The Founder Is the Bottleneck - and the Breakthrough - Andrew Poles

Hi, everyone, and welcome to Behind the Numbers. This is the program where we go a little deeper than the spreadsheets and the financial statements to understand what really drives business success. I'm Dave Bookbinder. I'm known as a best-selling author and valuation expert.

My guest today is Andrew Poles. He's a founder coach who works with first-time entrepreneurs navigating the realities of building and scaling a business under pressure. His work focuses on something that often gets overlooked, and that's the idea that your business can only grow as fast as the founder people. Andrew has coached thousands of founders on leadership, decision-making, and managing the competing demands of investors, teams, and frankly, life outside the business.

He's also currently working on a new book titled Over the Gate. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Dave. It's exciting to finally be here.

It does take a little bit of time, but I hope it's worth every minute for you. It sure is for me and the audience. I gave you a brief intro here at the top of the program. Anything I missed that you want to share with the folks list?

No, I think you did a great job. Also, I'm a dad, a husband, and about to be a granddad. Family's a big part of my life. So like all entrepreneurs, we have a lot going on outside the business as well.

Great point, and congratulations on being a granddad. Thank you. So let's get this thing started, shall we? You focus on founder growth as much as you do business growth.

Where do you see founders fall out of sync with their company? Well, I think when you're especially talking about first-time founders, this tends to happen after the company... Reaches a particular size or scale. And it's different for every founder, but it's usually pretty early on.

And the reason why this happens is because the people who become founders tend to be super high performing individuals who've never really needed to be managed to be, you know, to be sort of tightly watched or hold held to be accountable by an external party. They're very self-generative. They're very innovative. They can solve problems.

They're highly intelligent. And so when they start having people join the team and they need to start producing results through other people, the skill set they've built to be a high-performing individual, it doesn't translate well to leading and managing other people. They also don't necessarily know a lot about creating and managing business systems because, again, they've just been in these individual performance roles. Tools.

So that's where the demands of the business start to outpace both their experience and their skill sets. And typically what they do is they try to lean harder on the things that have gotten them where they are. And those are just not the right tools for getting them where they need to go. So at that point, the business needs the founder to grow and to learn new skill sets, to learn new ways of seeing the world, maybe even to learn how to relate to people in a more effective way.

Yeah, I see that quite a bit in my personal life, looking for maybe a contractor who's really skilled at what they do, but clearly can't run a business because they don't return a phone call. We're recently speaking with entrepreneur lawyers who have gone out on their own and they're now embracing this idea of being the CEO of their enterprise. So when you talk about that little bit of a disconnect, maybe there's some blind spots that you've seen that founders have about themselves and growth.

Yeah, there's two or three we could touch on. One of them is, this is such a blind spot that when I say this, most people are like, what? Like, the number one blind spot I see is that everyone thinks the way I do. Everyone performs the way I do.

So founders will interact with someone who needs to perform in some role, just like they were talking to a clone of themselves. And then they're shocked when the person that they're trying to hand over some accountability to or some tasks to doesn't execute it the way they expect and then they blame the other person when they when what they don't realize is that people know there's not going to ever probably be anyone else in the business at least not for quite some time when you've got enough money to hire really really high performing super successful people until you get there the people you hire are just not going to perform the way you do, they're not going to think the way you do they're not going to drive themselves the same way you do.

And they're also not equity stakeholders in the business the same way you are. So they just require a different kind of thoughtfulness, almost like a strategic approach to how do I hand over an accountability in a way that the other person can fully own it and see it the way I need them to to perform. So that's a huge blind spot thinking everyone performs and thinks the way I do. Yeah, that's a big disconnect because oftentimes Sometimes people think they're hiring in their own image, but you make a great point.

It's just fundamentals in terms of the equity incentive or lack thereof. Yeah, these are important things. And also, there's so much context that goes into the way a founder sees their own business, the way the founder sees the market, that there is something. I don't know quite what the word is for this, Dave, but, you know, founders get almost touched by the possibility of something when they start this business.

And in the case of my client, just because that's who I prefer to work with, it's not just people who see some kind of financial possibility. They see some possibility for impact in the market. They're trying to solve a real problem and that problem is somehow meaningful to them and their engagement with that problem over time gives them this rich context. It's very challenging to turn that context over to someone else.

So it really does take a lot of strategic thinking to do that well. So that's one of the first sets of skills they lack. Also, the second one, like a blind spot, is that, in the beginning of a company, it's very useful to hire people who are like Swiss Army knives, people who can wear multiple hats, who can solve lots of different problems, who don't mind jumping around. But at some point, as you go to scale your business, you have to transition from Swiss Army Knives to specialists and from that kind of like, hey, I can stretch my arms out pretty far here and keep this whole thing together to transitioning into business systems that work with or without the founder's intervention.

Sorry, without the founder's intervention. And so thinking of the business as a set of coordinated processes is. As opposed to looking at it through the lens of this person who understands all the things and can do all the things, that's often a blind spot for people. How do you take what for me is intuitive?

How do you take what for me is obvious? And that's one of the things you'll hear a lot. It's like, why don't they get this? It's obvious.

Of course you wouldn't do it that way. Or of course you would do it this way. How do you take that almost intuitive understanding of the business and turn it into a business process or a business system that works every time? And it's another big blind spot we see in this transition from small to, say, medium small.

Yeah. So when you talk about this transition, as we are from, say, entrepreneur to leader, wearing the CEO hat, a lot of the performance is going to be driven by ultimately leadership. So when the founders are basically putting together teams for the first time, what other things are they misunderstanding about what it really is? I think that when they're doing this for the first time, they oftentimes misunderstand Hiring and how do you recruit and hire people that are going to be a good fit for what you want?

One of the things that I think is important. That I think is challenging is that there's a lot of people who have been very successful who talk about that the most important thing is to hire really great talent and to find people who are just great at what they do and then bring them on and kind of like find a role for them, find a fit for them. And although I don't necessarily disagree with that, I think the challenge is that not everyone with great talent in a particular thing is great for any particular role.

Roles do require specific skill sets to be there as a foundation and then also, people need to also think about for founders they need they need to think about when they're early on in their journey, can they personally work with someone who has the kinds of behavioral and communication styles that the person they're hiring has because communication as many of the people you interview you, Dave, talk about is, probably one of the most important greases on the gears of a business.

And when the communication is really effective and really strong, it can carry a lot of things that the business processes being maybe underdeveloped, you know, need carried. And without that communication, it all breaks down. And so founders need to learn how to hire people that can both do the specific role they need well without lots and lots of training or management in the beginning. And also people that they can work well with who can work well with them.

And so I don't think you can just hire great talent full stop. I think you need to go beyond that when you're early and think about these things. When you're Apple or when you're Amazon or you're Google, sure, just hire great talent because you have so much in place. You have so much structure and so much management structure.

But when you're early, you can't do that. You have to hire, you know, like I'll give you, I'll give an example. I'm working with a founder right now whose company is about five-ish years old. And they just transitioned from a B2C play with their software product to a B2B play, selling into higher education as the first market.

And the salesperson they hired is a great relationship salesperson, but she's not a hunter. It's very foreign to her to go out and hunt and actually push deals to close. And so So she's not being effective in sales. And as the first and only sales hire right now, that's really a challenge for the business because the founder does not have time to invest in training her to do these sort of meat and potatoes, table stakes types, activities and skill sets of conversations while he's trying to raise funds and do all these other things.

So this is very challenging. So it wasn't the right hire for that role, even though this person is super smart, super talented, really great at parts of the role, but not great at the most important part, which is closing deals. So. Yeah, I think recruiting, hiring is another skill set they've got to learn early on in order for the business to be successful.

And that goes along with what we said before, obviously, because even if you do hire someone who's great, if you don't hand over the context, if you don't hand over the history, you don't hand over how the business processes work, that person's going to be way less successful, way more frustrated. So those two things fit together like hand and glove. Yeah, that's why I always say you got to get the people part right, the human capital part right. Those early hires are so important to your point.

A bad hire, your downside risk is greatly diminished than if you're... It's much bigger early on when you're really counting on that person and you invest a lot of time in them. And then the business results are riding on their performance. When you're an early stage startup, and by startup, I mean someone who's basically playing with other people's money, so to speak.

People who, I don't mean playing in a bad way, but I mean literally other people's investment in the company is the money that you use to build the product, try to sell it, go to market. When you're in that situation, your ability to demonstrate that you can perform every single month, month over month, and push this thing forward is absolutely essential to your ability to continue to raise funds as you need those funds to continue to grow. And so if you make a bad hire in the beginning and that person takes you six months to sort that out and you don't make meaningful progress in six months, that is just oftentimes devastating to you when you're trying to raise the next tranche of money.

So, yeah, these early hires are critical. Yeah, can't emphasize that enough. Completely agree. You have talked about founders losing control of their time before they even realize it.

I've certainly seen that moving. What does that typically look like? I just want to clarify, I heard your question because you've started to cut out just a little bit for some reason. Did you say losing control of their time?

Yes. Okay, great. So what I see is that founders often don't have a robust enough and strategic enough system, for managing everything they have to do in running the business successfully, including running their life successfully in a way that their life works and supports them in the business. Most of my clients are parents, not all, but almost all of my clients are parents, men and women both, that I coach.

And so, you know, in addition to having this business that's meant to support your family, your family also needs some of your support and you need to take care of your health to be able to hold all that together. So there's a lot. Founders need to learn how to balance. And the only way that you can do that is by intentionally, thoughtfully structuring your time in a very strategic way, where you have time carved out in every day of the week to address all those important things that you need.

And most people that I coach have never had to think about time this way. They've always just been able to grind harder to get to the end of what they need. But early on in the business, especially if you're starting to have some level of success, the demands of your life, including your business, will outpace grinding as a solo gear. And so now you need to start thinking about, okay, well, I have to produce this result, this result, this result, this result.

How do I do that? When am I going to meet with the person to find out what's going on with this thing and to coach them through whatever their challenges are? When am I going to exercise? How much time do I spend on email actually?

And where is that in my calendar when I'm doing that? Most people don't put time in their calendar to deal with email, but they spend two hours a day on email. So where's that time coming from? It's always coming at the end of the day after everything else they plan is done when they should be spending time in their world with their family.

So they should be able to, or when they need to exercise or sleep. So there are just predictable things like that, email, or sometimes it's interruptions. Most people don't think about this, but I don't know anyone running a business who doesn't get interrupted a whole bunch in ways that are both important and unavoidable. And not that every interruption is, some interruptions are unnecessary, but many of them are necessary.

There are emergencies, there are breakdowns, there are just hot potatoes that have to get handled. Most people don't plan for that. Like, what do you mean? How do you plan for that?

You never know it's coming. And it's like, well, you always know that it's coming. You just don't know when it's coming and you don't know how long it's going to take to handle it, but you know it's coming. And so, for example, I have all of my founders block off time in their calendars every day that they're not allowed to schedule over for breakdowns and interruptions.

And why you need to think this way is because if you don't, then you wind up lying to yourself about how much you can get done in a day. You wind up making promises that you can't keep and becoming unreliable. That leads to people not trusting you as much and you not trusting yourself as much and starting to hedge on your promises. And it leads to overworking.

So you need a system for strategically managing all of the demands on you so that you know when you walk into the day, you've already won the day and you've already won the week and you've already won the month because you have mapped it out. And that system also has to include a way to help you not task switch because of your fear of forgetting to do something or not getting to something because your calendar isn't set up well. So you need a way of capturing as things come to you oh i need to respond to that email oh i need to follow up with this investor about this thing you need a way of capturing that in the moment that just takes a brief second.

That you know you will come back to every day your list of things that you thought about that aren't planned, that you have a moment in the day to come back to that list and schedule them out so that when they pop up when you're working on this project and you're like in flow state and you're really focused you don't take yourself out of flow state, by either jumping to the task that you just thought of so you don't forget it or you take yourself out of flow state because now some part of your brain is saying don't forget this don't forget this don't forget this, so the way founders lose track of their time is they're insufficiently strategic and no one's ever trained them in a robust enough system for how to manage all this stuff so that you've actually won the battle before going to war and that's the way i talk about it there's this quote from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, that goes something like, victorious warriors figure out how to win and then go to battle, and defeated warriors go to battle and then figure out or try to figure out how to win.

And that's what most founders are. They're like that defeated warrior who just jumps into battle and is trying to figure out as they go when what they need to do is back up, take time, slow down, figure out how to win, plan it out, and then go to war. I'm hearing a recurring theme here about systematizing your day and your life to really keep you focused. And when you talk about those interruptions throughout the day, that resonates for me because I've got my email open in the background all the time.

I get an alert every time something comes in. Those distractions are like, how are you able to help your clients understand the distinction when they get interrupted between something important and something? Well, okay. I think there are two parts to this equation.

And I think one of them is often not discussed or dealt with and that becomes the downfall of the second part that often is discussed or dealt with, which is then there's multiple matrices for like, how do you distinguish between urgent and important and critical and so on and so forth. There are various ways of carving that up. It is important to realize that as a founder, your tendency will be to feel like every single thing is urgent when it's not. And so it's important to have those distinctions between something that's urgent versus merely important.

But I'm not going to talk a lot about that because there's lots and lots of great information about that out there. The part that I want to talk about, and this is one of the core tenets of my approach to coaching, is that the inner world of the founder winds up being reflected in the way the business is set up and functions. And so at the same time that founders are needing to deal with the structure of the business, the way the systems and processes work and all that stuff.

That we talked about, they also need to deal with their inner world and how that inner world shapes the way what's going on in the business looks to them and therefore how they respond or react. And so, for example, some founders are being driven by fears around failing. Fears of either failing in life, failing to support their family, or some older wound that they have around failure and accomplishment. And that will create what I call a dirty fuel.

So it's a fuel that you use to get yourself to perform, and it burns really hot. So it's very effective at getting you to perform, but it comes with a really big cost. It's dirty in that sense. I see this all the time with founders where there's some fear there that they haven't dealt with internally, that it winds up just driving them to do things, in a reactive way that no amount of categorizing something as urgent or not urgent will interrupt.

And I'll give you an example. I have a client right now with a really amazing company in the medical technology space. And they've probably raised close to $100 million at this point to get their first clinical trial going on this very complicated device that interacts with the brain. And every time this founder gets a request from one of their investors, whether it's a lead investor or whether it's one of the very small checks that got written in the beginning of the process, and they usually will ask for something that is completely irrelevant to the business.

Hey, my niece is trying to get into the school where you went to graduate school and could you make an introduction? Whatever, you know. Or hey, I want you to meet this other founder in my portfolio because the investor believes that my client can help them in some way. And my client doesn't have time for saying yes to every one of those.

But they feel like they have to because this internal fear they carry. That makes it all seem real to them. It's like, if I say no to this person, this might be the person five years from now, when I need this thing, to help us, you know, not die on the vine of not having enough funding can make the introduction to the person who knows the cousin of the wife of the, you know, it's like some catastrophized version of what if, and they cannot extract themselves from that until they see it.

So until they can deal with that inner peace of what's driving them. Then they'll never be able to say yes and no appropriately and powerfully. So the other piece of what we're talking about here in terms of interruptions and losing track of time and task switching and really being effective, the other piece other than having a good, you know, like maybe four square quadrant for how to categorize all the things and make smart choices is can you effectively deal with what's driving you in life that isn't driving you towards building the thing you want.

And so this is the other core distinction here, Dave, inside the inner world, the founder. There's a huge difference between building something because it's meaningful, and it's deeply meaningful to you or trying to avoid something. That you're afraid of, that drives you unconsciously. Those often look the same, but they could not be more different.

And so you've got to get yourself, if you want to be both successful and fulfilled, where you don't blow up your marriage, where you don't blow up your health, where you don't drive everyone in your company crazy and churn all your employees all the time, you have to learn how to face those fears that drive you to avoid things that are just unconscious and hardwired for you. So you can start getting your eye on building the thing that's meaningful to you and therefore making smarter choices.

Did that make sense? Absolutely. And there's so much in there, being ruthless with your time, creating the boundaries so that you don't have to feel like you need to say yes and sit there, just wrapping your head around all those other components. So much that these entrepreneurs need.

And that's why we talk about coaching as a real value add for the business. I want to talk about your book, Over the Gate. Yeah. I required you to write it.

So what inspired me to write the book was when I shared the story the book tells with friends and family after the part of my life the book talks about ended or completed, everyone said, you got to write that down. I had no plans to do it, Dave. I honestly just, to me, it felt like my own private little, you know, experience. It wasn't little, but my private experience in life.

And when people were like, this is really meaningful. You need to write this down. You need to write this down. And I finally just said, well, gosh, you know, if three people in a week have told me the same thing without talking to each other, obviously the universe is trying to get me a message here and I should just listen.

And so I said, OK, I'm going to do this. I'd never written a book before. And I always figured my first book would be a business book or a coaching book. But instead, it's a memoir about a chapter of my life that was deeply, deeply meaningful.

And the book is called Over the Gate because my wife challenged me in a moment on the couch of our living room in January of 2022 to attempt to do something that I knew for an absolute fact was impossible for me. Even though lots of other people did it, and I knew it was totally possible, when I looked at it, I said, there is no way I could ever do that. And she really challenged me. And it was in a domain of life that she knows nothing about.

It was an athletic domain. And something about the way that she had certainty that I could do it really disturbed me in a great way because it forced me to really question if maybe I was completely wrong about this thing that I thought I could never do. The thing in this case was we had watched a documentary about the Leadville 100-mile mountain biking race that's at 10,000 feet of altitude and it's 104 miles with like 12,000 feet of climbing on a mountain bike on mountains. And I was like, I could never do that.

And, and, you know, that's not central to my life, my business, my family were central to my life. But somehow, I could just tell that my belief, my the depth of my belief that I was not capable of doing this thing was everywhere in my life. It wasn't just in this one domain. And I could just tell if I took this on and, if I could discover that she was right and I was wrong, that it would just change me forever as a human being.

And so I took it on. And like we were talking about with running a business, the challenge of training for this and accomplishing it drove up so many fears and traumas from my past that I thought I had dealt with that I had not. And it forced me to learn a lot about myself that wasn't just about biking. That it was about healing trauma that it was about believing in yourself it's about taking something that seems miraculous and is to the greatest extent possible turning into something mechanical.

That you can pursue one little step at a time. And it was about letting people in and healing that wound. I think many of us carry that we feel like when it comes to the most important things in our life, ultimately we're alone, that they'll never be as meaningful to someone else as they are to us. And therefore people won't really show up or really get it.

And it took a lot for me to let people in to participate and be part of the whole project and to really go through what they had to go through to show up and be there for me when I was racing. This 104 miles. And so it was, it reconnected me to a sense of something greater than myself, reconnected me to people, it reconnected me to a sense of what people are really capable of. And that's why it's called over the gate, because I think everyone carries this sense of gate, having being inside a gate, you can't get over inside ourselves around meaningful things.

And the purpose of the book is to show people hopefully that the gate that's there really can be climbed over or gone around or you can find the key you know and that that's what the story is ultimately about, yeah it sounds like these are all themes and lessons that founders really need to hear right now, i think so because again since the business winds up reflecting the inner world of the founder wherever the founder feels like they're not capable of something that's important or that's needed the way they compensate for that will become a part of the way the business functions.

And those compensations are somewhat effective in some ways, but they usually wind up jamming something up somewhere else. And so being able to get over those gates, because the business, and this is a great thing, you know, maybe to wrap that piece up with, Dave, I don't know if you find this, but I do. Who the founder needs to become for the business idea to be fulfilled is determined by the business. The business needs the leader to become someone they've never been before.

And that often feels impossible. Like, oh, but I'm just not this way. I'm just not that way. And it actually is possible to become the person the business needs you to become to fulfill that dream, that idea and you'll do it in your own unique way.

You know, you won't be Steve Jobs, you won't be Elon Musk but you'll be the Dave Bookbinder version of that kind of leader that is authentic for you. So yeah, we all need to be able to climb over those gates to fulfill the dream our business has in store for us. Yeah, I do see that every day as well and I couldn't agree with you more. I want to talk to you a little bit about burnout.

Yeah. And I think based on the conversation we've had so far talking about being ruthless with time management and systemizing your life and processes and things. Is it really possible to build a successful company without sacrificing everything? It's not possible as far as I can tell to build a successful business without sacrificing things.

But I think that word sacrifice is dicey. I think a better way to put it is it's not possible to build a successful business without making trade-offs. And so sometimes those trade-offs might be that you are going to forego some sleep for short periods of time in a sprint. And then be tired and have to recover.

And then pay the price for that, whatever that looks like, maybe taking some time away from the business then or whatever. Or you may choose to take time away from your family sometimes that you would otherwise put there. There are trade-offs. But I think the point is, is that if you're not, being strategic and thoughtful and getting out ahead as best as you can of these kinds of choices and ways of organizing your life, then what is almost a certainty.

Especially for men, but I see it in both the men and the women I coach, is that you will just default to sacrificing your health and your relationship with your kids or your partner in a way that isn't necessary. And it'll feel like it is necessary because you can't see any other way to not have the business fail. And so yes, there will be sacrifices, but you can do it in a way that has a balance for you. And balance has to be a person by person phenomenon because there is no like, hey, if you spend at least this much time with your family and at least that's about like, no, that doesn't exist.

But for each person in each day, there is what balances then or in each week or on the whole. And it just takes real thoughtfulness. It also takes including people like especially your family and your friends in this project that you're taking on. Like I was talking about with my mountain biking race, there's a parallel there.

Your children need to understand, why this business is important to you, why your dream is important to you, and how it affects people's lives. Because in my way of thinking, the job of everyone in the family is to get up underneath the dreams of everyone else in that family. Parents want to empower their children to live a life that's meaningful to them, but parents can also let their children empower the parents living a life that's meaningful to them. It can be a two-way street.

And so the only way I know to have the trade-offs, or if you want to use the word sacrifices, not be regretful is to have them be thoughtful. And to have them include, you know, everyone in thinking, the agreements that get made. And does that give you perfect execution where you never wind up missing an agreement or an engagement? No, there's no perfection.

But you can do it in a way that doesn't leave you with regret. And that was something I had to learn the hard way because the way I did it in the early parts of my career left me with a lot of regret because I was being driven by these fears and I wasn't being thoughtful about my time. And so I made choices that I wish I could, you know, make again. And that's what I endeavor to do in coaching is to help people avoid that path and learn that it takes real effort.

It takes real thoughtfulness and intentionality to not wind up with regret, to have the sacrifices be balanced. And that absolutely can be done. Yeah. When you talk about that and you're going back to your point about the business will dictate what you become as a leader with so many different constituents, whether it's friends, families, employees, investors, bankers, whatever, the whole gamut here.

Leaders really need to be, I'll say, a chameleon in how they present themselves and show up in each of those different constituent conversations. I think that's right i think that's but i but and some people might maybe hear chameleon like inauthentic but i don't think that's the way you meant it so i think what you're saying is that that founders need to be able to shift gears they need to be able to yeah show up and express themselves in very different ways you don't want to try to run your family the way you run your company that's not going to go well you know besides which you are not the sole founder of your family.

That is for sure. There's at least one other co-founder you got in there with you, even if you're not living in the same house. Yeah, the real CEO. The real CEO, correct.

So to your point, I also find if you do the inner work. In a way that's meaningful for what you're trying to build in your outer life, then it becomes easier for you to, as you're saying, Dave, to show up in different ways, in different contexts. It becomes easier for you to be maybe a little more straight and direct and maybe less, not quite as soft, with some people in your business who respond well to that and then maybe a little bit more, contextual and taking a little bit more time being a little bit softer with other people because that's what they need.

And then when you go home with your husband or your wife or your partner, you can show up in a way that works best the way they need. That's a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of energy. And so that it takes more energy to do that than it does to just show up however you show up.

And so this thing about mastering your time and mastering your schedule and being thoughtful about the structures of your business and also prioritizing your recovery and your well-being, you've got to become like a corporate athlete. You have to become like a ninja with how to, you know, deal with all these things because you want to show up as the best version of yourself for your partner. You want to show up that way for your kids. And if the energy isn't there, it just, you won't do it.

You won't be able to do it all the time when it matters. So yeah, learning how to be a chameleon is not just learning how to take on these different ways of being, which is part of it, but it's also about energy management. It's about being really smart about what you need to recover and to not waste energy on worrying that is just non-productive and to be really ruthless with your energy and your time so that you can be the mom or the dad or the spouse or the CEO that you need to be.

And that is one of the hardest things to learn because most of us have never needed, never have that kind of demand on us to be this way over here and this way over here and this way over here. Most of us can just sort of like run on the two or three gears that are most available to us. But founders can't do that. Not if they want to build a really meaningful life that includes all of it.

Yep, the scripts are different and you can't be on auto program. Before I let you bounce here, Andrew, because we're getting down to the end of the program. For a founder listening right now that's the first move they can make tomorrow. Dave, sorry to interrupt you, bud, but you, you went completely silent there.

I may be that you're too close to the mic. Yes. Yes. Let's try that again.

I'm sorry, Dave, but you cut out again. I'm literally not hearing any sound. I still apologize. All right.

I seem to have a tech issue here. I hope you're hearing me on this one last time. If someone's listening right now and they're feeling overwhelmed, what's the first move they can make tomorrow? So the first, the first move is to recognize that overwhelm is always 100% a function of feeling like there's way more to do than you either have time or capacity for you.

And that if you leave it there, you'll always be overwhelmed. So the best thing that you can do is to start to dig into whatever it is, whether it's that you don't feel like you have enough time or you don't have enough capacity and to break it down so you can see the reality of that versus the, concept of that or just the emotional side of that. Because the clarity of, okay, I have this much to do and I have this much time and it really isn't enough time. But which things don't have time will leave you with the ability to say, okay, what can I do about these three things?

These three things that I don't know how to get done and then that question will give you an answer. When you look at it like, oh my God, there's too much to do and not have time, you can't do anything with just the emotional experience. You have to get to the reality of what it is. So the best first thing you can do is recognize that what you're feeling is an emotion but you're not yet in the reality of your situation When you get to the reality, you can work it out.

Good stuff. Andrew, tell the audience how they can find you, how they can connect with you, and where they can get the book. So you can connect with me in two places. Number one, through my website, where there's a contact me section.

That's andrewpolls.com. And then I'm also very active on LinkedIn. So you can message me there and I will respond.

And that's LinkedIn slash in slash Andrew Polls. Over the Gate is currently in the agent searching for publication process. So it will either be published through a major publishing house or I will self-publish. So unfortunately, even though the book is written, I can't tell people where to find it just yet.

But it's coming soon hopefully to a theater near you right but if you're listening to this somewhere down the road definitely google it and you'll find it so there you go and thanks so much for joining us today behind the numbers really appreciate you sharing your insight, it's great being with you today thank you for having me dave thanks for everyone who's listening my pleasure yeah and a great point thank you for everyone who's listening really appreciate your support as well and as always if you enjoyed the episode please take a moment, spotify stuff really does make a difference in helping create more.

Until next time, I'm Dave Bookbinder reminding you that the numbers tell the story, but the people bring it to life. Take care, gang. We'll see you next time on The High Numbers.