KF #26. Being Resilient

Pete Mockaitis
Kristen, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think we’re going to have so much fun here. First, I want to hear the tale, I understand that one time you actually cleaned Tim Tebow’s house while in college. Did you bump into him? You didn’t know who he was? What’s the story here?

Kristen Hadeed
I’m the worst Gator football fan ever. I went to the University of Florida, which is a big school, cares about football. Yes, I cleaned Tim Tebow’s apartment several times and I did not even know it was him.

Pete Mockaitis
He was a student there?

Kristen Hadeed
He was a student. Yes. That was when he was – we won the National Championship. I should have known who he was, but nope. No clue.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s living large, college student having someone clean his house.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. I’d say so.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. They treat the athletes well. There’s probably like a stipend for that or something.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good time. I’m so excited to get into this conversation. We’re going to talk a lot about mistakes and learning and screwing up. In a way it’s kind of meta because boy, so you and I we know each other through our agency for speaking on college campuses. Campus Speech shout out, yeah.

Kristen Hadeed
Hey.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been a lot of fun chatting with you there. Then way back in 2013 you also joined me on the Student Leadership podcast.

Kristen Hadeed
Oh yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I know. I kind of forgot too. It was some years ago. Talk about mistakes, I made a lot of mistakes with that first podcast. It never really took off, but I learned so much from them. I think we’re going to have a better conversation this time around and it will reach about 100 times as many people.

Kristen Hadeed
There you go. Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fo sho. Let’s orient us a little bit. The Student Maid, what’s your company all about?

Kristen Hadeed
Sure. I definitely was not one of those kids that came out of the womb saying I want to be a CEO one day. I want to start a company. I was super lost in college, changed my major nine times.

Finally ended up with finance because I’d heard that you can make a lot of money working on Wall Street. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I thought I could figure that out because to me at the time success was about making a lot of money.

I used to go to the mall all the time when I was in college and window shop because I could not afford to buy anything. I just so happened to go to the mall this one day. I fell in love with a pair of jeans that I could not afford. It sounds so silly, but my company started because of this pair of jeans. They were 99 dollars.

I thought what is something I could do to just make 99 bucks and buy this pair of jeans and just call it a day. My first idea was to put an ad on Craigslist to clean someone’s house. A woman hired me. It was a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my. How so?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I had no idea how to clean. She had a mansion. I told her it would take me two hours. I didn’t have any supplies. I only had like this sponge and a bottle of Windex to clean this 4,000 square foot house. It took me seven hours and I wasn’t even done at the seven hour mark. It was just – she was like, “You need to leave,” because it was dark outside. She had already put her kids to bed. It was a disaster.

But she paid me. Then I bought the jeans. Then she actually called me back and said I really need help. She joked and said she could teach me how to clean. That’s how the whole thing started.

I cleaned her house every week. She told her friends about me. I forgot to take the ad down off of Craigslist. Then in college as I – every year I gained more clients, but I never thought that this would be my career. The turning point really happened right before my senior year I got this big contract to clean hundreds of empty apartments.

Pete Mockaitis
It was just you at this point?

Kristen Hadeed
It was just me. Maybe I had a couple people helping me, but they weren’t – it wasn’t a serious business. This was just a side gig.

I get this contract. It’s 800 and something apartments. They’re filthy. I hire 60 people to help me with the work. These are all college students who I hired. I have no idea how to lead a team of people. I don’t have any real business experience. I have no idea what I’m doing. Terrible leader. A couple days into the contract, 45 of the 60 people just walk in and quit, like on the spot at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
It was like in unison, like a group meeting or how did it-

Kristen Hadeed
It should have been a movie. Yes. It was like – I was sitting in this air conditioned club house in the middle of the complex with my feet propped up eating a Cesar salad. Right before they walked in I remember thinking to myself, this is so easy. Maybe I could be an entrepreneur. I like this. Because I was doing nothing. I was just sitting in this room doing nothing.

They walk in. I know something’s wrong because they’re whispering. I can hear someone saying, “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I know in my gut something really serious is about to happen. Then one just stood forward and she said, “We quit.”

I remember – I was so shocked. I couldn’t even process what had just happened. It’s so funny to me that I had no clue. I remember thinking, “Why are they leaving,” but now looking back, of course they wanted to leave.

The work was absolutely horrible. You’re cleaning empty, filthy college apartments and then you have this leader who doesn’t seem to care about you at all, who’s sitting in the air conditioning with her feet propped up eating lunch and scrolling Facebook. Of course you want to quit.

Pete Mockaitis,
Understood. Was there like a speech or did they lay out their grievances or they just said, “We quit,” and then it’s done.

Kristen Hadeed
No, it’s just “We quit.” And they turned around and they walked out. I was shocked, then it turned to anger. I was thinking, “How could they do this? I’m paying them.” There was so much work to do and I only had 15 people left.

I ran and I found those people. I told them what happened. They weren’t really surprised. I said, “Well, can you help me figure this out? We have to get them back.” I think they wanted to help me because it sounded more fun than cleaning, not because they really wanted to help me.

Pete Mockaitis
This is a juicy drama. I want to be a part of this.

Kristen Hadeed
I know. Then someone had this idea to call an emergency meeting at my house that same night and that the way that we would get everyone there is by promising them an early paycheck because the way that it was is you’d have to wait the whole three weeks to get your paycheck, but if they came to this meeting that night, they would get it that night.

It was a great idea. Everyone showed up. I just – I was just honest. I said, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what I did wrong.” I was honest about how scared I was that we had all this work, that I didn’t know how we would get it done. I think I just – I became a human to them. I think they realized that I was a good person, I just didn’t know how to be a leader.

One kind of said, “Oh, I’ll come back,” and then it was a domino effect. Another is coming back and then the next thing you know, they’re all coming back.

I always say that that changed the trajectory of my life because it made me really obsessed with learning how to be a better leader and most importantly learning how to build a company where people really, really wanted to be and they didn’t to walk out.

That was – that for me was I think looking back, that was the moment that I – I didn’t do it consciously, but I think that’s when I gave up my desire to move to New York and work on Wall Street because that summer really changed everything. We became a team and then I graduated. I turned down a job in finance to stick with Student Maid. Here we are. It’s been nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool and congratulations to you. You share these tales and these lessons learned in your book, Permission to Screw Up. Why that title?

Kristen Hadeed
It’s pretty funny. I always wanted to write a book, but I never knew what I wanted to write about. The way I got my book contract was kind of a backwards way. I was giving a talk. My publisher was in the audience. I just so happened to be speaking about Millennials at that event.

My publisher said, “I want you to write a book,” and I started writing about Millennials because I thought that’s what he wanted me to write about. That’s what I had just spoken about. When I finished the book, I didn’t like it. I didn’t actually finish it. Halfway through I said this is not – everything I’m writing about applies to all people, not just Millennials. I threw that version away.

Then I started to write about Student Maid and just the journey of leadership and it was empty. I went to dinner with a friend, who’s written several really great books. I asked him, I said, “How do you know when you’re writing the right book?” He said, in my experience the right book is the one that’s really, really hard to write.”

I thought about that. The book I was writing was not hard. I changed my thinking to what would make it hard. That’s when I realized that I was writing about all the lessons I had learned, but I wasn’t talking about what it took to learn them.

Yeah, I know the importance of empowering people, but I only know that because I micromanage people and people quit. I know the importance of building a relationship that’s real and meaningful with your people, but only because I had superficial relationships that did not lead to trust and loyalty.

I wrote about the how I learned it part, which was not fun. Some of the stories I wrote about paint me in a light that I don’t really want to be painted in, but it’s the truth. It’s how I learned.

The title, Permission to Screw Up, it’s about giving yourself permission. You don’t need it from anybody else. You don’t have to be perfect. Give yourself permission to screw up and to be human and in doing that, you will inspire the people around you to be more human.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. I like that a lot. Thank you. Well, you’ve got a lot of wisdom packed in there.

Could you maybe share just a couple of the most dramatic shifts that you made in terms of, “Hm, before I was thinking this way and then I had this experience which showed me that, no, that’s totally wrong. I should think about it the other way,” so in the practices that you abandoned or adopted as a result of some of those insights?

Kristen Hadeed
I would say the first major shift really had to do with feedback. Because 45 people quit on me, I was really afraid to give critical feedback to people because I thought it would make them quit.

I was the kind of leader who would recognize people every day for things that really didn’t deserve recognition, like thank you for being on time today. But that’s their job. You’re supposed to be on time. On people’s birthdays I would say thank you for being born. I recognized everything about everyone because I thought that was what – I thought that meant they would be happy and they would stay.

I realized two things. One that when we overpraise and we over recognize we actually are doing people a disservice because it doesn’t help them understand what their true strengths and contributions are. It’s also not meaningful.

But number two, when we avoid feedback that really needs to be given, the critical feedback, the kind of feedback that really helps people grow, we’re hurting them because we have this opportunity, we see a way they could be better and we don’t speak up, we’re hurting their growth and their development.

There’s a student I had who – she did a couple of things. I mean things that were really bad, like trying on a client’s high heels and –

Pete Mockaitis
What? Doing what to the high heels?

Kristen Hadeed
Trying on a client’s high heels.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, just putting them. Okay.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. Or like playing Mary Had a Little Lamb on a client’s antique piano that clearly is off limits. Just stuff that would get under my skin. Every time I would hear about something I would say, “Okay, I’m going to confront her,” and I never did.

Then I finally got the courage to do it and I did it in an email. It was a total cop out and then she quit. Then I felt guilty because I felt like man, I really missed out on this opportunity to make her better. Now, chances are the values she had, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but I should have told her way earlier that this kind of behavior was not acceptable and I missed out on that opportunity to help her learn and to help her grow.

There’s a tool that I loved teaching. It’s in the book. It’s not my own. I learned it from a company called Barry-Wehmiller, one of my favorite companies in the world. It’s called the FBI. It’s a way to give feedback, both critical and recognition, that inspires behavior change or inspires someone to keep doing something great.

It’s a sentence. Each letter stands for something, so feeling, behavior, impact. How you felt about someone’s specific behavior and what the impact of that behavior was.

If someone’s late, for example, you can say, “I felt disappointed that you were 30 minutes late to our meeting this morning. The impact, even though I know it was not your intention, now the impact is I don’t know if I can rely on you. I don’t want to feel that way, so can you help me?”

The idea is that person probably didn’t wake up saying, “I can’t wait to be late so that you’re disappointed and you feel like you can’t rely on me,” but once we tell them, once we tell them how we feel, the impact it’s had, now they want to change that behavior.

On the flip side, recognition, you can say, “I felt proud when you spoke up at the meeting this morning and when you shared your opinion. The impact that had is everyone else felt comfortable sharing their own and we had a really productive meeting.” Now you’re telling that person I want to see that again. I want to see you share your opinion again when you have one in a meeting.

I love the FBI. Now, in my company, every single person on our team that’s one of the first things they learn even before they learn how to dust and vacuum. We’re big on the FBI.

The second thing I would say is about when is it time to give up. That was really hard for me. I’m someone who believes in everyone’s potential. I think it’s really hard when you’re programmed that way when is it time to walk away from someone.

On the flip side, if you’re working in an organization and you’re giving it your all and you see the potential in this organization, but it’s just not right for you right now, when do you walk away? Do you walk away?

We have this metaphor that we use at Student Maid. It’s called the line. It symbolizes what it takes for the relationship to really work.

What we say is the leadership team, the executive team, we’re going to stand at this line every day and what that means is we are going to invest in you, care about you, give you feedback to help you grow, support you, stand by you when you fail. We’re going to give you the tools to do your job and that’s what it’s like standing at the line for us.

But it only works if you’re at the line, which means that you’re doing something with the feedback we give you. You’re giving us feedback when there’s room for us to grow. You’re getting back up when you fail. You care.

What I’ve learned in this whole thing is you can’t make someone care. You can’t make someone change. You can’t make someone anything. They have to want it.

If you are standing at the line, whether you are leading a team of people, whether you’re not, but if you’re at the line and you’re by yourself, I think that’s how you know that it’s time to walk away because you can’t force that other party to stand at the line with you. They have to want to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Then it sounds like you’ve had some experiences then when others are not standing at the line and they needed to be let go.

Kristen Hadeed
Yes. There was a student we had many years ago. Her name was Kayla. Kayla, she was the best cleaner we had ever seen. You could eat off the floor after she cleaned it.

When I met her I learned early on that she had a really rocky home life. She was the first person in her family to go to school. She was fully supporting herself. She came from physical and emotional abuse and made it very clear that Student Maid was like her family. I made a vow to myself that I was going to protect her and keep her as a part of our family no matter what.

The problem was Kayla had a real issue with being on time. She was late very often. It wasn’t just five minutes late, ten minutes late, sometimes it would be 45 minutes late. I really struggled with, here’s this person, I know she’s struggling in her personal life and that we mean a lot to her. She’s also a really fantastic cleaner, but yet she can’t be on time. What do I do?

It started to cause a lot of tension on the team because other leaders in the company would say, “This isn’t fair. We’re requiring everyone else to have – to be on time, so we have to hold her to the same standard.”

What I ended up doing with her is I made exception after exception after exception. It got so bad that she started to not show up to work. Then I just had her cleaning my own house because I didn’t want her actions to impact anyone else.

Long story short, I found out that she had a substance abuse problem. She really needed to go and get help for that. I had to eventually walk away from her. She went to a rehab center and she got better.

Then after that she called me out of the blue one day and she thanked me for giving up on her. I thought, “Uh, wait, what?” It was the first time anyone ever thanked me for giving up on them. She said, “Had you not walked away from me, I would have never hit rock bottom and I would have never wanted to take ownership over my life.”

I realized that you can’t keep giving people chance after chance after chance. You have to – they have to want to change. They have to be open to that. They have to be ready for that.

That experience really helped me. It made me realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone and even the best thing you can do for an organization is to say, “I’m walking away,” because that’s when the other party decides, “Hm, I need to change something here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. I imagine there are other occasions, maybe less dramatic, in which folks aren’t living up to the line as well.

Kristen Hadeed
Of course. Yeah. I think the key is it should never be a surprise to someone when they’re being asked to leave. This should not be coming out of the blue here. Okay, we’ve talked about this. We’ve made a self-improvement plan. We’ve identified what happens if the plan doesn’t work. Now we’re here.

What we find in our company now is that people don’t – we usually don’t have to ask anyone to leave. They come forward and say, “Look, I know we had this agreement for this plan. I didn’t do my part and so now I know that I have to walk away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yup. That’s powerful. I guess I’m so intrigued by some organizations in which there are some that have a really strong performance culture and expectations and clarity and folks who just clearly need to go and go, then others that just seem terrified of lawsuits and there are hideouts and stowaways and just severely underperforming folks who remain and there is no termination just out of a terror of lawsuits.

What’s your take on that? Have you had to deal with lawsuit issues or it’s just been pretty smooth? How do you think about the risk liability side of it all?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I’ll just say this, you name what can happen in a business, I have been there. I’ve gotten the T-shirt. I’ve done it all, been through it all.

But I think when you’re operating out of fear, that’s a problem. The route that I take is let’s never get to that point where there is fear.

I think it starts at the beginning. Are you hiring people who really embody the values? Then do your people feel empowered to speak up when they notice that there’s someone on the team who isn’t living the values? How can you make sure that those people aren’t really a part of the company for too long?

Then, like I said, the feedback should be regular. It should be ongoing. It should never be a surprise that this person is letting the team down.

Yeah, I think you have to live – I think you have to if there’s someone who is not sitting at the line or they’re hurting the organization, they’re hurting the team, they aren’t ethical, they’re not living the values, they have to go.

Your fear of a lawsuit or whatever it may be cannot trump that because the message you’re sending to everyone else in the company is actually the values that we say are so important, aren’t that important because we’re letting this person stay on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
So you have been sued?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh yeah. Yeah. But the story I think of when you said that, there was someone I had on the team who I knew was stealing. People had come forward and told me. I was afraid of her. I was afraid that if I confronted her, she would sue me, which is so backwards because it’s like she was stealing from the company. Oh my goodness. What am I afraid?

But I let her stay on the team. I was afraid to confront her. The way that she was stealing, she was adding time to her payroll, so she was exaggerating her hours. What ended up happening is she would go to newer people who didn’t really – who were just brand new and she would kind of bully them into lying about their hours so that their hours would match hers.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, because they’re partners, right?

Kristen Hadeed
Yes, they’re partners. The toxicity spread to so many people. So many people exaggerated their hours. I ended up having to let them all go. Had I just dealt with the problem the first time I heard of it, it would have never grown into that.

But that was a huge mistake I made. It cost – then all of the people who came forward and said this is happening and then they watched me do nothing about it, I ended up losing those people because they didn’t want to work with a company where the values and everything we said we stood for we actually didn’t.

Kristen Hadeed
I think you just have to treat people like – you have to care about people and you have to treat them with respect. You have to treat them the way you’d want to be treated. If you do that, yes, sometimes things get ugly and people are hurt, but I try to look past that and think about what’s the real root of this.

Every time where there has been something where someone’s come back to the company, it’s because they were hurt. They didn’t feel cared for. They didn’t feel valued. That’s what made them take this action. I think we just learned a lot from those situations.

Sometimes it’s not related to me. Sometimes it’s related to someone who maybe was their leader and they didn’t make them feel valued and cared for. It’s really hard when you’re in this position of leadership. I think it’s really hard to learn the dance between holding people accountable and really making them feel cared for and valued. Until you figure out what that balance is, you’re going to mess up.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Cool. I just wanted to say or hear from you if you have that strong encouragement for those who are in that fearful place of someone needs to be let go but I’m terrified of a lawsuit. To summarize you’re saying, “Don’t live out of fear. It shouldn’t be a surprise.” You’re saying, “It’s absolutely worth it to just – to live out the values and experience some consequences because you really come out ahead.”

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, yeah. A mentor once gave me some advice that helps me even today. Whenever I’m afraid of something, I think about what is the worst that can happen. I just wrap my mind around what’s the worst case scenario. Then I think about well, what would I do if that happened.

Now, all of the sudden I’m not worried because I’ve thought about the worst case. I know what I’ll do. How many times does the worst case actually happen? Hardly ever.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Cool. Give us some more pro tips when it comes to cultivating meaningful relationships. You said you used to host parties but that wasn’t quite doing the trick. What is doing the trick?

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, I used to think relationships were about just being together. When I started the company I was the same age as my team. I had a graduation party and I invited them over. We would go to the same pool parties and this and that.

But at the end of the day our relationships were superficial. We were talking about what we were doing over the weekend or what our plans were for summer vacation. It wasn’t really about anything with any kind of depth.

Over time I learned that if you really want meaningful relationships, you have to know people deeply. You have to know where they come from. You have to know the experiences that really shape them and the moments in their life that really define who they are. The only way you know is by asking and sharing yourself and being vulnerable yourself.

We do regular exercises at Student Maid. It’s called development day. Every quarter we bring our whole company together.

We always start with three vulnerability questions. The leadership team will answer the questions in front of the whole room. Then everyone splits off into different teams and they answer the questions amongst their team.

Examples are “What is the most challenging relationship in your life and why?”  or “What’s a moment that really defined who you are that you haven’t shared with many people?” or “What’s one thing that’s preventing you from becoming a better you that you’re not doing that you should be doing?” Things that really are hard to talk about but when you do, you actually form a connection. You actually build trust.

A lot of people look at that and they say, “Wait a minute. This is a little too weird for work and you’re crossing a line.” We never force anyone to share anything they don’t want to share. I’ll say that. But I think it’s so crazy because we spend most of our time at work and with the people we work with and yet we are afraid of crossing this line and forming a real relationship.

Well, I don’t want to work with people who I don’t really enjoy working with, who I don’t have high sense of trust with. What is that? I think if we really want to create a place where there’s loyalty and trust, we have to create the space for those conversations to happen.

We do that. It’s a huge, huge component of Student Maid. I think actually I think it’s the reason that people want to work for a cleaning company because it’s certainly not the work that’s keeping them there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. That is powerful. The vulnerability questions, which immediately makes me thing of Brene Brown. Then to start with the leadership and front and center is powerful because it’s kind of like we’re not just forcing you to do this, worker bees. Here we are showing the way and putting that example out there.

I guess the reason that folks are leaders is because they knew what they were getting into upfront is that this is a part of the game as opposed to – it might be a little bit trickier to spring that on people. “Hey, for tomorrow’s meeting, here’s kind of what I think-”

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. I think you have to explain to – especially when you’re doing that, it’s – what is the purpose of this. Why are we doing this? What’s the end goal?

We always say that relationship is the foundation of accomplishment. Before we can ever talk about accomplishing any goal, we have to have a really strong foundation that’s built on trust and real, meaningful relationships. Until we have that, we can’t talk about our business goals because we don’t have a foundation to stand on to reach those.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I would imagine it’s just like if you can share those kind of vulnerabilities – now I’m thinking about the movie Dodgeball. “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”

By that I mean, if you can say this thing that’s hard to say, that doesn’t have direct business impact or feedback about performance but it’s important to you, if you can say that, then in a way that just really kind of builds up your capabilities to have other difficult conversations in terms of, “You know what? This performance is really disappointing in these ways,” or “Here’s some perspective I have for you on how I found this challenging or upsetting.”

It’s like an icebreaker that actually breaks ice I guess is how I’m thinking about it.

Kristen Hadeed
Right. Yup. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Now as a result of sort of all of this stuff, you’ve got some impressive retention rates for your workers as compared to I guess the cleaning industry at large. Could you share just a little bit of sort of where you’re sitting versus the industry norms and any other kind of elements of the secret sauce you think are behind that?

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, the cleaning industry has such a high turnover rate. 75% is the average.

Pete Mockaitis
That means in one year 75% of a workforce will not be there the next year.

Kristen Hadeed
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Kristen Hadeed
Because of that the customer turnover is also equally high, 55% is the average.

That’s hard but then you add in that in our business model we hire primarily students. Not all students. If you’re a fit for our culture, you’re getting a job, but most of our team members are students. They come with not a lot of job experience.

Then the average profit margin of a cleaning company is only 15%, so you can’t really afford to pay people much above minimum wage. You’ve got hard, exhausting work, can’t afford to really train, develop. You don’t have a lot for that. Then you have people coming into my business with hardly any experience.

It’s a huge challenge, but we really evolved early on from being a cleaning company to a company that is centered around growth and leadership. We always say that we – our goal is to help our people build a skillset that really will help them be successful after they leave our doors. Everything we’re doing is about getting them ready and equipping them with the skills they need to be successful for after they leave us.

Because of that, I think people really feel invested in. I know they feel invested in and they don’t want to leave. While they’re cleaning, they’re taking courses on things like the FBI and how to find your strengths and articulate them in an interview and how to build meaningful relationships, what is vulnerability, what is empathy, how do you listen, what things should you text about, what things should you talk face-to-face about.

We do all of this stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with dusting or mopping or vacuuming but really does help you in your life.

Then what happens is people graduate and it’s time to move on from the company and they don’t want to go because they’re like, “Will I be able to find another company where I’m invested in?” Sadly I think there are a lot of companies that don’t do that. I wish more would. I dream of the day when every company invests in people like we do the bottom line.

I think the average person stays with us until they leave school. For some that may be four years, for some it’s two years, depending on when they join the team. It isn’t uncommon – sometimes we have to tell people, “You’ve got to go. It’s time to go and branch off and go out there and make the mark you want to have on the world.”

But I think it shows that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what the work is that you’re doing, you can find a way to really inject purpose and meaning into that work. As long as you’re making people feel like they are the priority because they are, they usually don’t want to go anywhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. So cool. I want to get your quick take on Millennials, not to belabor the point. But I mean you’ve got perhaps one of the most privileged vantage points of any human alive in terms of working with young folk, doing menial work. What’s your take on what’s real versus silly, overgeneralizations when it comes to Millennials?

Kristen Hadeed
I’ll tell you two stories quickly. One is a student who came into the office and said, “Do you know where I can get a stamp?” We said, “What? A stamp?” She said, “When I need one, my mom mails me one and I don’t have time to wait for that.” We’re like, “Your mom mails you a stamp when you need a stamp. Oh my goodness, we can get you a stamp way faster than that.”

It would be really easy for me to tell you that story and then at the end say, “Ah, Millennial,” but I’m not going to say that.

Then I’ll tell you this other story and it’s that my mom works with us. She’s a Baby Boomer. I gave everyone an assignment not too long ago where they had to write their own job description. I said it needs to be around 500 words. When my mom turned hers in she kept saying, “It’s either 503, 504, 498. I don’t know. I counted so many times. I keep getting a different number.”

I realized that she did not know about word count on Microsoft Word and she was hand counting every single word on her job description. It would be really easy for me to say, “Ah, Baby Boomers,” after that, but I’m not going to.

I think the point is, we’re all just trying to do our best. We’re all just trying to figure it out. It’s really easy to make fun of Baby Boomers, just like it’s really easy to make fun of Millennials, really easy to make fun of Gen X.

We’re all humans, so let’s just put this … away and let’s just instead focus on how can we just create a place that brings out the best in everyone, that helps everyone realize their potential, and remember that at the end of the day we all want to feel valued and significant and trusted. That’s the thing we have in common. Let’s focus on that.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds a lot easier than doing an elaborate segmented-

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, it’s way easier.

Pete Mockaitis
-intervention person by person based on their generation. That’s great. It sounds like you don’t really buy into so much the so-called assertions that Millennials are this way as opposed to Boomers which are that way.

Kristen Hadeed
I do think that there are things that help shape a generation. We employ Gen Z as well as Millennials. That’s primarily our makeup.

I think technology has really affected both. I think that it’s affected our independent thinking because when we have a question our first thought is that we Google it instead of thinking of it on our own. When we need directions, we type in the address and step-by-step it tells us exactly what to do. We don’t have to think about where we are.

Then on the relationship end, we’re used to texting and social media, so sitting and having a real conversation that’s really based on vulnerability maybe isn’t comfortable because we’re not used to that.

But then I think about, well that’s definitely affected us, let’s look at everyone else. When I walk into conference rooms with other people, I see people on their phones all the time. It’s not just Millennials. I see people emailing about important things that really should be face-to-face all the time, not just Millennials.

I think technology has affected everyone and the way we interact and the way we think. I think it’s affected Millennial in Gen Z’ers more because that’s really the way that we grew up, but I think that’s something that’s widespread.

Also, almost 70% of the world is disengaged at work. That’s not a Millennial statistic. That’s a human statistic. To me what it’s saying is this isn’t a Millennial problem. This is a human engagement problem. We have to figure out how are we going to help everyone become more engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Kristen, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Kristen Hadeed
I think – no. You’re good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh shucks.

Kristen Hadeed
I love this interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Flattery will get you everywhere Kristen. I appreciate it. Well, let’s do it. Tell us about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Kristen Hadeed
I don’t know who said it. Well, I have two. I don’t know who said either one. The first is, “Nothing goes to plan and that is the plan.” That just helps me realize that when something happens that’s a deviation, instead of getting frustrated, realize that it’s all part of the process. One day when you look back it will all make sense.

The other really helps me in terms of empathy. It’s that, “Hurt people hurt people. Loved people love people.” It helps me when someone’s emotions kind of exceed the moment or they’re angry about something and I cannot understand why they’re taking this out on me, I just remember that hurt people hurt people. They’re probably hurting inside about something else, so I need to come at them with empathy instead of anger.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh, I love John Gottman’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Kristen Hadeed
I’m obsessed with it. He, if you don’t know John Gottman, look him up. He studies – he’s a psychologist who works a lot in marriage and family space, but I find a lot of the work he’s done can be applied to the workplace. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh, I have so many. Probably the book that influenced me most early on, Delivering Happiness, which is written by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.

It really helped me understand what culture is and that is that it’s not things like having the cool office and a ping pong table and beer on tap, that it’s really about how people feel. Then it got me thinking, how do I want people to feel and how do I help them feel that way.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job? I’m sorry, scratch it. Your favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job.

Kristen Hadeed
I don’t know if this is a tool. I guess it’s more of a habit, but every night before I go to bed I think about what are the three things I want to accomplish tomorrow. I’m really clear on that because during the day there are so many things that happen that take you away from important stuff.

I think the night before identifying what are the three things that if I accomplish these, I’ll go to bed feeling like today was a win. It just helps me stay focused when things can get so crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks as you speak it?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I think it’s the title of the book. I think it’s that you don’t need anyone to give you permission to screw up; give it to yourself.

Just give yourself permission to be human and talk about it because I think we’re making leadership unattainable because we’re acting as if you’ve got to have all the answers and know how to do everything in order to be a leader. That’s not true. Everyone can be a leader. Everyone can have an impact on the person to the right of them or the left of them.

Sometimes we’re going to mess up in figuring that out and it’s all right and that’s normal. Let’s just admit that.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, all my social media is my name Kristen Hadeed and then you can go to my website KristenHadded.com or StudentMaid.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kristen Hadeed
Let’s see, since we talked about FBIs, how about give someone at work an FBI in person.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Kristen thank you so much for sharing this. This was so much fun.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I wish you and Student Maid tons of luck going forward for another nine amazing years.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Alex, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Alex Grodnik
Pete, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. And I think we’ve got a lot of great stuff to cover. But, first, I want to get your take on, I’ve learned that you had the idea for Uber years before the Uber people founded Uber. What’s the story here?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, so I was actually really fortunate. I got to grow up in Park City, Utah, which for those of you that don’t know is a small ski town about 30 miles outside of Salt Lake. It’s where all of the 2002 Winter Olympics Skiing events were held. So, you know, it’s a little ski town, everything just revolves around skiing.

And once a year there, there’s also happens to be Sundance Film Festival in February. And so growing up there with Sundance, it’s a fun time. There would be hundreds of thousands of people, movie stars and Hollywood people that would come to Park City, and it was kind of a unique period.

And so going to high school there, I saw in my little town, it doesn’t really have the infrastructure built to have hundreds of thousands people here at a given time. And one of the things I saw is that there’s no taxi system, there’s no way for anyone to get around. So I had this idea, “Hey, my mom has an SUV. What if I turned her car into a taxi during Sundance, for the two weeks that Sundance happen?”

And so I went to Home Depot and I got some fluorescent letters that said “TAXI” and I put them on the side of the car, on the back of the car. And, also, my dad did some work with police in one of his prior careers. And so we had one of those like undercover spinning lights that you plug into your cigarette lighter and like it magnets to the top of your car.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Alex Grodnik
And completely illegal but would actually blind people when they saw it but would definitely get people’s attention. So I’m armed with fluorescent taxi letters all over the car and a spinning red police light, and I set out into Park City, and I’m picking people up. And it wasn’t even 30 seconds before I picked my first person up, and they were from England, and they got in the car, and I drove them somewhere five minutes away.

And they said, “Okay, how much do we owe you?” And I kind of froze, and I was like, “Oh, I hadn’t really thought about how to charge.” So I said, “Well, you can just give me a tip.” And they gave me $20.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Alex Grodnik
And I said, “Wow, I just made $20 for driving someone for about five minutes in my car. Maybe there’s something to this.” And it didn’t stop from there. For the first, probably six hours, I maybe had like 95% utilization, just dropping someone off, picking the next person up. Because, I mean, there were no cars for anyone to take.

So I came home on that first night about 8:00 o’clock, my parents were out to dinner, and my brother – I was like 17 at the time, and I think my brother was probably 13. And my brother was there, I roll out, you know, must’ve been like $600 or $700 on the floor. And he and I were like rolling around in it like we’re Richie Rich.

And I’m like, “Man, Jake, there’s something to this.” So I go back out, and I’m driving down main street of my town with this light spinning and say TAXI all over my car. And before you know it, the police pulled me over, and they’re like, “Where is your business license? Where’s your regular license? What are you doing here?”

And I’m like, “You know, I go to high school here. I’m not trying to do something…” And they’re like, “Just stop doing this. This is ridiculous. You can’t do any of this thing. You have an illegal police light, you’re saying TAXI.” So I go home and I’m like, “Man, I have to keep this going, I can’t take a no here.”

So I went back to Home Depot and I got some letters that said FREE RIDES TAXI and took off the light, still going around town doing this, and then I got pulled over again. And they said, “You can’t say TAXI. You’re not a taxi. You don’t have a business license.” So, fine, got rid of the taxi, still say FREE RIDES, and it did nothing to deter the demand.

So, for the next two weeks, I’m driving non-stop after school driving till 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, picking people. I’ve got three of my friends involved in it. They took their parents’ SUVs and they slapped FREE RIDES on it, and we had kind of a militia of high school students driving people around town.

And now, fast forward to today, Uber actually brings in a bunch of cars and, you know, there’s Uber in Park City and they bring in a bunch of stuff for the Festival. But when I did this, there was nothing. And so it’s kind of like I always bump into some police or something when I go back to Park City and kind of everyone remembers this story.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. Well, so with the militia then, you had multiple cars doing numerous nights unimpeded by the police once you called it FREE RIDES?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, I mean, I still got pulled over one more time, and they took about a half hour, and they came back to us and they said, “Okay. Just be safe.” That was a complete loophole.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, that’s fun and intriguing. Well, I love it. So it’s not just like you thought of it, you really took some action, and that’s pretty cool. And I only thought of the Airbnb concept before Airbnb existed, and I had a buddy make a little PowerPoint talking about what he thought it would take to get the software up and going. We’re like, “Oh, that’s kind of cool. Maybe later.”

So that’s cool. Taking action. That’s awesome. And so I want to talk in large part about you and not taking no sort of as you illustrated here. But, first, I want to get a little bit of context prior to. So you got Wall Street Oasis, and that is a website I’ve been to many times. But could you orient folks, what’s the site about? And what’s your new podcast there about?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, absolutely. So Wall Street Oasis is a big finance community on the website, on the internet. It’s been around for over 10 years and it’s one of the most active finance communities online. It gets about a million unique visitors per month with people coming there looking for topics like how to break into investment banking, how to study for the GMAT, industry group specific stuff within investment banking, private equity, hedge funds. It’s pretty much the go-to place for people beginning a finance career.

And, recently, we’ve launched a podcast. And so the way that I came to it is I just graduated from business school. I got my MBA from UCLA, and I started a podcast, and the guys at Wall Street Oasis heard it, they liked it, and they said, “Why don’t you just have your podcast come live on our site?” And so for the last six months, we’ve been having a podcast where we speak with really just influential business leaders, most of them are in finance but a lot aren’t.

And we talk about secrets to success, the ups, the downs, optimal career paths, and really just life in general with founders, people like the CEO and founder of Google Voice, investment bankers who love investment banking, people who used to work in investment banking and have left for entrepreneurial pastures or greener pastures, all sorts of just interesting human stories.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So optimal career paths, have you sort of synthesized any kind of key takeaways or themes that show up again and again when it comes to getting an optimal career path?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah. So, you know, it’s interesting. A lot of the kind of key takeaways from the podcast kind of come congealed to – one of them is like really finding the right people who complement you. And that was something that Craig Walker, he’s the guy who founded Google Voice and who, now, has been a serial entrepreneur.

But he attributes a lot of the success that he’s had in his career to positioning himself around just other smart people, people that complement his skillsets. And we’ve also had discussions about the importance of networking with your peers, and not just networking with the guys who are running the show, but networking with your peers can be as beneficial as networking with bosses because, as you and your peers progress, they’re eventually are going to be the ones running the show. And so that’s also super important.

We talk about breaking down success and how defining success is really important, and how putting a process around that. So lots of interesting tidbits that have come from the podcast which has been really, really fun to do and get these first hand.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool, yes. Well, so I’m intrigued when it comes to career paths. So I’ve been to Wall Street Oasis for all sorts of little questions. It seems like Google loves it. So, hey, that’s cool. All sorts of questions. I’m remember when I was researching dress shoes, it seems like many, many forum posts, had to do with dress shoes and the hierarchy of prestige or quality to them.

But I think a much more substantive question is when it comes to MBAs, masters of business administration degrees, you got one, and you’re thinking a lot about career paths and career advice.

I know this is a hot topic. I know people who got an MBA and regret it, say, “Why did I spend that time and money?” I know people who got an MBA and say, “They were the best two years of my life. I figured out so much stuff. It’s been so instrumental in opening doors.” What’s your take on that one?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a tough question. It’s a unique question given for every single person. And I think if you go to a top 30 program, right? I mean, there’s 25, 30 great business schools. It’s going to be very tough to regret it in a long-term picture. I mean, it is an action-packed very, very fast-moving fun couple of years.

I mean, the experiences that you have are life-changing. The people that you meet are life-changing. But you’re getting at a good point. It is expensive. You might be giving up – you know, look at my perspective, I gave up a job where I was making six figures for two years, and then you’re paying six figures to go to school. So, then, the huge, huge commitment.

Really, on the financial return side, it makes a lot of sense. If you come from a, I don’t know, I’m going to call an obscure background, just not a traditional background or any traditional background but you want to move into a different career path, you want to go work for a big company. So, say, you want to go work for Bain or a different management consulting company, or an investment bank, or Amazon.

Amazon was actually the number one recruiter out of my class. These are window jobs, and windows open up to get these jobs right after undergrad and then they close. And then another window opens up again right after business school. And so if you want to go work for GE or Amazon or JP Morgan – great, you go to business school, you come into business school, you leave your job paying $80,000, $90,000, $100,000 and you get a job that pays you $200,000, and it’s a pretty quick return on investment, right?

From my perspective, I left a job paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now I go to business school and I spent another $100,000. And now I’m at a job that’s paying me literally hundreds of dollars per week. So my return is going to be a little bit longer but there’s no way that I regret going to business school. The connections and experiences that I had I think are going to be fruitful for me for my entire life.

You know, I went to business school at UCLA. I planned on living my whole life in Los Angeles. So these connections, you know, the 50, 100 connections that I have are really going to, I think, prove beneficial for me throughout my career.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s cool. Thank you. Well, one more appetizer, if I may, before we jump into the meat of things. I would love to get your take, you know, bankers and finance folks, there are some associations and some stereotypes, whether they come from movies or the imagination of folks. So having lived it and seen a lot of commentary around it through Wall Street Oasis, what general tidbits might you share in terms of when it comes to banker perception and stereotypes? Which of them are generally true versus generally false versus really vary a lot person-to-person?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, so I did banking for a short time in New York, but mostly I did it in Los Angeles. And while investment bankers are pretty similar across, I mean, you’re going to have much more stereotypical investment bankers in New York than you are in L.A.

But, you know, just like anything else, stereotyping and grouping people is kind of like a lazy way to look at it. Every single person is unique. But I can tell you that most investment bankers tend to be intelligent, driven, and bitter. You know, bitter after one year on the job, I would say. Optimistic, pie-eyed optimistic, zero years into the job. And then after one year, maybe a little bitter.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say bitter, like bitter about what or in what ways?

Alex Grodnik
You know, it’s tough. You have thought for so long that you want to do investment banking, and you get this job and really you’re just elated, and they’re paying you lots of money. I mean, you make well into the hundred thousands dollars your first year out of undergrad. And you think, “Oh, man, I want to go really just light the world on fire here.”

But then you start to realize that a big piece of that large compensation really is to compensate you for giving up your entire life. So you really have very, very little clarity into when you’re going to be working and when you’re not going to be working. I mean, basically, the idea is you’re going to be working around the clock.

I mean, I can’t tell you how many times there were when it’s Friday, at 5:30, and I’m thinking, “Yes, I am getting out of here. I’m going to go get dinner with my girlfriend. I text her, “Let’s get dinner. Cancel your plans.” And 15 or 20 minutes later, you got make that terrible phone call where, “Hey, sorry, I actually got a bunch of work. And not only am I not going to see you tonight, I’m not going to see you tomorrow, and I’m not going to see you Sunday either.”

And so that gets old. And investment banking, it’s an incredible place to begin your career. They say it’s like dog years. You get seven years’ worth of experience for every one year of work. And it is. You learn a lot, you get incredible access to management teams and investors and boards of directors, and you’re at the top level of the capital structure but you have to sacrifice a lot for it. And it’s definitely a tradeoff that people are usually not fully aware of when they’re making the decision to get into it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, cool. So, now, I’ve sort of scratched the itch of curiosity. I had a few things I wanted to hear you tackle. So, now, I want to hear a little bit about one of your superpowers which is not taking no for an answer. What do you mean by that? And how can we implement some of this wisdom?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, what do I mean by not taking no? It’s pretty simple. If someone tells you no, for me, that gets me excited because it’s like, “Okay, now my skills and expertise get to shine. I get to find a creative way, a loophole, a workaround,” just like what I did with that taxi story at the beginning, but it’s pretty much what my entire career has been based off of, of not just taking no and chasing the goals and accomplishments that you want to achieve.

And so, as applied in my life, I got into a college that was kind of above my punching weight. Then I graduated from that college in 2009 and I got into investment banking right in the middle of the financial crisis, you know. And then I got a different job in investment banking. And now, after business school, I’m a first-time entrepreneur, I’ve got a startup, I’m raising venture financing for it. And I’ve been told no probably over a hundred times trying to raise money for it, and it’s exciting for me when that happens because that’s when you start to get creative.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool to hear. And there’s so much to unpack there. When you say you heard no over a hundred times, this is just bringing me back to when I wrote my first book, it was about leadership in student organizations. I wrote it in college, it’s available for free at studentleadership.com but not super relevant to what we’re doing here.

And it was interesting because I wrote all of these query letters, these one-page notes to publishers and agents, and like day after day after day, I would get a bundle of letters back in the mail, old-fashioned snail mail, that say no, no, no in differing sorts of ways. And, occasionally, they’re like, “Yes, go ahead and send me a proposal.” And one turned into a deal which I ended up declining and self-publishing.

Anyway, but it was very therapeutic for me in terms of saying, “You know what, this doesn’t really hurt or sting that much, hitting it again and again and again.” And so you have called that rejection therapy. I don’t know if that’s an Alex original or if you’re borrowing that from somewhere, but I love that turn of a phrase. Can you expand upon that?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, rejection therapy, it’s not my phrase. It’s out there in the public domain, but it’s really just reducing the fear of rejection by exposure, by exposing yourself to it. It’s similar to someone who’s afraid of germs, they’re afraid of germs. And you go and you touch the railway going down to the subway in New York City every day. Over time you’re not going to be afraid of germs any longer.

So it’s desensitizing yourself to that fear. And it doesn’t have to be big things. There’s really one rule to it is that you need to be rejected by another person every day. And so, really, asking someone for a stick of gum, or a ride across town, or to borrow 50 cents, or for a high five, or to take a picture with you. All of these things in the beginning are hard to do. It’s hard to ask someone for a stick of gum.

By day five, by day six, by day seven, it’s definitely not hard anymore, and all of a sudden, bigger things. Asking for promotions at work, or raises at your job, or someone to go out on a date with you become not hard. You become desensitized to being afraid of no.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. That’s a powerful thought there. And so I guess I’m wondering a little bit when it comes to all of this asking, is there a risk of becoming a taker, you know, in terms of you just are freely asking and having so much with it that you’re sort of receiving more than you’re giving out in the professional or a karmic context?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, of course, there is. And you have to be mindful of that. I mean, we’re all human beings, we all want things, and we all generally like to help others. And so if you make it easy for someone to help you, that’s usually a pretty good thing and they’re usually pretty amendable to doing that.

On the same side, if someone asks you for something, going through this process, you become more humble. There’s a sense of humility that kind of comes over you as you go through this rejection process because you start to see that really no one cares. Like if you asks someone for something or like you raise your hand in a class, or you ask a question in a meeting, you might think it’s a big deal, but everyone is really so concerned with themselves and so caught up in what they’re trying to get and their goals and their achievements, that no one is thinking about your silly question or something you asked them for.

And so, really, you just come to the realization that it just doesn’t matter. And by putting yourself out there, there’s really only good to be come from it. And, yes, of course, you don’t want to be like that guy that’s asking, asking, asking and bothering people and pestering people. But there’s a fine balance to it, and I’m sure the listeners of this podcast are smart enough to determine that balance for themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, now, I want to zoom back to you said when you hear a no you get kind of excited. And you said that’s because it seems like it doesn’t even register that this is the end or that the door has been closed to you but rather you’re being presented with an interesting challenge. Can you expand upon that a little bit in terms of, you know, what is going on in your brain and the emotional makeup when you hear the no?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, so there’s obviously something missing inside, there’s something amiss inside of me that I need to fill it up with challenges all day long, but that’s a story for another podcast. But, yeah, really, the interesting part is, okay, so you get told no, and to a lot of people that’s the end of it. To me, that’s really the beginning of it because now, it’s like, “Okay, my creative juices start to flow,” and you get to think, “How can I get around this?”

And so it’s not even something that I’m doing consciously. It’s just like the taxi story. You tell me I can’t have taxi on my car, and immediately my mind just says FREE RIDES. I’m not afraid that the police have me pulled out of the car on the side of the street. I’m thinking, “Okay, how can I keep this going? How can I get around this?”

Very similar to what I told you about raising capital for the startup I’m working on. This is something I’m going through right now. Like I said, we’ve spent, we’ve hundreds of conversations at least, no, no, no, no, no, no, no at breakfast, no at lunch, no at dinner, no at cocktails. And I thought, “Okay, clearly there needs to be a better way to do this.”

And so I actually recently came up with a better way that I just started implementing so I don’t really have success metrics around it yet. But I’ve been asking a lot of these investors, instead of, “Hey, can we have a meeting for the startup?” I say, “Hey, do you want to be a guest on my podcast?” And, Pete, it’s amazing, all of these big time major venture capitalists, they love talking about themselves, and they want to be on the podcast.

And so I say, “Hey, will you be on the podcast?” And they say, “Oh, man, I’m honored. I’d love to be on the podcast. Send me your startup deck. I’d love to look at that as well.” It’s like it’s incredible the results that we’re seeing. We went from like seeing like 10% success rates up to close to 40% success rates. And so it’s early days. I don’t have millions of dollars of funding to show for it yet but invite me back in a few more months and I’m sure I will.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, certainly. And I find that, with the podcast analogy, well, it’s not an analogy, the practice that you’re employing, I can kind of relate to, in that it’s really just so much a matter of is your first kind of request or impression, one, in which you are giving, you’re offering something versus you’re taking something.

And it’s intriguing to me how, I suppose, when folks reach out to me with a guest pitch, like, “Hey, I want to be on your show,” or, “I’m a publicist, I represent this client. I want to be on your show.” It’s like, you know, I’m automatically biased to say no because, I don’t know, 95% plus of those requests are just fall dead. So nice job, Alex, you got in. You’re an elite, 5% are there.

So I was compelled, you know, because it was relevant and authoritative and engaging and unheard of Wall Street Oasis, like, “Oh, cool. Yeah, let’s talk.” So that worked out. But on the flipside, if someone is kind of being generous, like, “Hey, would you like to appear on my podcast?” Like, “Oh, well, yes, thank you.” And then it’s just sort of naturally inside me, and vice versa, is what I’m seeing.

Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, would vouch for this. It’s like there’s this natural reciprocity. It’s like, “You know what, someone gave me something, and I’m inclined to say yes because, you know, it’s beneficial for me so, sure, I’ll say yes. And then as a result, I get to know that person, I’ve got a bit of relationship with that person. I like that person, having had a little bit of a back and forth. And I kind of want to reciprocate. It’s like, you know, that person was helpful to me. I feel like it would just only be right for me to, if possible, try a little harder to maybe find a potential fit in the podcast for them, and to say, ‘Hey, this is what we’re going for. You give me some topics. Those aren’t any good. Give me some more…’”

You know, it’s like, suddenly, whereas they had to like nail it the first time with the perfect thing I needed to hear, now it’s like I’m helping them. it’s like, “No, no, move it a little over this way so we can find a fit.”

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, I mean, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s reframing the no and so it’s beneficial to you. I think, Pitbull has this lyric in one of his songs where he says, “Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice.” And so, really, just re-positioning, thinking creatively, instead of just asking, you know, “What can you do for me?” Maybe offering what you can do for them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And could you give us a few more examples? So, you know, we’ve talked very specifically about, hey, if you happen to have a podcast or a media channel at your disposal, that’s great. Go ahead and offer that up. But what are some other kind of gifts that you recommend offering that can help be door openers?

Alex Grodnik
You know, like in terms of cold-emailing people, there’s kind of an art to it. And, really, you have to be very clear with your ask. And so when you’re sending someone a cold email, you have to say, “Well, what am I looking for here? Yes, at the end of the day, I’m looking for a job, or I’m looking for an investment in my company.”

But there’s sometimes three, four, five, maybe even ten steps in between the cold email and the end goal. And so I always like to take baby steps. And so the first email says, “Hey, can we have a 10-minute call?” And if we’re in the same city, “Hey, can we grab a 10-minute coffee?”

And, really, just by making it very, very simple and very clear, a very short email, I find that people are much more receptive to that. If you make it easy you can have a calendar invite already in the email so that it’s really straightforward and simple for them.

And from there, you take the call and you turn it into an in-person meeting. You take the in-person meeting and you send them your investor deck or your business pitch. And you take that and you have them meet one of your co-founders or one of your advisors. And it kind of snowballs from there. But you’ve got to be very clear with your ask in the beginning and be very succinct with it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. That’s good. So that’s in the asking phase in terms of sort of upgrading folks’ level of commitment and investment and helpfulness toward you. I’d love to hear if you have a few more perspectives in terms of what you can give, what you can offer that is embrace, whether it’s a media opportunity, or what else?

Alex Grodnik
Yes, you know, it’s funny. No one even asks the size of my podcast when I’m saying, “Hey, will you be on my podcast?” So, I mean, it’s growing and I say we’ve been doing it for six months now. But, really, it could be an upstart, and I say, “Hey, come on my podcast,” or, “Hey, I’d love to interview you on my blog,” or, “I would love to get a comment of yours on my Facebook channel.”

There’s really so many ways to engage someone today. And, like I said, people are usually very interested in helping others, and they’re also interested in talking and adding advice, and talking about themselves, something everyone – a common thing. Humans love talking about themselves.

So, if you can get them, instead of asking for what you might really want in step six or seven, just ask them for their advice, how they got to where they are, what they did. People are generally pretty receptive to that. And, fine, if you have some type of outlet, you’ve got a Facebook channel, you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got a YouTube channel, people would be honored as they tell me to come on and help you.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And so then I want to get your take then when instead of maybe, let’s say you don’t get a no but you just get silence, you know. It’s sort of like if you try to make a call, or a voicemail, or an email, or a letter, whatever your mechanism, a tweet. And there’s just sort of nothing on the other end. You know, in a way I’m right with you like, oh, you’re hear a no and that sparks the creative wheels turning, like, “Oh, okay, well, let’s figure out an alternative win.” What happens if it’s just sort of like you can’t even connect with them in the first place?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, and that’s a great question, Pete, and it’s probably the more common scenario. And what I tell youths, I mean, I tell my brother this. My brother is an actor, and I tell him about emailing people, and he does it sometimes, and he’ll come back to me, and say, “You know, I email them, and they don’t email me back. So forget them, that opportunity is dead.”

And I said, “Jake, you sent them one email. Like do you respond to every single email? You have to send them two, three, four emails. I mean, not every day but like send an email, wait eight or nine days. Send another email, ‘Hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw this. Would love to get your advice.’ Another week, week and a half, ‘Hey, sorry for bothering you. This will be my last time. I really just would love to get your insight.’”

And people are busy, they don’t always respond to strangers on the first email. But give them the benefit of the doubt. They generally will respond if you send them a sequence of emails. And there’s tools that can help you to do this. Emailing tools like Mixmax is the one I use. And you can send an original email, and if they don’t respond you can set it for seven, eight, nine, ten days later to send a follow up email.

But, yeah, I mean, I say getting ghosted, again, it’s persistence is kind of also not taking no but, softly, not being a burden to someone.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s encouraging to hear that in your own life and results of emailing. You found that if you do have the persistence to do a triple, over time, you say more often than not, you get something.

Alex Grodnik
You know, I’m not going to say more than 50%, so less often than not. But it’s a numbers thing. If you send enough emails and, yes, you have called a 40% success rate of your three-email chain, then, yeah, those are pretty great numbers.

I mean, cold emails in the world do not have a 40% success rate. I would assume they have like a low single-digit success rate. So if you can get above that by employing some of these tactics I’m talking about, then that’s really great.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And when is it time, you know, to say, “You know, they’ve said no and I’ve kind of come back with a number of creative alternatives. When is it time to say, you know, goodbye for now?”

Alex Grodnik
I would say, you know, sometimes like three contacts is probably enough. You don’t really want to do more than that. And it’s also not to say that that’s dead. When you’re playing these numbers game and you’re sending, you know, a quantity of notes and emails and calls, sometimes things come back from the dead, you know, from weeks and months old.

Once you have enough irons in the fire, all of a sudden, like old things start to come back alive. And it’s really cool when that happens. It’s an incredible testament to just like the effort and the dividends that it starts to pay over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I can admit and attest to that when it comes to podcast guests’ pitches. I have pulled emails like months’ old because I saw them, and I thought, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting. Okay, I’ll put them in. Maybe I’ll look at it later when the guest pipeline is looking a little light folder.” And then when I do look at them closer and see some video, I go, “Oh, wow, what an engaging personality. Yeah, let’s do it.” So that totally happens on my end there.

So, very good. Well, tell me, Alex, anything else you want to make sure to cover before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Alex Grodnik
You know, I really just employ everyone to try the rejection therapy. It’s pretty easy. Also, another great way to do it is you go out and grab a turkey sandwich for lunch. You say, “Hey, may I please have a discount on this?” And you will be amazed by how often you get 10% off of a turkey sandwich. And people love to do it, and it’s kind of a funny thing. Because people don’t usually ask that, and so that’s an interesting way to get it. But I really just want to leave with a saying that you’ll never get what you don’t ask for.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. Thank you. Okay. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of quotes. Actually, I can remember the one from my childhood that was my favorite, was, “The happiness of your life is based on the quality of your thoughts.” And I really like that quote because it kind of goes with happiness is a choice. It’s not a right, it’s not something that you’re automatically going to get.

You need to choose to be happy and you need to seek that out in life. And so I make a conscious effort every day to remind myself that you can choose to be happy. And I also like a quote from Henry Ford, where he says, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Alex Grodnik
You know, I just read Shoe Dogs which was the Nike, Phil Knight memoir. It’s just, again, a story of persistence. Oh, my God, the obstacles that he overcame in starting Nike, and not over a short period of time. Basically like 10 years, the fights with the manufacturing facilities in Asia, and people trying to knock off his shoes, and the retailers. I mean, it was endless. And he just kept going forward. So I really love that.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be more awesome at your job?

Alex Grodnik
Yes, so I’ve mentioned Mixmax which is the email and calendar sending tool. It’s real simple. It’s like one of these things where someone shares their calendar with you and they send you three or four different times, and you click one and it instantly puts an appointment on both your calendars. It gets rid of the back and forth.

You know, once someone agrees to meeting you, you want to make it as easy as possible for them. And so by just quickly sending five or six different times where they could speak with you, and not having to go back and forth with, “Hey, what works for you. Friday, well, all right. How about the morning?” “No, I can do the morning.” Well, that sucks. So don’t do that.

Also, I recently purchased a thing for $8 which has changed my life. And it is computer glasses, glasses that I wear all day while staring at the screen that blocks some of the UV light from the computer screen. Maybe this is just specific to me, but I would come home from work, you know, after staring at this computer screen for 10 hours, and like my eyes would be so strained and I would have a headache.

I wear this $8-glasses and like my eyes feel like they do right when I wake up in the morning at the end of the day. So that’s an interesting purchase too.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, these computer glasses have come up in a previous conversation when we were talking about sales, and then I had a listener say, “I love computer glasses.” So it’s striking a chord. So then what you’re describing at eight bucks, at the price point then, sounds like it is primarily a matter of just blocking the light and not giving you any sort of prescription, you know, eye correction love. Just a bit of UV or blue light blocking?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, that’s exactly it. I don’t wear glasses. If I did, I would get these lenses put in them, and I’m sure you can get these types of blue light blocking lenses if you already have glasses, at any eye glass place.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, so then, tell me, feel free to name the brand. Was it Amazon? Or where did you acquire it? How can we all?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, it is Amazon. I typed in, you know, computer light-blocking glasses, and there are some that are more expensive and actually there was a company that was on Shark Tank last week that’s got another pair of glasses. I think theirs is like $50 or $60. I honestly don’t know what the difference is. My $8 ones are fabulous, so try them out. I mean, I don’t know that they’re the most fashionable but try them out. And if you want to upgrade, you know, upgrade later.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s excellent. Thank you. All right. Cool. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite habit, you know, a personal practice of yours that’s really been helpful?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, I’ve got a few. I try and meditate in the mornings. I’m not great about it. They say you’re supposed to do it before coffee, and I really like having coffee first thing. So I’m getting better at practicing meditation in the morning, but the practice I really want to share is a creativity practice.

And so I’ve got about a 30-minute drive to this startup that I work at now, and my old morning routine would be to wake up, you know, consume some online news, and then start listening to podcasts. And I would probably listen to two, three, four podcasts in the morning all sped up one and a half times. And I’d get to work and I’d be a little bit on edge, I’d be stressed out, “Oh, I didn’t get through all my podcasts. I’m listening to fast voices all morning long.”

It really wasn’t the most relaxing start for the day. And you and I both are podcast professionals, we’ve got to listen to a lot of podcasts and know what’s going on out there. So I still listen to podcasts in the morning, but for a piece of my commute now, I don’t listen to a podcast, I turn off the radio, and I sit in silence in my car as I drive to work.

And this is going to sound really funny, but I look at things on the side of the road that I see, and I see a dog on the side of the road, and I’ll start to makeup a story about that dog out loud in my car. I’ll say, “That dog is named, you know, Frisky. And Frisky came on a boat here from China. And on that boat, he made a friend…”

And so, you know, I start to do this. And, Pete, stay with me, it sounds crazy but now when I get to work, I feel like my creativity and my original thinking capabilities are really firing on all cylinders. And it’s been an interesting way to cut back on a lot of the stress that I have in the morning, and start these creative juices flowing.

You know, it wasn’t long ago where we didn’t have smartphones and we weren’t filling every single second of our time being in front of a screen being entertained. We used to have quiet time alone with ourselves. Now we rarely have that. And I think our minds need an outlet for the creativity. I think we all have creativity and creative juices pumping through us. But we need to manifest this, we need to practice this, we need an outlet for them.

And now, you know, by sitting quietly for five or ten minutes, kind of similar to meditating, I let those creative juices flow. And the results have been pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. Well, it’s funny, as you tell the Frisky story, it just brings a smile to my face, and it just seems like a pleasant way to live life in the sense of you’re noticing things, and then you’re allowing to bring into play a little bit. And in so doing, it just makes sense as a natural outcome of that is more free-flowing creative thought.

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, you know, I’m looking forward to having kids because then I won’t be a crazy person telling stories to myself in the car. I can make up stories for my kids and I think that’d be a great outlet for it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And is there a particular nugget or piece of insight that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they maybe repeat it back to you?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, I mean, it just kind of harkens back to the not taking no. You know, it’s really just what I said before, is that you’re not going to get what you don’t ask for. And everyone is just trying to have their best and most happy path through life, trying to help others where they can, and there’s a good way to achieve that.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Alex, if folks want to just want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alex Grodnik
Yeah, I’d point them to the podcast WallStreetOasis.com. You’ll find the podcast there. And I’d love to hear any questions as well. You can email me alex@wallstreetoasis.com. Happy to help and anything that I can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d share to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alex Grodnik
Yup, I would say the rejection therapy, do it for 30 days. You’ll be amazed by what comes of it. Like I said in the beginning, it’s very, very, very difficult. And by the end, you will be walking up to strangers in bars, asking them for God knows what, but you’ll have the confidence and humility that you never thought you would have before.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Well, Alex, thank you so much for taking the time here. I wish you tons of luck with the podcast and your fundraising and your storytelling and future child-rearing and all you’re up to.

Alex Grodnik
Pete, thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.