mean, I'm an extrovert, right? But I get that, right? There is that feeling of exhaustion, like no more people.

42:33 Couple more questions I wanna get into with you. Like, you don't need to name any, but do you have any competition? And I know there's two sides of the house, right? There's POD2 on the

42:43 consulting side, and you also have a software technology product, but do you have competitors -

42:53 The software, like different softwares that we create will have competitors. We generally try to fill gaps in the market, and so we don't try to go in and like take somebody out or something. But

43:04 the planning tool, you know, that one has some obvious competitors and stuff like that. On the consulting side,

43:13 I don't know. I mean, there's some other people that do this kind of thing, but the world is so abundant, you know, like. Like there's opportunity for all of us. And with software also, like I

43:25 really don't see the need for people to get bitchy at each other and try to like sabotage each other and all that shit. Like the amount of time that's wasted on thinking about competitors when you

43:36 could just go like find different parts of the market that fit you better.

43:41 Yeah, it's unbelievable.

43:45 So yeah, I don't know. When I started the business, my hypothesis was that, you know, I could do a better job than, you know, these really big consulting firms, Accenture, BCG, that like in

43:56 this space, I could do a better job than them for 10 or less of the cost. And that's proving to be true, which is pretty sweet. And I know that there's some smaller shops out there and stuff like

44:08 that, but, you know, a lot of the consulting pieces around trust and personality and, you know, do we have chemistry? And that matters more than, you know, Can I do a process map as good as -

44:21 you know, somebody else, right - Yeah, but you might be able to do it faster just because you've sat in those rooms and your team has been in those rooms. And like to go back to like 2015 at

44:32 NERSITE, like you guys were pretty dominant back then. And reviewed as like really the emerging player in both the rig and resource scheduling as well as the field development planning, upstream

44:45 planning space and really sort of without rival. And it's interesting for me, I remember saying to Marsha, like Marsha Ville, when you guys were starting pod two and you brought in, I think,

44:56 Leslie and you brought in Josh and you brought in some of these other people that you'd worked with, she said, those guys all in Raoul, you guys all really had a special relationship, right? And

45:07 I do think that some of that was forged in like effectively going to war together and probably putting in all of those hours that you put in. Would you wanna do that again? But there's definitely a

45:18 reason, like me and Max, who hit the trenches, like, pretty hard when we were at Southern Lakes, that did forge a level of comradery and familiarity that has carried over - Working together on

45:35 stuff, like that's what builds relationships to me. And how hard it is, that can bring out, you know, the personality of a person, you see who they are That's one of the reasons I like playing

45:46 golf with people, right? You see them go through some struggles, you see them go through some good times, you kind of see how they behave. It's a great interview -

45:55 Sorry - But yeah, and so I mean, we went through all kinds of stuff together back then, and it was a lot of fun. With Josh, especially, like, he and I, we just like, mind meld. Like, we

46:07 won't have to talk about something, we'll see something, and we'll talk about it. Like, I'll always be skeptical and be like, we really see the same way on this, and we almost always do.

46:18 So yeah, it's really cool. We've gotten some key pieces of that old team back together. And yeah, we're doing some good stuff, man - Like I'd congrats. And I'd say you're fortunate, but I think,

46:29 I know you a little bit now you've sort of created your own opportunity and your mindset and put the pieces around you that compliment you and make sense and that you can mind meld with. And I like

46:40 that phrase. On competition, and then I'm gonna let you go here shortly Like I've actually noticed a lot more fractional sales people pop up lately, which I think is, it makes sense, right? It's

46:55 fun. You don't have one boss. You can leverage your network in one way. You don't just go down one alley. And if there's a dead end, you're

47:04 dead. There's value to be created there. So I've seen a few of these companies pop up. I think COVID had something to do with it also, where everybody wanted to get kind of into the gig economy

47:13 and not just be dependent on like, Oh man, if I lose my job here, I'm screwed. Right now I can diversify my revenue streams. So people will say, hey, I just saw this company. Like do you

47:22 compete with her? Do you compete with him? And I'll say, yeah, I mean, it looks like we're doing some similar things. There's probably not an exact replica of the contact base and the subject

47:34 matter expertise. But I'll tell you what, like, if you reach out to that person, like I'm happy to share everything that I know and I've learned because there's been a shitload of trial and error

47:46 over the past two and a half years for me to try to get to somewhere where I can confidently pitch even what my business is - Yeah - So, you know, I'm not saying I invented contract sales for sure,

47:57 I did not, but there was a lot of learnings that I would love to pass on to people and suggest make recommendations and be an open book because I think that makes everybody better and it starts to

48:08 validate and solidify the fractional sales as a true business someday could be acquired, which was the furthest thing from when I started something, right - Yeah - So like I put that message out

48:21 there to anybody who's listening, like I'm not just saying, I'll share my contracts, right? I'll show people exactly what my pitch decks are, right? Things that I've learned from the past - And

48:33 we see the world the same way. And I think a big problem in the industry is how guarded everybody is. Like people don't have their demos on their websites and some like all kinds of stuff - Oh yeah,

48:43 yeah - Like your stuff is not special.

48:48 And like you're holding the industry back by keeping, you know, whatever your tool is behind closed doors and all this stuff, it's just dumb. But I think that there's a, I've met different

49:01 founders and I've met different folks in the way that they view competition is really fascinating. Like there's two companies that I'm thinking of that are, you know, they'll compete or are trying

49:12 to compete with us on on one of our software tools. I'm not gonna say where they are, stuff like that. But one of them, it's like, we talk and it feels like two quarterbacks in an NFL game where

49:25 like, I'm not gonna tell you our plan, but we can work out together - Yeah, I like that - The real friends, I'm not gonna give you the game plan, but we're friends. There's a camaraderie to it.

49:37 It's like, yeah, we're fighting, but we don't have to be decks. And then on the other side, there's decks that are like,

49:45 okay, you don't wanna talk to us because we might compete someday in the future. Okay, that's fine. We can play that game too, but yeah - Yeah, right. Now, I like that. I mean, because you

49:57 and the quarterback on the other side actually have a lot more in common than you and the defensive back that you truly are trying to beat - Exactly.

50:06 I love sports analogies. All right, Matt, we'll wrap this up here. Thank you so much for coming on Where can people find you? LinkedIn, Twitter, website, it's all the fun stuff. Yeah,

50:18 LinkedIn, Twitter, the big ones pod2pod2co

50:22 is our main website. Book came out a few weeks ago, Integrated Upstream Planning. That's on Amazon. You can also go to integratedupstreamplanningcom. I was surprised that that one was available,

50:30 given how much other companies talk about Integrated Upstream Planning. Yeah, we got it. Yeah, I'm on

50:40 the internet all over it So Matt, Matt Herriman, really, really fun to have you on. I'm glad we talked about a lot of stuff that really isn't work related, but also enjoy seeing you and your team

50:53 succeed. I think that you go about it with heart and you take pride in your work and you're establishing kind of a way to build culture that doesn't interfere with growth. It only adds to the

51:07 potential growth of your own company and to others. I look forward to future collaborations with you. Hopefully I get on your podcast at some point, but Matt Herrim and my man, thanks for coming

51:16 on with the funk.

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