VANNOY:

Hi everyone. Mike Vannoy, vice President of Marketing at Asure. And today we’re gonna talk about recruiting, hiring, and bus business decision making with a really, really cool guest. Most of you have heard the term FOMO, fear of missing Out. Well, there’s actually a guy who came up with an in invented that term. His, his name is Patrick McGinnis. He’s wrote a couple books on the topic and has, has a, a podcast on the topic. We’ll, we’ll unpack a little bit more of that as we go but Patrick McGinnis inventor of the Term FOMO author of the book, 10% Entrepreneur Live Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job. Thanks for joining me today, Patrick.

MCGINNIS:

Hey, thanks a lot for having me.

VANNOY:

Okay, so, so let’s jump in. I, I, I think a lot of people have heard the, the word fo FOMO, fear of missing out. A lot of people have not heard the term FOMO look. Can, can you just let, let’s start out with some definitions. What are, what does FOMO and FOMO even mean?

MCGINNIS:

Sure. So fear of missing out FOMO is defined as an anxiety that is caused by the perception, often fueled by social media, that there’s something better out there than what you’re doing right now, combined with a a, a worry or concern about being left out of a positive group experience. So, if you think about that, it’s like, part of it is the i, what I call aspirational FOMO. It’s the idea that there’s something great, that bright shiny object, and you want it, and everybody else is running after it. And then at the same time, what’s, what I call herd FOMO, the idea that everybody is over here and you don’t wanna be left out. Okay? So it’s, those are the two elements we get to FOMO fear of a better option that is an anxiety caused by the idea that, you know, when you’re trying to make a decision about, you know, choose a thing, choose from many options or, or a set of options that there’s an option still unexplored out there. And so if you keep searching, you’ll find something better combined with a belief that the longer you wait, the better a decision you’ll make because you’ll have more data and you’ll have a riskless decision. So it’s really about the combination of maximization and trying to optimize and believing that there’s true value and option value that’s sort of like having more time and more options is better, which is not necessarily true at all. So that’s, that’s the difference between the two.

VANNOY:

All right. So, so Patrick, you and I had, we’re we’re chatting before, before the show here. And I’m telling you a story of how I’m having this FOMO centric conversation with my son, right? I, I think, I think a lot of us probably naturally associate these terms with our personal lives. Maybe maybe a social media centric even you even mentioned that aspect to, to, to life and, and all the stimulus, all the options that never existed before. I don’t think many people I I wouldn’t say preparing for today, today’s conversation, I didn’t necessarily associate this with business in business decision making and how that translates in, in, in, into hiring, in, in, in developing people speak into that, how th this is not just some social media young kid concept we’re talking about here,

MCGINNIS:

Of course. And the reality is FOMO is a trendy word. I mean, it’s 20 years old. I invented it in 2003, right? 2002, three. And and it does have this sort of meme value, right? Like, it’s like NFTs, FOMO, all that sort of stuff. Great. The reality is that businesses are comprised of human beings, and human beings feel these, these feelings and these feelings go back to the dawn of time. These are part of the human experience. And the reality is that they are very much invol in the business world. So I’ll give you a couple of examples just in, in general that we can talk specifically about, you know, hiring and, and those areas. But think about every investment bubble that has ever happened. It’s really built on FOMO, right? Think about I have this example in my book, the, the story of, of Audi trying to get into the business of electric vehicles. It took them 10 years because of Bobo. They could never sort of settle on one path. There was always a brighter, shinier object they were trying to optimize for. And so we see that any time that a business is doing things that are inauthentic and trying to copy its competitors, then it’s experiencing FOMO. Anytime a business is so mired in analysis paralysis and it can’t get out of its own way, and therefore its competitors start to overtake it and experiencing fabo. And so those two forces are constant in the business world.

VANNOY:

And, and, and, and let’s take it a layer deeper specific to, to, to people in hiring. Cause I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m seeing how this plays out on both sides of the equation. There’s the employer side. I need to recruit and find and, and onboard and develop and retain talent in a world where the, the war for talent has finally hit Main Street, right? This is no longer a Fortune 500 intellectual exercise, attending McKenzie conferences. This is, you know, restaurants and retailers on Main Street, can’t get enough people to, to fill the jobs, right? So there’s the employer side, and then there’s the employee side. I think about great resignation in, in the, the unbelievable sea change we’re in right now. People reevaluating, what do I wanna do with my life? Am I really happy with my current job? I got a taste of virtual during, during the pandemic. Do I really wanna return to an office? Can can you speak into tho both those sides?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I did a course for LinkedIn called Navigating FOMO in the Workplace, because in this moment, you’re absolutely right, like Gray Resignation, there’s a l that’s really a FOMO thing. I mean, the, and, and when I talk about FOMO, FOMO is not necessarily a bad thing. FOMO could be great because FOMO is a powerful motivator. And so if you were in a job you hate and you watch your friends or people you know who are making moves, and you say like, oh, I’d love to do that too, that’s FOMO. But you can channel that in a positive direction, you know, if you do it the right way. But I, I think that’s, you know, when we see FOMO and FOMO, like think start for first from the employee side, we are all on LinkedIn. And I’ll tell you, LinkedIn for me is like a FOMO factory.

I see all those updates about X, Y, z person starting a new job. And I’m like, well, I didn’t start a new job. Like, maybe I’m stagnated, right? So it’s crazy. And then at the same time, the FOMO happens when we think about, well, okay, do I wanna change jobs or do I wanna interview for jobs or apply for jobs? Well, I have to apply to a gazillion jobs because I wanna make sure that I have as many options as possible. That is, you know, a strategy that sounds great on paper, but actually it can be extraordinarily destabilizing for the candidate, right? So that’s on the employee side. On the employee side, you know, I think it’s very interesting right now, the great re sorry, the great resignation is going to seed way to unfortunately depending on where you sit, I think that we’re gonna see a massive shift in leverage back to the hiring side.

And if you look what there has been comments by, you know, there’s layoffs happening there was a, a, a recent conversation that, that Mark Zuckerberg had with his company at Meta saying, like, you know, people were asking about working for home and vacations. And he was like, listen, guys, we’re about to go into a recession. Some of you shouldn’t even be here. And frankly, like, we’re gonna weed you out. So that is gonna change the conversation. Businesses have spent the last, you know, decade plus with the FOMO. We gotta hire, we gotta build, we gotta go after this person. We’ve gotta be faster. Now they’re gonna have to contract, and they’re gonna have to be more conservative, most likely. I mean, we’ll, can’t read the future, but, but we’re starting to see that conversation change. And so the, the challenge for businesses now will be, okay, how do we prepare for recession? How do we make the smart moves now to make sure that our workforce is like lean and agile? And that’s where the fabo happens, because making hard decisions is not comfortable. And people like to push them off, let’s just wait for a little more data. Let’s do this, let’s do that. Yeah. I don’t wanna make that hard decision that is not being decisive, that is having Bobo.

VANNOY:

Yeah, it, it, and Patrick, I, I mean, great segue. Think about recession. So there’s, you know, def varying levels of confidence in the degrees of depth of recession that may happen, right? This will be kind of, and, and probably more in your world, probably omitted in your introduction, Harvard business grad venture capitalist, more than a FOMO author in, in, in, in podcaster. Smart guy knows the business finance world. But as, as, as we obviously have a world of inflation, usually recessions are accompanied by high unemployment, right? And now there’s what, 11 more million, 11 million more job openings than there are job seekers, because participation rates are still a million less than they were pre pandemic. Yeah. in gdp, while the rate of growth is decreasing, it’s still growing, the economy is growing, the population still is growing. So we got this weird thing going on where I see a lot of businesses, I think, sitting on their hands waiting to make decisions. Is the recession gonna happen or is it not gonna happen? If so, how big? And then I’ll, then I’ll wait for that to react. But in a, in a world where you businesses are struggling to even get the people they need to fulfill the jobs, now this is the time to actually make hard decisions, right?

MCGINNIS:

It is. And you know what’s interesting? So think about this. The last time that we had a, you know, a real recession as it were was 2008 and oh nine. So that is 14 years ago. Yeah. And then the last time, but that was only in sort of, well, not only, but that really affected the financial sector. And sort of like some consumer areas. Technology really didn’t slow down. Like you think about 8 0 9, that was the Facebook I p o, like Silicon Valley was booming the last time we saw a real correction in tech was 20 years ago. So anybody, this is the, the part that kind of blows my mind. Anybody who’s under the age of 40 has never seen this. And I don’t mean that to dismiss, like, that’s not like saying like, oh, millennials don’t know things. Of course they do. What I’m saying here is that like, people just don’t have the experience.

And I started my career in like, in 2090 8, 99, 2000, I had to like lay off all these bunch of people at the companies I invested in. I made these very difficult decisions. And now I look back and I’m kind of ready, I’m like, oh, I’ve done this before. I have built the muscle memory. It’s a bit like I’m outta training, but I know what it feels like. And so what I would encourage people to do is, you know, seek out folks who’ve been through these kinds of experiences because really what, what what I’ve seen is the businesses that are built to last are the ones that anticipate the challenges. And you’re seeing this now, like, smart companies are taking preemptive action, and they are saying, you know, like, listen, we see where things are going. Let’s get ready. Let’s be ready for whatever happens. And if it doesn’t happen, great, but if it does happen, we’ve already taken steps to make sure that we’re gonna survive this thing.

VANNOY:

Yeah. So we, we’ll probably come back to this, cuz I think this falls in these things kind of fall into the hard decisions category, right? Yeah. But what probably is the biggest waste of time for organization is the amount of cycles wasted on small decisions, right? So take, take us through that. How, how do, how do people and therefore organizations, which are just groups of people, make the, what you would call the low stakes decisions faster?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah. And, you know, so the way I think about decision making, and I did a TED video on this called How to Make Bastard Decisions. So if you’re interested in this topic, just go to Ted. It’s there, it’s very quick. It’s like six minutes. But it’s very, I was gonna say

VANNOY:

It’s, I I highly recommend it’s, it’s a smart six minutes for anybody to spend.

MCGINNIS:

Yeah. It’s like, it’s gonna be on my tombstone cuz it came out so great. I was happy. So there are really three types of decisions that we make. High stakes decisions, low stakes decisions, and no stakes decisions. High stakes decisions, as you alluded to earlier, are the, you know, those things like how do we retool our workforce for a recession? Like, that’s high stakes. It’s hard. It takes time. You gotta do some homework. Great low stakes decisions are, you know, it’s that decision that is important. There needs to be some thought, but you’re not gonna remember making that decision in a month. Okay? So it’s the kind of thing like, what kind of printer should we buy? Where should we have the offsite? What color should the presentation be? You know, th those kinds of things among the 53 logos that are, you know, designed for and gave us, like, we’ve got three we like, which do we pick?

And then finally, no steaks decisions are things you won’t remember in a day. And that’s like literally, am I having the chicken or am I having the fish? So, believe it or not, you know, we make decisions every day. Low stakes, no steaks, very successfully. It’s like, think about how many decisions you’re making when you just to get from the bed to the door. You’re probably making like 450 decisions I’ve never counted. But there’s a lot happening, right? We make thousands of decisions a day reflexively. But we, we get to some things where we get stuck. And that’s the moment where, as you said, we waste a lot of time and energy. And this is what’s, you know, this is the, you know, the FAO really. It’s like, okay, we are deciding on what hotel we’re gonna stay at on our business trip. Like that shouldn’t be very complicated.

People spend a ton of time. Why? Because we live in a world of overwhelming choice. You go onto the hotel website, there’s like 93 hotels on a, you know, that you can choose from. It’s overwhelming. Spend time on it. And by the way, like what happens is people tend to spend time on these things because it’s a great way to procrastinate. I don’t wanna deal with the recession today. Let me deal with whether we stay at the Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons, or the Marriott or whatever it is. Hopefully you’re staying at the Ritz, but probably you’re staying at the Marriott. Now. How do we deal with that on the low stakes decisions? First of all, the no stakes decisions, those things that don’t matter. I literally flip a coin. I or I, I look at my watch, see where the hand is on one half or the other, and I decide I do this every day, multiple times a day. And it has saved me for 20 years from wasting time on things that don’t matter.

VANNOY:

Give gimme an example of something. You literally flip a coin cuz that’s like, oh yeah, that’s a little mind blowing to me.

MCGINNIS:

This is like, oh, gonna change all your lives right now. Cuz it’s like, should I go for a run? Like, I’m kind of tired, but I think maybe I should, I don’t know what to do. I I used to ag I’d be like, 20 minutes, should I go for a run? Now? I say, okay, if it’s even I go for a run. If it’s odd, I don’t go for a run. I look at the time on my phone decision made. Should I stay and have another glass of wine? Should I watch this show before I go to bed? Or just go to bed now? Like, I don’t know. But I just asked the universe, the universe, and by the way, I’ve never gone against the watch, am I? This has been 20 years, multiple times a day, thousands of decisions. I’m still here alive and healthy. So clearly the watch knows more than I do

VANNOY:

<Laugh>.

MCGINNIS:

So that’s, that’s the knows.

VANNOY:

And because we use it for low stakes decisions, it’s not a matter whether the right, the watch or the universe is right or wrong, it’s just the speed. It lets you make the decision and therefore what time do you have?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, if you knew the answer, if one thing was so obviously better than the other, you just decide. Right? The other thing about, so that’s the no stakes, by the way, the low stakes I outsourced to people. So let me give you an example of that one. I bought a new tc, my TV over there, bought that tv, go on Amazon, try to buy a tv, there’s like 90,000 TVs out there. I didn’t know what to do. So I just called a friend of mine who knows about TVs. I said, I’m looking for these five things. He recommended a TV and I bought it. I do that all the time, you know. And so what happens is, if he had said to me, Patrick, get this tv and I didn’t, then I would know, okay, like, I need to do more work. The reality is that like he, there are so many people in our lives that have expertise that can make recommendations to us. So every time I buy something, if I don’t know what to do, I go to the Wirecutter website in New York Times, look at the one that they recommend and just buy it. Because frankly, like, I don’t wanna spend the time researching. And if I really cared that much, I would wanna spend the time. So it’s really about forcing ourselves into decision points for the things that we just can’t do ourselves.

VANNOY:

Yeah. Anything else you wanna talk about? How to, how to make low the no stakes and low stakes decisions Before we kinda move into, I think some of the, some of the real meat here of these high stakes decisions,

MCGINNIS:

All I would say is this. People when they hear about this, they either think it’s amazing and start doing it, or they’re like, oh, I, you know, they feel a little threatened and I, you know, I’m with you, I get it. This is something, it’s a skill that you build. The more you do it, the more you start to realize how much happier and productive, more productive it makes you. And so, like, I have become the guy who makes I outsource all decision making and frankly, it has really allowed me to be more in the areas that I need to focus my time and energy.

VANNOY:

Okay. Let, let’s spend a little more time on, on the outsourcing part. This is this, the purpose of this show is to add values to entrepreneurs and employers, give them the best information they can to stay compliant from an HR perspec tax and HR perspective, but then also grow their businesses. What, what are, what are the things that you see as opportunities for people to outsource that they, that they probably doesn’t even cross their mind?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, like, I obviously wouldn’t outsource compliance like that kind of stuff. Like where you, if it’s a core function and it’s critical to your business and it is what I, you know, it’s a high stakes decision. You really need to, you cannot, you can delegate of course and review, but you can’t sort of just like wash your hands of that, that would be completely inappropriate, right? But it comes down to, as you make the, and I just want everybody to like be aware, as you go through your business day in the next weeks and months, when you get to these, you’re sitting around the table with your team and you’re trying to make a decision and you’re stuck, I want you to, in that moment, ask yourself, will I remember this conversation in a month? Will I remember this conversation in a day? And that allows you to think, is this a low stakes or no stakes?

And then with the, with the, again, with the no stakes, I literally outsource it to a coin flip because it just doesn’t matter. What’s happening when you’re stuck in these things is you are injecting drama into the decision making process. And therefore you must remove yourself from that process. When it’s the low stakes, this is a great opportunity to save somebody on your team. Like, go and figure this out for me. Come back with a recommendation. You’re empowering them. And what’s awesome about this too is when you take yourself out and you give somebody else the opportunity to make a decision, you bring in creativity and ideas you wouldn’t have had otherwise. And so it’s a really great way to develop people and you just have to make sure that their skills are appropriate to, you know, you don’t wanna have the person who, for example, I don’t pick my clothes. I, I, I just, I don’t like doing that anymore. I’ve given up on it. I have a person who helps me with that. You gotta make sure that person has good style and you like it, but it’s incredible how much you can leverage yourself the minute you start outsourcing to the people around you who have expertise in specific areas that teach you things and learn things. And by the way, you’re just gonna always, you’ll never become a dinosaur because you’re always learning new things. And that’s super important as well.

VANNOY:

Yeah, Patrick, that it’s interesting, I I, I’ve, I’ve kind of tried to remove the decision making from my wardrobe also. So I’m sitting here in my, in my home office where, where we do the show. But and I, and I’ll maybe mix up what shirt I’m wearing but when I’m, when I’m in office, it’s so, so white shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, it’s, and I, and they’re all different white shirts and different jeans, same cowboy boots every time. So I’m, I’m clean, but it’s the same outfit cuz there’s no thinking when I go to pack to, to hit the road. I, I don’t have to sit and think about, boy, what am I gonna wear on this day? On this day, I, I’m gone three days. There’s three white shirts, there’s a couple pairs of jeans and I’m done. Right?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah. I, I’ll tell you, there’s one other thing on that. And this is, I think this is one of these things where us guys have it easier because it’s just cultural stuff. But like, I was at a conference recently in Sweden and the CEO of Skims was speaking, he also founded a co-founded a company called Frame Yenz gre. And he said, every for men, like you should just have a uniform. And I was like, that’s really interesting cuz when you do have that uniform, and maybe listen some people, this is another thing, like, for, for me, clothing is a low stakes decision. I don’t like, I just need something that works and we’re moving on. I wanna look nice, but I’m not trying to be, you know, wear the Valentino necessarily. I’m not gonna the Oscars yet. But for some people it’s high stakes. If you are a if you work in fashion, then clothing’s super important. That’s not a low stakes for you. So it, you know, these things are personalized, but for me it’s sort of like I just need something that works and is consistent and I know it, I it, it’s great. And so I figure it out and I move on.

VANNOY:

I love that. I love the idea of thinking about it as a, as a uniform, right? It’s like, cuz in, we can go, we can go on tangents here, but then you’re all of a sudden in the area of personal brand, right? It’s like, how do you think of the name Steve Jobs without thinking of a black turtleneck or black crewneck, right? And right. It’s, it becomes part of an identity. Right.

MCGINNIS:

Or Elizabeth Holmes <laugh>.

VANNOY:

Yeah. <laugh>. Right. Exactly. Exactly. All right, let’s, let’s so here, here’s what I would say for, for, for our audience today that to me the most exciting thing here is, is is probably not the freedom that comes with some of these techniques but the, the art of the possible of all the time we, we save. When I think about how much time is wasted over, over the little things, re rehashing the same email in your inbox cuz either you didn’t act on it or archive it or delete it. How much time you spent booking your hotel in, in your example, Patrick packing the suitcase. We make hundreds and hundreds, thousands really of, of little tiny decisions a day. And if you made all of them faster, that’s a huge amount of time in our lives left to really tackle the big stuff, which in fact is harder and does require more homework and more deliberation. But if, if we spend all of our time making better hard decisions, how much better are our lives or our businesses, our employees, right?

MCGINNIS:

That’s exactly right. And you just hit on something in there that I thought was, that’s great, that didn’t come out in an explicit way, but I’d love to hit it. Which is, you know, one, one thing that that’s really powerful is to templatize your life. So when you’re packing, have your system when you’re doing emails, like I work with a, with a startup and, and I’m working very closely with ceo who’s brilliant, but he struggles with sending emails sometimes. He’s like, he’s think really thinking about the email and changing things. And when you look at the, where it started and where it ended, it’s really kind of the same. And there’s just been 10 minutes of like wordsmithing that doesn’t add value. So what we’re doing now is templatizing all email responses. And so you just save time. And I swear to God, you that’ll be an hour a day of gain time for that, for that founder.

VANNOY:

Yeah. And, and if you’re an entrepreneur, we’re not looking, entrepreneurs aren’t looking to gain that hour a day to, to watch some TV and go play golf and go to the spa. That’s an hour a day. You got back to do big things, right?

MCGINNIS:

To think big like thinking when you’re, when you are fiddling with an email text, you are in the world of the small thinking, not the big thinking.

VANNOY:

Yeah, yeah. Some of the biggest thinkers I know and that I engage with their emails in text are borderline cryptic because there’s, because of the lack of, lack of punctuation and brevity, it’s like, okay, what did you mean there, <laugh>? But me by

MCGINNIS:

My emails are a mess. Like, I should really work on that. But like, you probably, you know, in our communications, it’s like one word responses. My mom is like, my mom actually said to me, she’s like, your emails are so cold. Sorry.

VANNOY:

All right, let’s move to, so all this time we, we’ve just saved ourselves you know, how how do we make better high stakes decisions? And, and maybe, maybe we start with the, the, your working definition is of a, a definition of a high stakes decision.

MCGINNIS:

Yeah. A high stakes decision is something that is mission critical that you will remember making this decision a year down the line. It’s something where you need to have criteria, you need to do research, you need to form a view. And so that, that’s, you know, it is, for example, do we hire this person to be our new head of hr? Do we fire this person who’s not working out? Do we rebrand our company? You know, those kinds of, those are like the real, you know, important things in life in the workplace, right? So what happens here is, is is oftentimes a, we get to the point where we have a, so this is really about fao. Like, I’m not addressing a situation in which you only have one candidate, or you have, you know, say it’s like, well, I’m not asking you to say like, we’re gonna hire this person, or we’re gonna just shut down the company.

Like, that’s not a fabo situation. It’s a very clear economy. Where I’m dealing with in my work is like when you have three candidates and you’re like, these are all pretty good, we can’t decide, okay? That’s, that’s where, where I’m addressing, and that’s the fao, right? And so what I recommend there is first of all, you know, having a process. And I like to think like an investor, really, my work is informed by my experience as an investor. So I think like a venture capitalist, it’s like, all right, we’re making an investment in hiring this person. Well, let’s assess who is this person? Are they skilled? Can we afford them? What are the alternatives? Like, what are our criteria? Does this person meet the criteria? All those sorts of things. Great. Assuming we get to three candidates, then we get in a situation, well, which one should we choose?

And that’s where the FAO happens, because we start to think, well, you know, all these three people are great, but you know, what, if we keep looking, what if we find number four and they’re the perfect one, they’re the one that, you know, it’s so obvious that they’re the best one, that we have a riskless decision. That’s the trap that people fall into. And one of the reasons to trap is because people think that like, the more you look, the more your, your sort of option set will increase. But the reality is you may lose options. One of these people who you’ve not gotten back to may say, okay, I’m taking another job. And then you’re, you lost your favorite candidate, and only then you’re like, oh my God, we should have gone after this candidate. Right? So that’s what’s really interesting. And so what I, what the process that I encourage people to go through is one in which you take the candidates and you force yourself to remove one, then you keep your other two, then you keep basically removing until you get down to the final one, and you choose that one.

Now, the reason you do this is because when you remove one and then permanently eliminate it, you eliminate the risk or the sort of temptation to keep cycling through the same people, right? And so we, the, the problem when we have fabo is that we are so afraid of eliminating an option cuz we wanna have as many options as possible that we never decide. So by forcing to eliminate you then are, are you basically you move towards the decision. Now the great news is if you forcibly eliminate one and then you have massive regret, then that’s the sign that that’s the person that you want. So it’s really about a structured way of cutting down your options till you get to the last one. And in that process, you can I recommend sort of if you’re kind of stuck bringing in other people to help you and sort of work through these things. But that’s, that’s kind of the process that I recommend.

VANNOY:

Patrick, y you as, as you, I’m listening to you talk, tell the, the story here. I I’m reminded of like Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point, right? We’re talking about emergency room patients would present, patients would present the emergency room with symptoms that appeared to possibly have had to do with a heart attack, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and and I’ll, I’ll butcher the number so I won’t even try, but the punchline was that the more tests they ran, the less accurate they were in their assessments that it turned out as something like a four or five point test. If, if they present for these five things, yes, treat it as heart attack and, and, and all this, it’s, it’s, it’s fabo. It’s like, well, what if I’m, what if I, and these are, these are doctors, these are, these are emergency room doctors, right? The best of the best smart people. It’s like always seeking more information. If I run this test, if I run that analysis, we do this, we do this diagnostic. It doesn’t lead to better decision making, right? There are, what, what are the criteria that you need to make to, to make this decision and get that in nothing more, right?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah. Who wants an indecisive er doctor? That sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? And, but it’s no, so that is, but like, who wants a, who wants an indecisive, you know, business partner. And that’s where these things are so critical. And the great news is like, I know we’ve gotten, you know, this, these are big ideas. And probably you’re saying like, you’re not, you know, probably you have questions and stuff. The great news is, first of all, it’s all written down in my book, but second of all is that like, the more you do this, the more you, the great news about decision making is the more you live on this planet, the more expertise you have and knowledge and data to make better decisions. And so you just get better at it over time. What happens to people and where they get hurt is that, you know, this is really a decision making strategy for living in a world of overwhelming choices. We live in a world where if you wanna buy white shoelaces on Amazon, you have a thousand choices, right? So that’s the problem is we live in like big data, like big data, great. Not when you’re trying to decide something necessarily, we’re overwhelmed. And so what I’m trying to do is get people to forcibly simplify their decision making process so they can actually move forward.

VANNOY:

React to this Patrick, I I, I’m envisioning, so somebody follows your, your, your template, right? It’s, it’s set the criteria, the other things most important to you, gather the facts, the research, all the options re remember fao identify a frontrunner, compare it each, each option and then eliminate, right? And, and really at that point, your your, your gut will tell you that’s great. I can imagine fabo slowing down every single one of these steps. I mean, just the research alone. It’s like, how much research do I need to do? Where do I stop? I mean, you fabo could triple the length of every single step in that, in that, in that am am I making sense? What? And if so, you know, yeah. Or correct me. And, and then what’s your, what’s your guidance here?

MCGINNIS:

You’re absolutely right. Somebody with extreme fabo is going to struggle at every step, and that’s where you gotta call in the, you know, the re the, the backup. Because what happens with decision making, and I’m sure you, you’ve experienced this, it’s like, I could be having a problem trying to decide something. I go talk to my best friend, and all of a sudden, like that person assuming that they’re like reasonably intelligent and incisive will sort it out for me really quickly and say, why don’t you think about it this way? And you’re like, wow. The same way. Like, we’re always, it’s amazing how many times somebody comes to me with a problem they view as intractable, and I’m able to give them advice that they find very valuable. Because when you are, it’s, again, Fabo is about the emotion. It’s like, I am asserting myself in this problem.

I’m creating chaos. Like I am. I am the problem because inside my head I’m wondering if there’s something better. And I’m trying to optimize in these kinds of things. When you take yourself out of there and you get objective, third party advice, almost, I would say a hundred percent of the time, you are able to then push through some of these emotional things, right? It’s all up here. And so that’s what I encourage people to do. If you get stuck, get, it’s like we’re trying to decide, do we wanna hire this person? What are the criteria for this role? Like, if you can’t settle on that, bring in your business partner or your colleague, or talk to a friend or an expert or a coach to say like, I can’t figure this out. Talk it through. And I can guarantee you, you will figure out those things.

VANNOY:

And sometimes somebody that from outside even your area of expertise, right? Or somebody who has a, a fresh look. I, I mean, I think about, you know, my family, like, we like watching Shark Tank. It’s, it’s brutal how, and, and you’re, and you come from venture capital background. So you, you, you can appreciate this. The entrepreneurs are so emotionally attached to their business that they’re completely blind to, oh, here’s your problem. And, and these sharks, they get to the heart, to the essence of the issues with one or two or three questions, right? It’s like, okay, tell me about your business. What’s, what are, what are sales? How you been doing this? Oh, what about this? Oh, well, therefore that’s your problem. It’s like people with fresh eyes and who have seen the patterns before can, can recognize these patterns in ways that we’re, we’re just too close to it.

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, a hundred percent investing is pattern recognition. And so many other disciplines in the business world are pattern recognition. Now, obviously, we have our sort of implicit biases, which can make that pattern recognition flawed. So it may be that I, I like, I’m Mark Cuban had a bad experience in the industry and therefore assumes it’s always bad and misses out on this great opportunity. Like we should always think through that, right? And so we, we, you know, you always need to have a fresh perspective, but you’re a hundred percent right. I’m always shocked when I meet an entrepreneur and I ask a very basic question and they haven’t thought it through. And they’re, they’re sort of like avoiding it because they know that’s the weak spot in their business. And so it’s very important. And what I do one of the things I think I’m, that makes me most effective as a, as a professional, as a business person, is that I kind of have, like number one, I have like the 10 people who I know, you know, and certain disciplines are really good, and I can call them for advice.

But number two is I’m ruthless about just reaching out to people who I think can solve my problems. I have no shame. I will ping anybody and just say, I’m trying to figure this out. You’re an expert. Can you help? And yeah, chances are they will, especially if you have some sort of connection. So I am, I am, I, I have found that decision making in particular, those inputs of data, you know, getting out of your implicit bias and getting really good advice. And that might be advice you don’t want to hear, but I prefer that. I wanna feel the pain. I wanna get all the ugly things out on the table before I do this decision. That way, even if I decide a thing that maybe they didn’t tell me to do, I kind of know how I know what the ugly baby looks like.

VANNOY:

Yeah. let, let, let’s spend just another couple minutes here on, on the high stakes and kind of go back to the top of the conversation. You know unemployment, near record lows. Yet everybody is saying recession coming. We just don’t know how big or how long, bigger fear is. Probably more around stagflation all of this to say a lot of entrepreneurs are, are deer in the headlights right now on making big decisions. Yeah. when it, and especially, I mean, what, what are your two biggest costs? Usually it’s, it’s real estate and people, maybe it, maybe it’s cost of goods and materials depending on your business, but clearly people is always right up there. So you’re thinking about recession, I’m thinking about cost when it comes to people, but I’m also thinking the ways that I’m gonna be successful in the future are not the ways that may me successful in the past. Cuz we’re, we’re, I mean, everything in there, <laugh> in our worlds are, are, are changing. How, how, how would you guide the business owner, the entrepreneur, the senior exec for a small, mid-sized company at, at this point in time, knowing the uncertainty that, that we’re dealing with?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, this is a tricky one, right? Because I think about the, there is no consensus. I was at a dinner last night with one guy, you know, was focusing, they’re both friends of mine that I worked with in the past. I, one guy was telling me that the real estate market’s gonna crash and the fed’s gonna raise rates to 5%, and that’s the only way to tamper inflation. And I had not even heard that. I was like, wow, that sounds crazy. But who knows, right? We just don’t know. And I think right now no matter, you know, what your thought is about the effectiveness or of the current US government kind of doesn’t matter because like, this is global. Like, inflation in the UK is like 12%. So if you think eight is bad in America, don’t go to England. So there’s like, we should just accept the fact that a lot of the levers that are gonna control our economy are outside of the control of, you know, the fad and the government. And it’s just

VANNOY:

Very, and what we talked before, like venture capital being pattern recognition. There is no pattern for in cur today’s inflation plus today’s employment levels plus job participation rates plus baby boomers retiring, plus birth rates and job entrance plus supply chain disruption from the pandemic plus a pandemic plus. Is there gonna be another pandemic there? There is no template right now, right? Yeah. No one can say, oh, I’ve seen this pattern before.

MCGINNIS:

It’s pretty awful when Yeah. And throwing in a war yeah, it’s messy. So what I would say is, first of all, having kind of, you know, the year 2000 I lived, just sadly for me, I was, had a front seat to the 2000, 2001 tech bubble crashing. I mean, I was like in the middle of that. And then I worked at AIG in 2008 during the blow up of the financial sector, and I was like front row seat to that. So I have had more than my share of pain. So here’s what I would say, based on my very hard one experience. Number one is Cassius King always is king. Like, you know, really protecting your cash balance and accumulating a rainy day fund is super important and you can plan for that. Yeah. Number two, really understanding what’s core and what’s non-core and prioritizing your time and money and the things that are core.

And then deaccelerating, the things that are non-core. And you see this all the time, businesses during the boom times. So they start investing in all these very nice to have things. It’s like, oh, you know, I’m a like, I’m Coca-Cola, you know, I’m, what do I do? I make sodas, but you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna start an N F T division because that’s the bright shiny object we have the FOMO. Well, that stuff’s gonna go okay. It’s just not a good use of time. And number three is, one of the great things, if we can find a few about the hard times is it forces us to be focused, but it also forces us to be creative. And so look at these challenges, not as just a bad thing, but it’s like, okay, let’s develop some grit. Let’s figure out where the future is going.

Because if we make it through this, our competitors who are happy, fat and lazy will not, and we can grab a ton of market share. And so it’s actually, you know, every crisis is an opportunity. I know that’s a, you know, phrase that everybody says, but it is true. I have seen it myself. It’s like, if you are battle ready and you have a plan and you’re decisive going into a crisis, you will be able to acquire competitors who weren’t thoughtful. You can take market share from them. You can you can do so many things. And so it’s a really good opportunity to reinvent your business.

VANNOY:

All right, Patrick, I think I just lost camera, but I think I still have audio. You got me there. Yeah, I

MCGINNIS:

Uhoh let’s

VANNOY:

Let, let’s come back specifically to, to people.

Yeah. with all the uncertainty, I, I like where you ended there on, on, on creativity. So none of us know there is no template, there’s no, there’s no playbook for the as is. But one thing we do know for sure is we’re gonna need better people than our competitors. We’re gonna need more talent. We’re gonna need talent that is aligned to our mission and to our culture. So how, how, how do I, how do I as an entrepreneur think about making changes in my, in my approach to hiring people in this time of uncertainty?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, it’s a, so first of all, in your question there, you just said something that I really think is critical, which is mission and culture, which by the way, like I remember when I was doing my MBA at Harvard, I was kind of like, Ugh, these things, they’re so soft, like mission, culture, whatever. No <laugh>, I have, you know, as an investor in companies I’ve seen so many times where you have a company that doesn’t know how to talk about those things. And therefore when you don’t know what your mission is, how can you hire because you don’t know where you’re going, right? It’s the north star. And so that is really important. And so, first of all, I would just focus on that. Second of all I would say that this is an, a really good opportunity to go after people in the market that you have wanted to hire because your competitors and competitors in other industries are gonna start to, you know, lay off people or they’ll just struggle. And so the opportunity and the retention of those companies, like if you have a company that had a billion dollar valuation and then it raises it at 200 million, like the talent’s not gonna stick around because there’s no more upside for that. And so if there are people that you wanted to bring into your company, this is the opportunity to go after them.

VANNOY:

So, Patrick, how do we, how do we think about all this when, when creating a, a company culture? Cause cuz so much of billion employment brand, attracting talent, getting talent that is aligned to our, to our culture, to our mission, to our our vision and values. How, how do, how should an employer think about this in this world where there’s, there’s not a template, there’s not a playbook for today’s environment.

MCGINNIS:

Let’s start with FOMO. So what does FOMO look like in a corporate setting? It’s really about the notion. You know, we get back to like those early, what you said at the beginning about aspirational, FOMO, herd FOMO, aspirational FOMO is the notion that there’s something better out there than what you’re doing right now. So that’s, you know, the company that starts just doing things that are outside of its core mission. And it reminds me of like, do you guys remember, I, this was a crazy time. There was a company called like Long Island Iced Tea, but then they went to blockchain and they started doing things in the blockchain. Like, that’s FOMO. Not sure why they did that. I don’t think it ended very well. Yeah, but, but, but you know, that, that’s what, what happens when you, when you have FOMO, you become rudderless and you lack focus.

And that’s really bad for employees because then they don’t know where to focus. So I think first of all is when you really in touch with what your core strengths are and you hire people to execute on those, then you reduce FOMO. But second of all, it is okay to acknowledge that there are exciting things out there that are worth exploring. And FOMO can be a powerful motivator. FOMO is that thing. I mean, I got a little bit involved in the N F T space this year because I wanted to learn about it. I had FOMO, but I didn’t just like throw all my money into NFTs. I started advising a company in this space. I learned a little bit about it and then I was able to sort of engage in that. And so when you, when you wanna use FOMO for good and learning, you can do.

And what you can do, for example, is what Google does. Everybody if you heard about it, Google has a system where you spend 70% of your time on the core mission of the company, 20% of the time on growing initiatives. And 10%, which is called 10% time on, you know, kind of like very, very edgy things that you know could never maybe happen or you, it’s kind of exploring the frontiers that program, the 10% is what came up with Gmail. And so what I tell people to do is like, take a percentage of your time and energy focus on something that could be, you know, a total failure or could be the next big thing, but just limit it there until you have enough data to know that you should in fact focus on that area and that your FOMO was spot on. So that’s the FOMO side.

On the FOMO side, you know, it’s, I really think this comes down to the culture piece, which is so many companies have decision making structures that are designed to sort of draw things out. It’s like, okay, well, like let’s meet next week and get 43 people on a call and we’re gonna a 19 hour conference call and then we’re gonna kick a can down the road. And this is where managers have to be great at setting deadlines and creating processes that drive towards decision making. So, you know, it’s the classic analysis for analysis. And what happens is companies, especially big companies, they have tons of resources, tons of people, you know, it’s like, you know, they’re kind of comfortable, they have tons of market share, so they don’t, they don’t have the urgent sort of decision making of a startup that’s has scarce resources and has to move fast. And that’s why startups eat the lunch of big companies all the time. And big companies spend all the money buying the startup. You’ve gotta create an entrepreneurial decision making culture in your company, and that’s how you overcome FOMO.

VANNOY:

Yeah. You know, Patrick, I I would add, it’s like probably probably two things. One, you can’t, if you have a culture that punishes failure or makes failure and embarrassment, all you’re gonna, you’re throwing rocket fuel on FOMO, right? And in in, in, in Fabo, because it’s not just fear of the better option, it’s what if I’m, what if I’m wrong? Because part, part of part of the fabo strategy here is the, the speed at which we make decisions, the simplicity at which we make, make decisions. And if we punish for being wrong, all you’re gotta do is paralyze people more. Can you, can you speak to that?

MCGINNIS:

Yeah, that’s right. Because the thing about Fabo in particular is what’s really happening? I mean, think about fear of a better option. It’s like the, the word fear is always there. We don’t, you know, we don’t think about it cuz we just say the acronym, but what we’re doing there is we are fearing choosing the not the best thing. It’s like, oh, I’m gonna make a choice that is suboptimal, ergo I’m gonna wait until I have the perfect thing in front of me. Guess what? That doesn’t exist. And so you’re trapping yourself in this very nasty dilemma. And when you’re fear, you’re fearing failure, that that sort of like plays right into that. And so I have never been in a company that that where there was like where it was better because there was a fear of failing. And I think like, frankly, like the reason why we saw the 2008 financial crisis was because people were so unwilling to admit their mistakes that they kept doubling down and doubling down.

And so that is really, like, you always hear these stories like some bank, like, you know, like Barclays was a great example from the, I think it was the nineties, they had this trader and he just, like, he wasn’t allowed to fail, so he kept doubling down doubly. And one day they were like, oh my God, we’ve lost like 33 billion or whatever. When you create a culture with transparency and openness around failure, that you can learn from that failure, and you can also make sure you address that failure before it eats up your entire business.

VANNOY:

Yeah, yeah. A agree. And then there’s, there’s the, the other side of that same coin, right? It’s like you could have an organization that says, you know, we, we, we we’re an entrepreneurial experimentation culture. We, we, we don’t get punished for making mistakes, but if, if, if only those who have the successful projects or the highest value projects, if they’re hoisted on everyone’s shoulders and praised and no one else is there, there’s another side of that coin on the reward side, not just the punishment side. That could be, I don’t know if it’s equally paralyzing, fear is pretty, pretty big motivator. But, but, but, but it can have the same impact.

MCGINNIS:

Yeah. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. And I think that’s, think that’s what, once you start to recognize the inherent patterns of thinking, so much of this, what we’ve been talking about today is just like, it’s about the internal narrative that you’re telling yourself because of your old, you know, we all like have had our path in life and we’ve made mistakes and we’ve, we’ve done things wrong and we started to doubt ourselves. And like, you know, that’s just like part of what it is to be a human being. But when you start to recognize those patterns and address them, then you unleash a ton of power that you can use to, to win.

VANNOY:

Yeah. You know what, Dave Patrick got awesome conversation. I think I’m gonna use that time to, to wrap. You help businesses every day. So you’ve got a podcast, FMO sapiens, you’ve written a couple very successful books. The 10% Entrepreneur, if you’re missing out how, how might people get ahold of you and what are other ways that you help businesses?

MCGINNIS:

By the way, this slide is beautiful. I love it. I don’t, I don’t, I think you guys made that. And I just wanna say that whoever does your graphics, they, you know, get my ma massive approval. So the best place to find me, you have the two books there. The 10% Entrepreneur is really about how to be an entrepreneur. Like the Google Method. It’s very similar, like 10% of your time, money, energy, while keeping your day job. The second is the, the FOMO book, and it really gets into FOMO, FOMO and decision making. I have a podcast called FOMO sapiens which is really, you know, it’s every week we talk to entrepreneurial decision makers about how they make decisions and how we can do that in a more effective and powerful way. And you can find me@patrickmcginnis.com or FOMO sapiens.com.

VANNOY:

Okay. Awesome. Patrick, really enjoyed meeting you today. Enjoyed the conversation and thanks to everyone else for joining us today. If there’s anything we can do to help you get smarter when it comes to hiring, developing talent, staying compliant with all the ever-changing HR laws in paying your people. This is exactly what we do for 90,000 other small and mid-sized growing companies. So until next week, Patrick, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. See you next week, everyone.