Production forecasting is fundamental to every E&P’s decision-making, and these forecasts are usually bad. 

Forecasts are always wrong – that’s how predicting the future works – but the forecasts that are informing high-dollar investment decisions are unnecessarily and repeatedly low quality for completely preventable reasons. It’s not because of old software or bad engineers. It’s because of inadequate process, deficient communication, and bias.

Don’t just take my word for it…

https://www.onepetro.org/conference-paper/SPE-195914-MS

There are a lot of factors at play here but today, let’s talk about “risk.”

A scary story

In working with a mid-sized US-based independent E&P, I found six, yes six, places between the decline curve and the executive team where different types of what they called “risk” had an impact on the production forecast.

First, a couple decisions around factoring in “risk” grounded in legitimate technical motivation: 

• the reservoir engineer ignored downtime to keep the EUR the same
• the production engineer added operational risk (i.e. downtime) to make the near-term forecast more realistic

Then, the management adjustments started rolling in:

• A small bump up by the asset manager so that the annual number is the same as last time in an attempt to avoid meaningless variance analysis
• A 5% haircut by the asset VP because they missed last quarter by 2% and spent a month explaining why
• A smoothing exercise that makes each month an average of the previous 3 months by the corporate planner. No bumpy graphs allowed.

And finally… a “Strategic Financial Risk” of -3.35% was applied by the corporate planning manager.

I’m not saying that each person involved didn’t have an understandable reason for doing what they did, whether it was job security, not understanding the impact, or trying to avoid unnecessary questions. I am saying that the executive at the end of this line doesn’t have a chance in hell of understanding the information they are given, much less knowing if it’s a P10 or a P90. 

Then the actuals come in…

“Why did we miss?”

Answering that question accurately is impossible, but then dozens of people work for a whole month to come up with a (worthless) answer. The first two changes were made in the decline curve of individual wells themselves, then the next three were made at the asset level, then the last one was made at the corporate level, and none of this was explicitly documented. Good luck with your variance analysis…

It’s not just them

This was not an isolated situation – some version of this happens in almost every E&P that I’ve worked with. However, not every executive is blind to the factors going into their forecasts. Not every organization develops their quarterly guidance through this game of high-stakes telephone.

In some companies, it’s clear what goes into the forecast. People know that there is planned downtime at a processing facility that brings next month down by 10% (that’s not risk, by the way). There is a separate scenario used for midstream planning and negotiations. They’ll share the P70 with IR, use the P50 for budget, and use the P30 to fund the bonus pool.

The Drivers

This type of system is built on trust and ownership, then process and technology. Understanding weaknesses on each front can make the cause of our forecasting woes pretty obvious.

Trust

When a frontline manager sees the field level forecast, that number will be compared to what the boss will think of it. If they got punched in the head last time a forecast was shown below target, what do you think they’re going to do? They’ll defer that pain as long as possible by sweeping bad news under the rug, holding out hope that the team can figure something out to make it up. Meanwhile, the boss’s boss is making decisions thinking that number is the realizable, P50 forecast when in reality, it’s probably not going to happen and the people on the team all know it.

Ownership

Some would call this accountability or empowerment, but those have been bastardized to be nothing more than a term that executives and HR managers nod their heads at. Ownership is about letting people run their part of the business. That means that they are allowed to fail. Put on a leash so they don’t destroy the business (it should be longer than you think) but if they feel strongly about a decision that you don’t agree with and you overrule them, one of three things will happen. 

1. They quit. 

2. Worse, they will make decisions and won’t tell you. 

3. Even worse, they won’t care as much and will just follow the path of least resistance.

When organizations attract great talent but don’t know what to do with it, this is where things go.

Process

Do the asset teams complain about corporate changing their numbers? Do people talk about something, or someone, being a black box? Do people describe planning as a distraction from their real work? All are signs that the process is either non-existent or ill-defined. Everyone understanding their role as it supports the rest of the organization is the only way that the ship will go the right direction.

Technology

This industry has some of the most impressive technology in the world being used out in the field, but we’ve got a lot of ground to make up (about 20 years worth) with our data management and tools that we put to use in the office.

The hours spent deliberating about why February looks weird on the graph, or being mad at the person who didn’t know they shouldn’t change the unique well identifier, are lost forever. That’s stupid and we should not waste another second on it.

There has to be a good way for teams to access the data they need, to do their individual work, and then easily share it with others. When I say good here, I mean good. Integrations are seamless, important assumptions travel with the data, and (gasp) wells have the same names across systems.

The companies that do this…

The executives that build a culture of trust and ownership, supported by good process and technology, understand their business as it really is. They then use the right information for the right purpose. They have mutual respect with their people because they trust and understand each other.

These are the companies that have a competitive advantage because they make better decisions, faster.

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Turning vision into reality

(If you haven’t read the beginning of this story, The Build-Up, start here.)

The level of clarity that came from finding my purpose produced a strange feeling. It’s hard to describe, but it felt like a combination of comfort and fear.

Comfort in that I had a guiding light. A mission that I was on. Something that, if I work hard toward it, I could be happy with myself.

Fear of failure. Failure is not falling short of a target. Failure is not doing what we know we should. Backing down. Not trying.

 I’m obviously not going to transform work for everyone on Earth, so that’s not the fear.

I’m afraid of myself. Afraid of the weight of the purpose being too much. Afraid of giving up and taking an easier route toward some other half-assed version of success.

Now I don’t have any excuses. I can’t say I’m searching for what I want to do. I can’t say I’m looking for purpose. I know what I should be working toward. And now it’s up to me to do it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t start calling people quite yet…

“Hi, my name is Matt and I would like to help you enjoy your work.”

“Umm…okay? How does that work?”

“I don’t know.”

click

That’s where the rest of my personal planning process came in. I’ve built this up over the last 5 years, learning from Ray Dalio, David Allen, integrated planning for oil & gas, and many others. This process is a big part of what I teach in Lead Your Way, and it’s how I run projects, my business, my life.

Here’s what it looks like and what came of it.

The Process

Principles – How will you behave? Laws, lessons, and rules to live by. (You can see mine here.)

Purpose – why does the thing exist? (in this case, thing = me) What’s the point?

Vision – What does working toward or achieving the purpose look like? How does it feel?

Goals – What needs to happen in the next 1-3 years to make the vision happen?

Major Projects – What do you need to do to reach the goals you’ve set? (Tangible, 0-2 years)

Tasks – For each project, what’s the next thing to do? (The smaller the better, e.g. book a meeting, google how to write a business plan, call a person, etc…)

Habits – What habits will support responsibilities and/or projects? (e.g. want to write a book? write every day. want to be fit? exercise every day.)

Responsibilities – What must be done to keep everything else on track? (fitness, relationships, income, etc…)

I step through each of these items from the top down, tying them all together. I’ll share lots more detail on this another time. (This process is one of the things I help people do for themselves in Lead Your Way.)

The Plan

You can see my principles here. I’ve talked about the Purpose. Here are the vision and goals that I came up with.

The combination of my purpose, my vision for the life I want to lead, and my goals led me straight to the projects I ought to be working on.

I love consulting because I love helping people. Not just doing things for them, but making them more capable. More effective. Happier.

I hope that I keep doing consulting work until I die. The problem with consulting is that it is very time intensive. So I started thinking about how I could achieve the outcomes from my consulting work for more people, faster, better.

Luckily, there’s this thing called the internet. At the beginning of 2020, I decided that I was going to start using it, especially social media, in a productive way. Aiming to produce more than I consume. Leverage the power of it as opposed to just using it for memes and fantasy football research. One tool is Twitter. There, I came across a few people that seemed to have a very interesting business model. From writing to productivity to graphic design, they were helping thousands of people in meaningful ways. Mostly by themselves. One is just a guy and his wife, one has a couple partners, one has a small support team.

I’ve talked to a couple of them and they are truly good people that are trying to make the world a better place in their own way. Taking their expertise, experience, capabilities, and leveraging technology to maximize their impact. Ultimately the how is pretty simple, but not easy. They’re productizing themselves. I watched them for a few months and noticed that they all:

• Produce highly valuable content that will stand the test of time
• Build and deliver products that help people make positive change (courses, digital products, workshops, etc…)
• Create communities around their work

Ultimately, they’re investing their time into building assets. They’re not trading their time for money.

Having a big impact and enjoying life as a good family man seemed at odds. But once I saw this model, it seemed like it checked all the boxes. That led me pretty quickly to what projects I should be working on.

The Projects

Here’s where it started getting really exciting for me. Converting the high-level purpose all the way down the line to reality. The projects I initially came up with (the same day I figured out my purpose) were pretty vague and not very useful, but it wouldn’t take long for me to figure them out. Like I said, I love consulting and will do it in some form, hopefully forever.

But the lifestyle of a full-time consultant isn’t good for people that:

1. don’t like chasing people to sell projects
2. like spending time with their family
3.  want to do something that scales without hiring an army.

This model that I found would seem to work well, but with consulting work added in. So at the time, there were two primary projects.

Build a People-Centric Consulting Business
A fancy way of saying that I’ll be a decent human being and not one of the soulless, evil, management consultants that we all know and hate. Doing the best thing for both the human side and the financial side of the business. (This is where the “People + Profit” tagline that I used for a while came from.)

Create Online Education Programs
I just looked back at emails and I actually kicked off the beta cohort of Lead Your Way exactly 1 year after quitting Aucerna. Weird.

It was initially intended to be leadership training for new managers, but by the end of the beta, I realized that I had really packaged up everything that I had learned in the first 10 years of my career about how to be effective, kind, and happy at work. I’m so proud of how it turned out. From the quality of the content to the innovation in the design to the profound impact it had on people.

Along with writing and videos, I’ve added on the newsletter since then and have a couple other projects that I’m starting to kick the tires on. I know the conventional advice is to pick one thing and hyper-focus on it, but I’m comfortable having a few plates spinning as long as 3 things are true.

1. Each project is aligned with my purpose
Killing all the things that make work suck is a pretty broad scope, but this immediately eliminates any options that would purely be for personal gain. That’s a good feeling.

2. Each project supports the others
Check out this amazing image of Disney’s business model as designed in 1958, how every piece of their business supports and is supported by other pieces.

The quality of this image is astounding to me. Such high detail but it makes complete sense as you navigate it. This is how I want Pod2 to look. A collection of projects that are aligned by an overarching purpose and are made more successful through the existence of the others. Notice how it’s clear what the #1 priority is…

3. There is a clear priority.

“Know the difference between your steak and your side dishes.”

Consulting is my steak; the online courses are currently my potatoes. They’re number 1 and 2, for now. Working on the side-dishes comes after I’ve done my work on the first two. That’s why the newsletter is weekly-ish…

The End of the Beginning

That brings us to the end of my first year out on my own. To the end of this series. People seem to have enjoyed this so I’ll keep sharing stories as I go. But to wrap this up…

I’ll summarize those 12 months with one word.

Fun.

The sabbatical was the pleasurable vacation/family/golf type of fun, but since then it’s been the brand of fun that only comes at the intersection of fear and excitement. That place where you are simultaneously certain you’re going to change the world for the better, and also scared shitless that you’re completely wrong about everything.

The lows are low and the highs are high. I believe that the opposite of happiness is boredom, and there is absolutely no boredom anymore.

Reality will probably fall somewhere in between revolutionizing how organizations work and utter, embarrassing, failure. But if nothing else, I’m going to be learning.

If nothing else, it’s going to be fun.

And that’s how work is supposed to be.

How I found the purpose of my life’s work

(If you haven’t read the beginning of this story, The Build-Up, start here.)

I was going to call this part of the story WTF, but that only describes the smallest piece of what happened here. What really happened is that I found clarity. Direction.

I figured out the purpose of my life’s work.

This wasn’t luck. This wasn’t a DMT trip. This came from doing what I knew that I should. From being intentional.

My Daughter Made Me Weird(er)

Since my daughter was born late 2015, my whole perspective on life changed. As it does for many people, especially those who spend terrifying time in the NICU with their newborn, becoming a parent changed me. In lots of ways.

But one of the most impactful ways that I changed was that living with intention became extremely important to me. No longer was I up for whatever came my way. No longer did I want to follow inertia. No longer did I want to go along with what seemed ‘normal.’ I saw how fragile life could be, how easily it could end. I didn’t want to waste another damn second.

I found the term ‘intentionality’ shortly after my daughter was born, in Chris Bailey’s first book, The Productivity Project. I highly recommend it. Seriously, if you want it, email me and I’ll buy it for you. It’s that good, if you follow it.

Chris redefines productivity to be about accomplishing what we intend to, not just accomplishing more. This hit hard for me. Obviously, if you don’t know what you intend to accomplish, you’re just going to be swept away by whatever else might be influencing you. Inertia, bias, emotion, other people, social media, your deep-seated childhood problems, whatever. But you’ll almost never do what you actually want to do.

That’s how so many people look up after a 40-50 year career and wonder how the hell their life ended up like this.

So I decided to change. To live intentionally. In every aspect. I was never overly influenced by what others were doing or what they thought of me. (You could tell by the cars I’ve driven.) But it went to a new level after this.

There were the fun experiments like cutting out alcohol for 3 months, no caffeine for way too long, cold showers, going full vegan for over a year. But the more meaningful part was my personal planning process. It started simple, with The Big Three. At the beginning of every day, I would write down the three most important tasks for the day, then do them as soon as I could. Not necessarily all work things.

Here’s a good example, before Lead Your Way got it’s name…

I wouldn’t necessarily hit them every day. Things would come up and change priority. Some would stay on the list for several days in a row, but if nothing else, I started each day knowing precisely what I should be doing that day. It works amazingly well for the day-to-day. What about taking it further?

Professional Strategic Planning

Over the course of 2016-2017, I started expanding this. I’d have a Big Three for each week, month, and year. Again, things would change along the way but starting from a place of focus, starting with a thoughtful plan, helped me drive with much more conviction.

At the beginning of 2018, I started taking it further. Developing a 3 year vision linked to a 1 year plan to support that vision. It makes me cringe to read and share this, but here’s the plan I made for my career at that that time.

Then, for both roles I had at the time, I created a lengthier document with the goals and projects it would take to actually get there. (Too many people & company names in those to share…)

I was pretty happy with that process. Refined it over the years to include a brain dump at the beginning, overarching principles, and some other pieces. I used it after I quit my job in 2019, both to get the most out of my sabbatical and to start Pod2. It worked well to keep me focused on my goals, but it was still pretty tactical. Lacking depth.

Finding Purpose

I would come back to this process either when I was feeling disorganized and unfocused, or when I had a big decision to make. When COVID rattled everything in March of 2020, both of these were true.

I knew I needed something stronger. Something deeper. I didn’t just want another 0-3 year plan that would change when something else happened. I wanted to get clear on what I’m doing here in the first place. I wanted to find my purpose. Not just of my work. But of my life.

How the hell am I supposed to decide what’s most important this year if I’m not even clear on what I want out of my life?

Figuring out my purpose came down to answering two questions:
What would you do if you had all the time and money in the world?What would you do if you had 6 months to live?

Here’s what I scribbled down:

The answer to the first question indicates your aspirations, your dreams. The things that you would do if there were no constraints.

The answer to the second question shows you what you would regret not doing. On your death bed, if you didn’t do these things you would be disappointed in yourself.

Combining the two answers showed me the three things I should do.

First is family. Spend time with my family, experiencing new things with them, learning with them, growing with them.

Second is legacy. Take what I know, who I am, and turn that into something that might live on. After reflecting on this, it comes from two places.

One is for the people I know and love. If I were to die tomorrow, I would regret them not having more to remember me by. They wouldn’t have my stories, my experiences, my ideas, my lessons, me.

The other is for progress. If others can learn from my mistakes, take the things that I’ve figured out, learn them, then build further, faster – that is beneficial. I’m no Edison, but if what I’ve figured out over the years dies without anyone else taking advantage of my mistakes, my breakthroughs, my lessons, that’s simply wasteful.

Third is to help people enjoy their work. When asking myself the question of what I would do if I had all the time and money in the world, I wrote down that I would buy companies and make them not suck. That comes from my hatred for wasted potential. From fighting with a lazy teammate to being extremely hard on myself, I’ve always been allergic to wasted potential. Especially when it causes unnecessary suffering.

When I say ‘make companies not suck,’ that aims to kill everything from inefficiency to discrimination, anything that causes poor quality of life or poor balance sheets. I see so much potential for companies to do better, to be better, both for themselves and their people. Obviously I don’t have all the time and money in the world, but I could certainly chip away at this problem in other ways.

My Purpose

So there it was. I had my purpose. Clear as day in the 3 big areas of my life: family, self, and work.

Family: Learn and grow together through experiences and present time with each other.
Self: Leave a bit of me behind for my loved ones, my ideas and lessons for the world.
Work: Help people enjoy their work.

I can’t tell you how liberating it was to get this level of clarity. It’ll evolve over time, but so many decisions are already made for me now. If it contributes to my purpose, it’s a yes. If not, no. Simple.

At this point I figured out the real purpose of Pod2. While the “how” absolutely includes the consulting work that I initially focused on, the “why” goes much deeper. Much further. Much more meaningful.

Problem is…that’s not actionable. I would have to figure what that actually meant, what it would actually look like, what I needed to do that day to contribute to the purpose.

I’ll talk about that, learning how to use the internet, and my business model, in the final part of this series, The Deep End.

Starting a business and the genesis of Pod2

(If you haven’t read the beginning of this story, The Build-Up, click here.)

So that was it. Time to start a consulting business. How on Earth do you do that? I actually already had the book.

I just checked the order date on “The Consulting Bible” by Alan Weiss, and it was June 2, 2017. Over two years before I really needed it, but man am I glad I had it.

I’m usually reading 2-3 books at a time. Usually one for learning/self-improvement and one for pleasure. I read in bits and pieces. Rarely do I sit and finish books quickly unless I’m on vacation or on planes too much, so I usually carry them around for a month or two. I distinctly remember an anti-sober summer evening at an Irish pub in Calgary.

This was a session.

I was with my people, laughing, arguing, talking sh*t, venting about work, reminiscing, and talking about the future like people do after Guinness round 4. What if we started our own company? What would it be like? Especially in that state, I like to convert talk to action. So I got the book out and we started our employee handbook inside the back cover.

I’d like to say my handwriting was impaired, but that’s just how it looks…

Obviously, we had thought through none of this, but in it you can see two core beliefs:

• We must be aggressively intolerant to complacency. Especially in “F*ck okay” you can sense the anger and frustration with the status quo. With low quality. With limping into action instead of driving with conviction.
• We should enjoy work. Whether this means not taking things too seriously with Fireball Fridays, staying close in annual retreats, taking care of people with unlimited vacation and flexible work.

A few of these ‘commandments’ live on in Pod2’s list of principles here.

There aren’t many books that live up to their title, but “The Consulting Bible” does. Everything from incorporation to negotiation to proposal writing to managing scope. It’s not a comprehensive guide, but it gets you pretty close to what you need on every topic. If you can’t figure out the rest, then you probably shouldn’t be starting a business.

How Pod2 Got It’s Name

There was never another option besides calling it Pod2.

Pod2 actually started in 2013. When I joined Enersight that year, there were four of us that started within a month of each other. This almost doubled the number of people in the office. (You can see a picture of my chairless, deskless, work area here if you missed the first part of this story…)

At some point, we eventually bought enough desks and rearranged them so that everyone would have a somewhat reasonable place to sit. We printed off the model layout of the office (engineers…) and had people put their name where they wanted to sit.

Well, one guy was late to the party. He was one of the first hires, before my batch of four, and decided that he should get more of a say. So he marked out the names that were already there, put himself next to the boss, and put the other two earlier hires next to them.

The desks were L-shaped, so we put them in groups of four. Pods…

The four of us all got put together at a different pod of desks. And Pod2 was born. At first we just called it that to give the guy that rearranged things a hard time. But like all good inside jokes, it just became this idea that kind of stuck around.

When it was just Pod2 together, it was family. Lots of sh*t-talking, but never judgement. Like siblings. Too much honesty. Absolute transparency. Arguing, but never walking away. Helping each other, no matter what.

Eventually, we would create Pod2+ to expand the circle of trust. We even made one guy go through an initiation (email me or DM me on Twitter if you want to see the very weird and absolutely absurd agreement we drew up. Not posting that one here.)

No, we didn’t get matching tattoos or develop a gang sign. But it grew to mean something. None of us had the “right” degree or a “traditional” background. It grew to represent the underestimated. It grew to represent not giving a damn how things look on paper and letting results speak for themselves. More than anything, it grew to represent trust.

So, when I was registering my business with the Secretary of State and I got to the part of the form that asked for a name, I didn’t really have a choice.

A Big Win

Back to that discovery project I did. Based on the findings, the company decided to redesign their planning processes and implement a couple of software packages to support them. Since I knew the situation the best, it made sense for me to stay on as project manager. Plus, process design is an area where I’m both capable and interested.

So before I even had a website, I had my first client.

Never forget that people talk…

The buyer from that project recommended me to someone else that was looking at a broader process improvement across the company.

We had lunch to discuss the project and the client told me that they wanted to work with me. We had one more call, then I put together the proposal. I’d sold plenty of projects in my career, but this was the first one that was fully mine. No rules. No approvals. It could be whatever I wanted.

I took another look at chapter 7 in “The Consulting Bible” and proposed exactly what I thought was best. Being intentional with every term.

If you want to be treated like a partner by your customers, you have to act like one. This shitty vendor vs customer dynamic wastes so much time and energy. It’s driven by egos and/or a lack of trust. Especially when I’m a one-man shop, I don’t have time for that nonsense.

What does that actually look like?

• Fixed, value-based fees, not hourly.
  Billing by the hour pushes the client to be cheap and for me to work slow. Not good for anyone.
• Share the risk.
  50% paid up front. The rest at some point mid-project. Again, it’s in everyone’s best interest to get the project to success asap. If you’re worried about the consultant ghosting you after the last payment, you shouldn’t even be talking to them.
• Joint assumptions.
  I was clear about what I assumed was my job and what I assumed was the client’s job.

And it worked. Very little negotiation. We were on the same page, focused on the highest value work. Aligned in our motivations down to the T’s & C’s in the contract. Let’s go.

The Critical Error

On the evening that I sent the proposal, a Friday, I was finally ready to publish my site. I knew almost nothing about web development and went to YouTube university to figure this one out.

When I hit “Publish” on the site, I was pumped. I overworked it, overthought it, the way you do when you do something for the first time that will be public. It was pretty basic, not much more than a brochure, but hey…I made a website.

One problem though…when the site went live, I accidentally took down my email server…

Remember, I had just sent my first significant proposal from my first business. Over 6 figures on the line. The peak of anxious excitement. Then I wasn’t able to receive emails anymore.

I figured it out late that night, with some help from BlueHost support. I messed up the DNS settings because I hosted the site with a different service than I got the domain from.

I think this was my first real “entrepreneur” moment. Crushing a deal with a client and sending a 6-figure proposal that I “knew” would get accepted, then possibly botching the whole thing by f*cking up while I had my IT guy hat on. Only me to blame…but like I tell my 4yo daughter “when we fall, we learn.”

My Last Pre-COVID Meeting

I was off and running. Putting in good work on the projects I had, keeping in touch with the people I’ve enjoyed working with.

I had been trading messages with my oil & gas people in OKC for a couple months and finally decided to take a trip to see them. No agenda or project to try and sell. Just catching up. Coffees, lunches, etc…

This was the week of March 9, 2020. That Wednesday, I was at a sports bar having dinner with an old friend, gearing up to watch the Thunder/Jazz game on TV. We almost went to the game but we would’ve gotten there too late.

That was the game where they pulled people off the court before it started. That was when the NBA suspended the season. That’s when sh*t started getting real. We were just sitting there, watching, checking Twitter, seeing what’s going on. Unsettling.

That Thursday, I met a fellow Matt for lunch at a burger joint. Great to catch up but nothing exciting. Thinking back to that time is weird. Crowded spaces. No mask. No hand sanitizer. No social distancing. No aiming your breath away from people.

Handshakes.

Smiles.

But there’s no such thing as normal. Nothing is permanent. Sometimes things just change a little more abruptly.

So we adapt.

Next in the series will be WTF?!? – how I went from shock to clarity as COVID hit my brand new business.

I quit without a plan. Now what?

(If you haven’t read the beginning of this story, The Build-Up, click here.)

So I did it. I quit. For the first time in over 8 years, I didn’t have a Monday meeting on my calendar.

Since I’d joined enersight 6 years earlier, I had my head down, totally focused on helping the company grow, doing a good job. I had a few clients approach me over the years but I never even entertained the idea. I hadn’t really looked around.

I had no clue what was out there.

So I made the decision to not make a decision. The only constraint I put on the search for what to do next was that I wouldn’t decide anything before September. I needed time. So I had two months, guaranteed, that I could do whatever I wanted. Well, my kids were 3 years and 8 months old and I love being married, so this wasn’t going to be a euro-trip vision quest kind of summer, but I had 40-50 extra hours per week. I knew this was a pretty rare opportunity, so I needed a plan.

The Plan

On the personal side, this was going to be epic. I was going to do all the things I hadn’t done because I didn’t have time. I was going to become a scratch golfer. Complete a 100 mile bike ride. Get famous on Twitch. Write a book. Lose 10 pounds and get the deadlift up to 400.

Nope. That’s not how it works. Especially not when you have a family you love spending time with. Basically nothing went according to plan, and I’m perfectly okay with that.

I did end up playing golf every week and got to where I was consistently in the low 80’s for a bit. Golf is such a fascinating game. There’s not much else that snaps me into the present moment so well, aggressively tests my mental strength, but also relaxes me.

Plus I was able to capture this disturbing, but overly natural moment:

“How am I supposed to CHIP with that going on, Doug?”

My meditation practice was strong and I revived my love for reading. The whole family got into a good routine with exercise, and while I didn’t ride 100 miles or lift a house, I was balanced.

But the best part of the summer was the family time. My wife was still staying at home with the kids at the time. (I almost wrote “she wasn’t working at the time” but anyone who pays attention knows that stay-at-home parents work way harder than the rest of us.)

One of the hardest parts of having high aspirations is the guilt. I want to be the best husband in the world. I want to be the best dad. I want to achieve a hell of a lot through my work. So when I’m neglecting work for family time, or especially if I’m spending too much time at work. I feel guilty for what I’m not doing. This was the worst part of that period when I had three different management positions at the same time. Obviously I didn’t like not being able to crush the goals for all three jobs, but it really hurt me that I wasn’t able to do what the people that worked for me, and the customers, deserved.

After years of working long hours and travelling way too much for some stretches, this period of being able to just hang out was unbelievable. No guilt that I was neglecting work. No guilt from missing dinner. No guilt from having to call my wife (again) and tell her that I have to leave town. No guilt from having to choose which “critical” work would just have to go undone.

Spending a minimum 8 hours per day with my family was life-changing. Anyone that knows what babies and toddlers are like knows that time was not relaxing, but I loved it. Deepening the most important relationships in life. Strengthening our family unit. Spending weeks visiting extended family. Just pure, soul-enriching stuff.

So I didn’t spend the whole summer on golf and exercise and writing and games, though I did a fair amount of that. I spent it husbanding and dadding, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I also had a pretty epic birthday party…

On the professional side, I decided the best thing to do was to look around. With this new openness to possibility, I reconnected with people that I enjoyed working with or thought I might. (Trying to work with workfriends) I cold emailed some dream companies, applied for a few roles, talked about every startup idea that I heard. I also had that consulting project, the discovery project to finish up, but that wasn’t going to be much work. Or so I thought…

Over the course of the summer, there were 3 jobs that almost came together, one of which would lead to me starting my company.

The safe option
Senior Customer Success Manager, for a B2B SaaS company
This company was a little bigger, would’ve been amazing to work for, and would’ve firmly put me in the middle of the tech industry. This company provides a customer success software to the biggest names in tech and I would’ve been managing some of those customers. If there’s one skill I’m sure of, I do a great f*cking job at taking care of customers.

This one felt comfortable and familiar. A bit of a step-out but I was sure I could do a great job. Very attractive from a stress-level perspective but when the hiring manager called to tell me it was between me and one other candidate, I told him to choose the other person.

It just felt too safe. It didn’t scare me at all. Knowing my nature, there was a real chance that I would be bored within 6 months and we’d all be regretting it. I leaned hard on one of my favorite principles on decision-making here: “If it’s not a f*ck yes, then it’s a no.”

The fun option
There’s a group of guys that I got introduced to through a previous boss. Successful company looking to expand their footprint in the US. The founders were impressive, interesting space, customers that loved them, but the biggest draw for me was that I just had so much fun every time we met. Not just jokes and talking shit about our mutual friends over drinks (I learned what grappa is. It’s good…), but real meaningful conversation about why we do what we do and clear alignment of values regarding how to do business.

A few problems though. We were far apart regarding money, at least our starting points were pretty different. I wasn’t too driven by money at this point but that slowed momentum. Also, unfortunately we met in the middle of my “no decisions allowed” window. This caused a delay, then one of them had an extended vacation, and somewhere in the middle of that, they found the right person. He’s awesome and perfect for the job. The role would’ve been much more purely business development/sales, at least in the early days. While I would’ve learned a lot and (probably) figured it out, the guy they brought in is a real pro. Best guy for the job.

The exciting option
I was most excited about this one. Super small, boutique consulting shop that had a foothold in a fast growing niche in tech that I cared a lot about. There were several things that the founder said about starting the company and his vision that resonated with me to the core. I had a lot of respect for him and it would be exciting to join them as they were on the cusp of a big inflection point.

I’m not sure how close he was to wanting me to join, but in one of our last calls he said something that was critical in my decision to start my own company. He said “we’ve reached the point where it doesn’t make sense for [co-founder] and I to spend time on anything but the highest value work, so we need to bring someone on to manage a lot of the day-to-day.”

As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to start my own company. He was in the position I wanted to be in, and it wasn’t that far away. I want to focus on nothing but the highest value work. Thinking about the story of how he had started the business, his mindset, his thought process, I came to the conclusion that I could get where he was. It was doable.

So I started to do it.

In October 2019, I had lunch with one of my best friends, a previous boss actually. I told him my idea for a consulting business. One that would focus on all of the real problems that had surrounded the software implementations that we’d been doing for years. The things that we didn’t have the time, or trust, to solve for most customers. People problems. Change management. Change leadership. Real process design, agnostic of the tools.

I explained all of this to him over wings and beer and he said “yeah you have to do that.” Not in a commanding way, but in a way that conveyed that it was obviously the right decision. I understood the problem, there was a big need for it, and (clearly) I had a passion for solving it.

Plus, I already had my first client…

Next in the series will be The Shallow End, I’ll talk about starting a consulting business, how Pod2 got it’s name, negotiating like you don’t care, and my last meeting before COVID.

Quitting my job without a plan

(If you haven’t read Part 1 – The Build-Up, click here.)

So I had made the decision to leave. There was a gap between the time that I made the decision and the time that I actually quit for a couple of reasons. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little harder to stay motivated during that time, but my “why” hadn’t changed. I’d stayed as long as I did because of the people. I cared deeply for many of my coworkers and mentors, and I absolutely loved the people that had worked for me. Plus if you’re going to spend time on something, anything, might as well take it as far as you can.

There were a couple of things that made it harder to leave. There were a couple that made it easier. But honestly, it was pretty uneventful. Aside from the “where we going?” message I got from someone when they heard I had given my notice.

So for this part of the story, I want to focus on the biggest lessons I learned while I was there.

Lesson 1: Aim to make yourself replaceable.

From early on in my career, I told myself that I would never be the type of person that tries to hang on to my position, to consolidate power, to prioritize self-preservation over what’s best for the business.

This served me well.

Since a year after I became a manager, I was constantly trying to develop someone to replace me. Maybe it was in one of the books I read early on, but it just made sense to me.

When you focus on making yourself replaceable:

• you accomplish more because you empower instead of delegate
• the people the work for you go further, faster
• you stop associating your self-worth with your position
• you set your sights higher, on what you need to learn for the next role.

I’ll give this approach a lot of credit for the following.

This image represents the people that worked for me. Of about 40 employees over this time:

• 5 have started or are starting their own companies
• 10 are now in management
• 2 quit, and it was the right move for both of them
• I’m still in contact with most of them.

Obviously I’m not taking credit for what these people are doing. But they say you should judge a leader by the accomplishments of their people. However I’m judged, I’m damn proud of this.

Lesson 2: Don’t worry about getting fired.

Obviously, this is not an endorsement to be a ***k. Some people go way too far. But much more common, we overestimate the risk of speaking up. Being bold. Asking for what you want. Bringing up problems, especially if it’s something your boss is doing.

Overall, this is about prioritizing what you think is right over self-preservation. This is about prioritizing truth over loyalty.

Pick the organizational disaster of your choice. From Enron to the Houston Astros to the Minnesota Police Department. Somewhere along the way, many times along the way, people made the decision to be loyal to bosses, colleagues, peers instead of telling the truth. It doesn’t end well.

This is about being able to live with yourself. Not having regrets. Knowing that you did what you knew in your heart was right.

When you do this:

• you focus on what’s important because you prioritize impact over perception
• you build better relationships with peers because you prioritize accomplishment over competition
• you stop bad things from happening.

If it wasn’t for this, I probably wouldn’t have gotten that first management position.

Lesson 3: Say yes to fun work.

When faced with the decision whether to do something, fun should override most other factors. Especially at work. Taking on the job of running Latin America was so much fun. That crazy night celebrating some futbol match (that apparently mattered a lot) with the locals at the Obelisco in Buenos Aires.

Not sure if that was rain or beer on us…probably both.

Spending (not enough) time in Bogota working with and building the team there was amazing. They’ll always feel like family to me.

After I became a manager, when the chance came up I would take on a consulting project. Partially to keep my technical skills from slipping too far, but honestly I just love consulting. Working with people to help them solve problems. There was one project that probably should’ve taken two months, but for lots of reasons, the client wanted it done in one week. So I took that one on. One full week locked in a conference room with a rotating group of six people client-side, to complete a project, end-to-end, that should’ve been two months. And they made it very clear they weren’t going to pay a penny more than 40 hours worth.

There was some problem that I was trying to figure out. Some formula or something. So I sat back in my chair for a second, searching my brain and the room for the answer. No sooner than my first blink “are you waiting on something from us? do you need something? what can I do?” Yadda yadda, we pulled it off. That was 5 years ago. We haven’t really kept in touch. But just last week a friend was talking to that same client and they brought up my name, that project.

When I quit, I gave about a month’s notice. Aside from documenting the projects I had in flight, it didn’t make a ton of sense for me to keep pushing on other work if I wasn’t going to continue it. So I had some spare time and I asked if there were any interesting consulting projects that I could help with. There was. It was a discovery, my favorite. There’s just something about digging into a problem to uncover the root of it that I love. Especially complex problems that, on the surface, look simple. But almost always the root cause lies within the people and the culture. Figuring that out and solving it is just so damn fun.

We’ll talk a little more about that project through the series because it didn’t wrap up before I left the company. Plus it had a lot to do with where I am now…

But anytime I had a decision about what to do, and went with the most fun option. I never regretted it.

Lesson 4: Everything is temporary.

In 6 years at one company, I had 6 different jobs. Several of them overlapping. At one point, I had 3 at the same time. Don’t do that…

A good friend asked me which was my favorite and I honestly couldn’t answer. I learned so much at every step and miss something about every position. There’s also things that I hated about every position. No matter the job, some part of it kinda sucks. Just can’t let that ratio go too far the wrong way.

Looking back, I certainly stressed and worried much more than I needed to. It came from a desire to do a great job, but until recently, I didn’t have the ability to be at peace with the gap between how things were and how I want them to be.

This is all about acceptance, clarity, and awareness.
Acceptance of how the current situation is.
Clarity into how you want it to be different.
Awareness that every current situation is just that, current. It will change.

With this, we can get a little more comfortable with that gap.

Acceptance was the part that I lacked. I was pissed off at the difference between how things were and how I thought they should be. That caused both good and bad things. That helped me work really hard to make them better. But it also kept me from appreciating the good things along the way.

I was too focused on closing that gap. With a little more acceptance, I would have been happier and probably accomplished just as much if not more. I would’ve recognized that everything is constantly changing and won’t last. When we do that, we persist through the bad a little easier and appreciate the good even more.

It’s hard to put a value on an increase in overall happiness level for 6 years, but it’s high. And recognizing the impermanence of every situation would’ve made that difference.

Now what?

Boiling down my time there to 4 lessons doesn’t do it justice. I’m a completely different person than when I started, certainly for the better. I’m infinitely grateful for the people I got to work with, many of which are my best friends now.

My time there had come to a close and I had no idea what I was going to do next. But I knew one thing. I was going to take a damn break.

Next up in the series, The Summer of Matt.

The events that led me to quit my job without a plan

There are a lot of reasons that people leave jobs. Fit, pay, bosses, fatigue, boredom, grass looking greener, frustration, opportunity. Some combination of these things eventually strengthen to a point where the time comes to leave.

Three things happened that pushed me over the edge. But first let’s talk about what it’s like to join a start up.

Rough Start

I joined the company in 2013, somewhere around employee number 20. I’ll never forget my first day. I show up at 7:45am like most eager beavers would. Drive into the apartment complex that inexplicably has an office building at it’s center. Walk past the questionable daycare on the first floor. Climb the stairs and feel my way down the dark hallway to eventually find the right door. It’s locked. Not wanting to look like a simp, I pace the hallway to make it look like I’m just walking up behind whoever will show up.

No one shows up.

Until 8:30. It felt like years. That’s when I met Josh at the door. He started a week earlier but at least he had a key. We go inside. Beer bottles on most desks. A mostly empty bottle of tequila sitting simultaneously next to the printer and the sink.

What the f**k did I get myself into?

I had left a “good job” at Chesapeake Energy (RIP), at the time one of the best places to work in the US. We abandoned the house we just bought in OKC and moved 7 hours from anyone we know to Houston. And this was my desk?

Obviously things improved from there. By the time we passed $10 million per year in software revenue, I had my own desk. (But I did have to pick it up from IKEA and build it myself.)

We worked our asses off and had a lot of fun doing it. I met the group of people that I want to work with forever during that time. Mud runs, late nights, doing the right thing, trying new stuff, huge contracts, customers that loved us, that trip to Cancun….

Unforgettable.

Things Change

Fast forward a few years. We were acquired and then did more acquiring, eventually having 7 companies in the fold. Through a combination of luck, timing, and skill I was moving up the ranks. I did good work, but it just as easily could’ve been someone else in my spot. I was fortunate.

I was a manager at 26, a VP at 28, and my responsibilities were only growing. I grew from leading an 8 person consulting team in Houston to leading ~20 people across 3 teams, from Calgary to Bogota, plus I was put in charge of building a new global department (Customer Success) from scratch. I was in the succession planning conversation, being mentored by the CEO.

On paper, everything looked great. I should’ve been happy.

I wasn’t.

There were the typical frustrations that come with working in a fast-growing tech company. The problems are similar to those in any company, but faster, more violent, and harder to solve because you’re running so fast. But those things aren’t that big a deal. The small stuff is tolerable if you have the real factors of job satisfaction right. I doubt things were too different there from other companies. The overall conditions were fine.

But…

I’ve always had the itch to start my own company. I always hated inflexible schedules, even back to high school. My attendance senior year was near the minimum amount to graduate. (Pretty sure I still got all A’s though, just saying…) I always had a low tolerance for “corporate” stuff, bad meetings, political posturing, the brand of company speak that never actually says anything, “messaging”.

I always had the, maybe naive, belief that I could run a successful company that avoided this stuff. So I had a feeling that, at some point, I would take off to try to start something. I just didn’t know what or when. All of this was an undercurrent as my time there was becoming more and more unbearable. My unhappiness was less about the work or company changing, and more about me changing.

No More Excuses

Here are the three things that decided the “when.” The “what” would come later.

I learned that entrepreneurs aren’t that special.

In my last year there, I met a founder/CEO that started his company straight out of college and had grown it to $5 million ARR over the last 5 years.

So he’s never had a boss. He’s having fun, calling the shots, doing his own thing at work. The niche is unbelievably small but he’s just getting after it and doing a great job.

This is going to sound bad, and I didn’t know him that well, but from our interactions I was remarkably unimpressed. During an hour long conversation, he asked me the same question 3 times. Not in the strategic way that one might do this to see if someone is being honest. But I think he simply forgot. He had us change rooms and complained to the building management because there was a dead bug in the corner of the room…

Not my kindest moment, but at the time I thought “If this guy can do it, surely I can.”

I proved that I was employable.

Since I wasn’t happy, I put some feelers out. Applied to a couple of jobs, went through a couple interviews, and thankfully got a couple of offers. The positions weren’t amazing, but I could see myself taking them if I needed a job.

I wasn’t excited enough to take them at the time because, as I would eventually learn, I didn’t want another job. But it showed me that if things didn’t work out, the likelihood of me being unemployed (while never zero) wasn’t too high.

I got some money

I have two kids. My wife didn’t work so I was our only source of income. When the company sold to a different set of investors, I had some options that vested. To steal a term from one of the best people I know, I didn’t have ‘fuck you money’ but I had ‘I’d really rather not money.’

That bought me time. It bought me at least a year to figure something out.

That was the last piece of the puzzle. It eliminated my last excuse. 

Looking back, that’s all these were. Excuses. We already had 6 months in savings. I had gotten other job offers. I knew a dozen successful founders and none of them were superhuman.

I thought that I needed more. More confidence. More safety. More money. But those were just lies that I told myself to avoid doing what I knew that I should. Because it was uncomfortable. It was just The Resistance talking.

But without question, at that point I had the belief, a reasonable safety net, and some cash (time) to figure it out.

At that point, I couldn’t not quit.

This is part 1 of “On My Own: how I went from working a job to leading my life.”

Next in the series is The Jump.